What is Democracy?

Selective Reactions to What is Democracy? edited by Richard Ketchum

Really ancient book this time, from 1955. Perhaps the amazing thing is that it somehow wound up in a public library in Japan and stayed there all these years? It's quite an eclectic volume, and it's really hard to imagine how the various topics were selected. I could list the various topics, but I feel like I'd be defying you to make any sense of the list, except that "good = democracy" and all of the good things are supposed to be somehow uniquely linked to democracy. However, one especially weird topic was the praise of radiation and the potential for nuclear power, though atomic power plants were only prototypes at that time. It's the last major topic of the book, and spans quite a few pages in the relatively small book.

Not everything is good, however. In this book "bad = communism". Many of the examples are clearly twisted and even look humorous from the perspective of 2008. However, the ones that really bothered me were all the examples of nasty things that the communists were doing that sound exactly like what the Bush administration has been doing over the last seven years. In some cases, you can argue that the communists were wholesale criminals, while the BushCo kleptocrats are only retail criminals--but sometimes its the other way around. Many of the most 'touching' examples were in the highly slanted question and answer sections at the end of the book. For example, one question asked if the Soviet constitution protected human rights. Of course the reality was yes, that the Soviet constitution had lots of protected rights--but the book's official answer "from on high" was "No", because non-constitutional mechanisms were used to violate those rights. Shucks and darn. No one had better give the Dick Cheney any fresh ideas, eh? It rang especially loudly since the book had mentioned the Magna Charter in glowing terms a number of times, and though "habeas corpus" itself was not mentioned specifically, unjust and nonjudicial imprisonment was mentioned as a bad thing that a democracy would never do.

There were also a number of mentions of propaganda techniques that are now highly popular, but are only evil communist methods according to this book, and lots of poorly chosen examples... Overall it's more interesting as a testimony to the state of mind of those times than informative as a political science text... Read it and laugh?

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

A Highly Critical Review of Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki with Sharon L. Lechter

These reviews are supposed to be of books that Dubya wouldn't read, but this one is quite possibly a book that Dubya may have read and would almost certainly approve of. Yeah, it's full of lies, but they're the kind of lies that Dubya and his rich buddies would like to believe. To put it succinctly, the author might be monetarily rich, but he's intellectually and morally bankrupt. This book is a kind of manual for 'the goodness of greed', but when you actually think about it, you realize that the truth is otherwise. The essential premises are contradictions. Greed may seem good for a few winners, but he ignores the much larger numbers of losers and the total loss for society. The author claims everyone could use his methods to become rich, but if everyone did, then the society would collapse and we'd all starve to death. You can't eat money. Someone should run the numbers on what percentage of the population could actually use his strategies before society collapsed. I'm sure the author hasn't.

Basically I'm going to work through the book sequentially describing some of my stronger reactions, relying on the epistemology of lies described in my earlier review of Imperial Hubris. In brief, a Class 0 lie is an internal contradiction, Class 1 is a counterfactual statement, Class 2 is partial truth, and Class 3 is truth presented to seem false. (I'm not sure if there were any Class 3 lies here, but they are hard to spot, and I wasn't really looking closely enough for them.) Finally, I'll discuss my alternative economic perspective that is the foundation of my strong negative reactions.

The first part of the book was basically historical and autobiographical, and my main reaction was how contemptuous he was towards his own highly educated father. He tried to be polite about it, but it was quite clear that all of his comparisons and contrasts were in favor of his adoptive "rich dad", who was actually the father of his friend Mike. The essential story line here was that Mike's father wanted to teach his son how to be a successful businessman, and the author of this book basically went along for the ride (casting off his own contemptuously impoverished father), and wound up quite wealthy, though not nearly as rich as Mike (who inherited the large head start as well as the same training).

My first strong reaction was actually to a Class 1 lie on page 69, where he cites the golden rule as "He who has the gold makes the rules." Actually, this is a double lie. The actual golden rule is "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", which makes his so-called quotation a counterfactual statement. However, this lie is also a Class 0 lie of self-contradiction, though that wasn't apparent yet. After finishing the book, I realized that at no point in the book does he actually say anything about making rules. The entire emphasis of the book is on playing by the existing rules, and with no considerations of any rule-changing topic such as political lobbying.

(This part actually reminds me of a character in Crooked House by Agatha Christie. That character was very good at making money by skating along the edges of the laws. He was supposed to be so good at it that he often caused the creation of new laws, but he just moved to new niches and new cracks and continued making money--which also reminds me of a later section of this Rich Dad, Poor Dad book where he describes the importance of moving into new ways of making money, though he didn't mention changes in the laws, except in the passive sense that changes occur and create new opportunities.)

On page 85 he describes Ray Kroc as the founder of McDonald's. Having read a couple of books about McDonald's recently, I started by wondering about the intended sense of "founder" here. The key ideas of McDonald's came from elsewhere, but the main point in this book was that Kroc was really in the real estate business, not the hamburger business. I think this qualifies as a kind of Class 1 lie, since no one would claim that Kroc was a founder of the real estate business.

On page 89 is the first clear appearance of the central contradiction of the book. He is arguing for the acquisition of assets, which he files into eight categories (including a catchall "anything else"). The essential feature of these assets is that they all produce money, but none of them involve the owner in the actual production of anything. Yes, it is okay (according to the author) to buy a business that actually produces something--but only if you are *NOT* involved in the business. He actually words it as "Businesses that do not require my presence." Well, actually, it wouldn't matter if it didn't produce anything, since his criterion for being a desirable asset is only that it produces income. Remember that he is advocating that everyone should follow his guidance--but the result is that no one will produce anything and no one will actually have anything except for money. No wonder he didn't want to consider the actual golden rule.

On page 102 I was struck by his reference to his "first Porsche". I felt this was a kind of self-contradiction for several reasons. The most important is that he is emphasizing the need to control expenses and frequently criticizes people who spend too much--but suddenly it's okay to buy a Porsche. Not to mention it's just his first one. He plays the humble game pretty often. Are we supposed to believe his second Porsche was an economy model?

On page 110 he suddenly changes his angle. The new crucial factor for success is this "factor" with various names, but basically the willingness to take risks. This is basically another Class 0 lie since he's now thrown away his various other criteria for success. Later on the same page, he says "it's not the smart that get ahead, but the bold." (He replays the same theme later on with regards to effusive praise of Texans. Again touching one of my Texan nerves...) Until this point he has frequently been speaking in praise of education, but it's increasingly clear that education can't insure you become rich, and getting rich is the only metric of success he cares about. I also regard it as a Class 2 lie, since he's ignoring the large number of losers, even including the bold ones. The unspoken deeper truth here is that the author thinks of himself as a winner, and he believes winners have no reason to think about all those pestilential losers.

On the next page he concludes that "There will be a dramatic increase in the number of new multimillionaires." Another obvious self-contradiction, though the easiest way to make it come true would be through hyperinflation caused by too many people creating too much bogus 'value'. This is actually related to the deeper reality of this chapter, except that he doesn't really consider what it means to say that "The Rich Invent Money".

On page 120 he says "So did Bill Gates" in terms of giving the market what it wanted. This is Class 1 since most of Microsoft's success has involved dictating to the market what Microsoft wanted to sell. Also Class 2 since it ignores the competitors that Microsoft crushed along the way.

Page 133 is another Class 0 section criticizing education. Lots of lip service to the value of education, but once again he is making it clear that the real metric is wealth measured in monetary terms.

Page 137 is probably the peak of his moral bankruptcy. Here he quotes in an approving way a "managing director" of a "major national pension consulting firm" who recommends the "Silver Bullet" plan for baby boomers without pensions. The explanation is "they can always blow their brains out" if they can't afford to keep eating. He certainly wouldn't want this advice to be applied to himself.

Still on page 137 he continues with a Class 0, 1, and 2 rant against "socialized medicine" forcing hospitals to kill patients old patients. The Class 1 part is just because the actual track record for socialized medicine is generally very close to non-socialized medicine, but consistently better for the specific group of people he claims are suffering. The Class 2 part is because he ignores such details as wealthy people still buying better medical treatment regardless of the rest of the system. However, the Class 0 part is actually related to his discussion of wealth elsewhere in the book, where he says wealth should be measured in terms of how long you can go without working. Well, according to his own criteria, functional social security would mean that everyone is wealthy--though that is clearly not his view, as made clear by his consistently hostile consideration of taxes. (Actually, the entire tax topic should be handled separately though I didn't flag those pages specifically. He never considers whether or not taxes produces any benefits--except that he frequently twists tax laws to his own advantage. He even had a Class 0 mini-history of taxation around page 95.)

On page 141 he gives ex-schoolteachers some credit in cases where they're earning lots of money. Does he know that McDonalds finds that former teachers are among the best candidates to manage their restaurants?

On page 147 he is arguing for the universality of his approach, though in a backwards and self-contradictory way. He has a list of "reasons", otherwise known as personality traits, that prevent some people from becoming rich. I felt the "reason" that was missing was "morality". In particular, he frequently cites examples from real estate, and often involving forced sales of various kinds. In other words, his approach to making money is to exploit other people's misfortunes.

A related example involved a special kind of state bond that he recommends buying because this bond pays 16%. He didn't really go into the details, but I strongly sensed this was another Class 2 lie where he was downplaying the negative sides, which (by indirect hints) involve the risks and the loss of liquidity in the land that is apparently required to secure the bond. Actually, the return of the bond might be 16%, but if it's linked to real estate that can't be sold, then the real return will actually be determined primarily by the value of the real estate after it becomes liquid again. However, there are also moral and contradictory aspects of this example, since it represents benefiting from the government taxes he keeps denouncing everywhere in the book. (He consistently attacks government, but there is nothing intrinsically wasteful about government that can't be matched by examples from private industry, and there's many important services that are legitimately and most effectively provided by government--and taxes are needed to pay for them.)

Another exemplary area where he boasted of his winnings was the stock market. For example, he boasted about a deal where he made a lot of money playing on America's increasingly dangerous dependence on oil. However, one the most immoral passages of the book was his defense of insider trading, basically claiming that all stock trading was more or less inside trading--and he just wanted to be as far inside as possible without actually getting arrested for it.

Returning to the progress through the book, on the next page (148) he claims that a small investment would eventually make you very rich because of the miracle of compound interest. Another Class 2 lie, since no one lives as long as his example, but also because conditions could never remain stable that long, or the money itself would adjust to be appropriately less valuable.

Near the end of the book he suddenly introduces another Class 0 lie as he tries to make himself look moral. He speaks of the value of donating to charity and criticizes his own father for being too poor to donate more. Since it completely clashes with the rest of the book, it's clear that this is just a moral bandaid--and if you believe it, you would probably be the kind of sucker who helped him make most of his money.

From my notes I see the topic of inheritance taxes wasn't cited concretely. Suffice it to say that he's against them. Only the children of rich kids should be entitled to that advantage--which again contradicts his universal claims.

One more topic was the Marine Corps, which he mentions in a number of places and recommends as a learning experience that contributed to his abilities to make lots of money. Remembering my own experiences in the Corps, I'd agree to the learning experience part, but as far as learning to make money, I'd just say "Not so much."

In conclusion, I have to regard the author as totally immoral, someone who eagerly accepts benefiting from other people's miseries and failures. His only metric of personal value is cash, and his only concern is with making sure he has as much as possible. Why did he write this book? My current hypothesis is that the most important reason is that he found it to be an easy way to make more money (especially since most of the editorial grunt work was apparently done by someone else), and secondarily, he is trying to 'make peace' with the memory of his pro-education father--his real father, the poor fool who spent his life teaching and supporting teachers. I rather hope his father's ghost doesn't find out about it.

His vision of humanity is that we are basically vicious animals, but this author sees money as the only important law of the human jungle. Therefore the goal of his life is to collect as much money as possible. Apparently a life with lots of money is more valuable than a life without money. The author makes it clear that his adoptive rich dad was better in his opinion than his relatively impoverished father.

My conflicting view is that people are basically equal, and the poor people contribute, too, both as people and to the economy. My perspective is that it is essentially wasteful for one person to accumulate extreme wealth. Not just the first Porsche, but *ALL* of his Porches are wasteful. To actually drive the economy, it's better if lots of people are spending money, and happy to do so, rather than fearfully protecting their small amounts of cash. If they believe that social security is going to keep them from starving to death, then they can spend their money. Yes, there is a problem if people go into debt, but encouraging personal deficit spending is a problem of its own created mostly by immoral advertisers and greedy bankers. (Medical expenses are important, too, but special. No one wants to be sick, but no one can predict their exact medical expenses, and statistical treatment is the only approach that makes sense. Obscene profits for insurance companies and trying to skip over some people or letting them skip over themselves are fundamentally bad.) Basically the systems in France and Sweden make more sense to me. Lots of people seem happy and secure there. They pay high taxes, but they believe they get good values, especially in terms of economic security in exchange for their taxes.

The Naked and the Dead

Another memorial book, since the author passed away just recently. Not up to even attempting a full review just now, so...

A few reactions to and comments about The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

Starting with the spoiler alert and capsule review. I really can't say much of anything about this book without giving things away. However, it is a good book, and it's worth reading for its various merits, and if you're at all inclined to do so, for now you might as well take my word for it and you should go ahead and read it, and you can read my meanderings later on. I think you'll even be surprised by the way the book transitions, but I definitely think there's plenty of interesting material there. Now you've been warned, and I'm about to start giving things away. Are you sure you don't want to go read it first?

The book is mostly a character study, and even though the characters are fictitious, they feel amazingly true to life. He really does capture the spirit of real people and places all over America. Part of this is done in the shifting viewpoints of the main story of the battle for the imaginary island, but there are also 'time machine' snippets of mini-biographies of various characters.

The reason this is qualifies as a book Dubya wouldn't read is because of the profoundly anti-war message. At first it seems like it is glorifying the heroism of the soldiers, but in the end the whole thing just seems pointless. The leading character, the platoon sergeant, has to be dismissed as a vicious killer, and his brave men as a bunch of cowards who are just most afraid of him. One of the nicest characters in the book is the lieutenant who is set up and effectively murdered by the sadistic sergeant, though the Japanese do the actual shooting. The character that Mailer probably most closely identified himself with is killed by falling off a cliff for no particular reason in a pointless 'mission' that is ultimately aborted by a wasp's nest. Turned out that the outcome of the campaign had already been determined some months ago, but the American intelligence was so poor that they just didn't know it yet. If they had interrogated a few of the prisoners they were so eager to exercute, they would have known that, and the main result of the delay before they find out is to make the slaughter go more quickly in the end. Probably the most heroic effort in the entire book was the futile attempt to rescue the wounded soldier, but all that accomplishes is to cause a lot of extra suffering before he dies--and then they lose the body, too. The general's main concern is to rewrite the official history so he can claim credit for a flanking invasion that didn't matter, either.

There was an interesting part starting from page 247 about the big lie and the prediction that America would have a big Red scare and then slide into fascism. Considering when it was written (around 1946), that part of it looks pretty prescient, even amazing.

Guns, Germs and Steel

This one has an unusual context in that it was recommended by a very senior and well known programmer who must also be a very shrewd judge of character on the basis of a couple of email exchanges...

Shallow Review of the Deep Book Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years by Jared Diamond

How to justify this one for this blog? Usually the reviewed books are current and have overtly political themes, but this one is pretty straight history and was published in 1997. However, it definitely isn't the sort of book that Dubya seems likely to read or understand, so I guess that's the main justification. There was a chapter about kleptocracy, which was a notion I'd never heard of but which I've already encountered elsewhere, but nothing overtly directed towards the coming neo-GOP government. Kleptocrat certainly applies to some of the current crop of neo-GOP leaders... Under extreme time pressure (with the book due back at the library tomorrow) and being a bit tired, this one is mostly just going to be notes and reactions.

The overall perspective is very high level. The author notes that he's covering an average of 150 years per page per continent, which is certainly booking. (Pun intended.) The thematic question was posed by a fellow in New Guinea, who asked why the people outside New Guinea had so much 'cargo', as they refer to most of our worldly possessions. To answer the question Diamond mostly focuses on the history of food production and how it influenced migration. The guns and steel of the title represent the technology made possible by accumulated food surpluses, and the germs are awkward side effects mostly acquired from domesticated animals, but devastating to the unprepared hunter-gatherers. The basic idea is that Eurasia had better natural resources, especially for plants that could be domesticated, and a big head start, and that's why they won. This is a very wide web of a book. He draws evidence from linguistics and anthropology and carbon dating and historical records and archeology and genetics and various other areas, and weaves it into a very cohesive presentation.

It's kind of a funny thing, because I regard myself as very broad and shallow, and he is clearly a very deep scholar in a number of areas, but... In one of the few areas where I do have a bit of depth, it turns out that he's wrong. That was his discussion of the Japanese language, which has a totally incorrect presentation of the Japanese writing system. I actually see how some aspects of the Japanese reality could be incorporated into his presentation to actually strengthen it, but this sort of mistake does make you wonder about other details of the book. As a result of that, I found myself more skeptical about some of his other examples where he appealed to Japanese examples for such topics as guns restrictions in Japan. Japanese-related topics actually appeared many times in the book, though the final one was a place where he skipped over Japan's probable involvement. He mentioned that China gave up navies, but he didn't mention that before that several Chinese fleets had perished in typhoons when they were attempting to attack Japan.

Another omission was The Mismeasure of Man. Actually, quite a bit of Gould's work seemed relevant to his topics, but there certainly wasn't any mention in the text, and I didn't spot anything in the appendix about additional reading, though he closed the general section with a famous book that was basically an attack on Gould's book. I'm pretty sure that Gould's revised edition, which included a response to that book, was published several years before this one--but still no mention of it.

To quickly mention the topic of kleptocracy, I kept expecting him to start ranting about "property is theft", but he kept it on more reasoned basis. He wasn't very consistent there, seeming to agree that there were some large scale projects and good works that were sometimes done by governments, but that the idea was basically theft. I'd prefer to regard it as a greedocracy... Anyway, I felt that his political theorizing was a relatively weak part of the book.

Near the end he's talking about the study of history as a science... He includes various aphorisms about history, but he left out the one I regard as the quasi-official joke of my own history department at Rice: "The only lesson you learn from history is that no one learns any lessons from history." He never heard of it? Or it cuts too hard against the grain of his thesis that history is worth studying?

Interesting read, and lots of food for thought--but not sure if I should recommend it to a general audience. Well, Dubya should read it, but mostly to keep him out of mischief for a few months. Can't expect him to learn anything by it.

Sicko (the movie)

Usually these blog entries are about books that Dubya obviously hasn't read and won't read, but this time it's about a movie he's unlikely to see. I suppose it's possible, but he wouldn't like it and it would probably bruise his bubble, since he appears a couple of times in predictably unfavorable lights. (However, none of those appearances actually made enough of an impression to make it into my review of the movie...)

Review of Sicko by Michael Moore

Not at all sure where to start with this one. There are so many perspectives I could write from. It's a movie that I'd been hearing quite a bit about for some months and I was even looking forward to seeing it. I've decided to start with particulars and move to the more general conclusions.

The first particulars regard the circumstances of seeing the movie. It arrived in Tokyo yesterday, quite a while after its release in America. Compared to the debut of Fahrenheit 9/11 several years ago, I felt the response was tepid. There was a long line to see Fahrenheit 9/11 when it arrived here, and my recollection is that many of the showings were sold out. However, Sicko is apparently not being widely promoted, and several of the theaters where I asked about it have no plans to show it. The theater where I saw it has about 140 seats, but I'd estimate that only about 100 seats were filled in my showing, the second showing on its first day in Japan. I don't think that's because of the effective blacklisting of Michael Moore in the States, but probably reflects a basic irrelevance of the theme to Japanese people. What's to discuss from the Japanese perspective? Japan has universal health coverage via mandated health insurance, and there just isn't much relevance here. Then again, perhaps the blacklisting is effective in keeping non-Japanese out of the theater? I spoke to two foreigners about Sicko later in the day, and the American immediately dismissed it, while the Canadian said he wasn't planning to see it any time soon. Serendipitously, a Japanese physician overheard one of those conversations, and did ask about it, but only briefly. It did make me curious how Japan deals with uninsured people such as transient foreigners, but basically it seems like a very minor problem here. The health care system in Japan works, and works well. Why should the Japanese be interested about those American problems?

As I turn to the actual topic, I feel like I need to back up a bit... Since this is such a personal issue, I feel like I should intrude with some of the particulars of my own medical experiences, because they have to color my perception of the issues here. I suppose it's an interesting point that every reviewer of the movie does have relevant personal experiences, one way or the other. Do they just ignore them? Anyway, in my own youth in the States I was mostly happy-go-lucky about it, and didn't worry about medical insurance. I do remember some fairly major medical incidents, but I managed to get by. Upon reflection, I think I may have been slid under the table a couple of times. For example, I had a fairly serious eye procedure that I now suspect was partly subsidized as research. When I was in boot camp, they wanted to pull my wisdom teeth, but I wanted a second opinion and my recollection is that I later wound up paying $165 for a civilian dentist to do that work. No insurance, but I'm surprised to see (via a bit of Web searching) that the price apparently hasn't changed that much. My last major medical incident in the States involved a motorcycle accident, and I remember that one of the first things they did when I arrived at the hospital was introduce me to a woman who was some sort of payment counselor. Her job was apparently to help make sure I would be able to pay for it all, and it turned out to be quite expensive, too. Fortunately, the other driver was clearly and obviously at fault, so I was sure he was going to pay for it. His insurance company almost immediately offered his coverage limit as a settlement, and since I thought that would cover my medical costs, I accepted. It turned out that it was enough money, but not by much, and it really didn't cover my losses if you considered things like lost income. (I was a contract programmer in those days, and I lost a lot of working time.) At the time, I knew I could have sued him and probably received a judgment for about double the settlement, but I didn't want to. After I saw all the bills and after they ate up the settlement, I wasn't so happy-go-lucky about medical costs, but a few years after that I came to Japan, and the problem went away. I've been sick a few times in Japan, but it just isn't an issue here. Trivial particular directly related to Sicko involves the woman whose insurance company bailed on covering her ambulance ride. I remember that as costing about $700 when I needed it in the States, but in Japan it's just a free service. For this part I can say that I've lived with and received medical care under both systems, and I prefer the Japanese approach. Enough prelude:

The movie started with a couple of stories about uninsured people. The footage of a fellow sewing up his own injury was rather shocking, actually, but he was very matter of fact about it. The other story was the widely publicized piece about the fellow who cut off two fingers and could only afford to reattach the cheaper one. Michael Moore noted that about 18,000 people die each year because of their lack of medical insurance, but said he wasn't going to say more about them. However, the film always skirted around the edge of the uninsured issue, because many of the cases included in the film involved various kinds of losses of medical insurance or fear of losing medical coverage. Also, the section about the charity cases being dumped on Skid Row was obviously about uninsured people...

Most of the first half was just sob stories, though Michael Moore didn't really try to jerk tears there. My feeling was that he was deliberately trying to keep it light, though there were still places where I felt close to tears. It seemed to me that he deliberately decided against the tearful approach, both in the stories he selected and in the way he handled them. He tried to focus on the upbeat and humorous side of people who wanted to keep fighting for their own better health. There was some fairly aggressive coverage of claims denials and policy rejections, but it still seemed like a relatively light touch. For example, I felt he could have gone much farther with specifics when he was interviewing the fellow who had worked as a investigator for the insurance companies.

The transition point away from problems in the American system involved a young woman whose insurance was canceled when she developed an age-inappropriate medical problem. (This was also where Michael Moore became more visible in the movie rather than just being a disembodied voice.) Her long-term solution was to commit fraud against the Canadian government by exploiting their free health care system. She did seem basically troubled by this unethical solution, but maybe she took the ethical way out and actually married her Canadian friend and accomplice. Michael Moore actually suggested as much, and the closing credits included a jovial plug to marry Canadians for their health coverage, along with a link to www.hook-a-canuck.com, a real website which currently includes a link back to Michael Moore's website.

Hereabouts Michael Moore inserted some footage of American criticisms of the Canadian health system, focusing on such things as quality problems and long waiting times, so he used that as an excuse to investigate the Canadian system. This was especially a place where I felt a more conventional and systematic approach would have been good, but Michael Moore just treated it very informally. He just walked around and talked to people. Okay, it's a valid sampling approach, but I felt like I wanted statistics more than essentially random samples. However, I'm not sure how he could have done it while maintaining the light tone. Perhaps a news ticker at the bottom of the screen with statistics in synchronization with the people he was interviewing? For example, the ticker could show average waiting times while he interviews someone who reports an actual waiting time.

I've already forgotten the transition rationale, but he had some excuse for continuing with the British system. Again there were lots of fairly random interviews with people who seemed basically satisfied not to worry about paying for their health. This section included a fairly long interview with a British doctor who seemed to be doing quite well even though he was involved in socialized medicine. Actually, the topic of 'socialized medicine' was an area where Michael Moore played a kind of interesting game. In several places he deliberately used propagandistic and polemical footage, but as a kind of humorous contrast, treating the demonization of universal health coverage as a kind of sick joke, which he then contrasted with the successful realities.

I felt the transition to France was actually rather abrupt and loose, but by now it was quite clear that Michael Moore did not want the movie to feel tightly structured (which also made the time feel like it was flying). This part of the movie actually had a number of complicated focuses that were jumped over rather quickly. Of course the primary focus was the French medical system, with a lot of the reporting coming from Americans living in France. That included an interesting segment where he rode around with a doctor who was making house calls. A lot of minor ailments are evidently handled at great convenience to the patients. A secondary focus was on the cost in terms of taxes paid, and Michael Moore's primary response there was just interviewing a middle class couple to show that they seemed to have a very nice lifestyle, taxes notwithstanding. The generous vacation laws in France got more coverage here. The final focus was on French democracy in action, with Michael Moore's theory being that the French government is much more afraid of the French voters than the American government vis a vis the American voters. That's a topic you could easily make an entire documentary on, but it was basically just a passing item here, though it was clear Michael Moore admired the vigor of French democracy.

Again there was a loose transition, this time back to America to consider some women who were dumped by hospitals. The impression I had here was that it was just a sad story that he felt was too powerful to cut. Or maybe he was moved by the coincidence of the second woman who was dumped just before he arrived to film the story about the first one. He did use this topic as the basis of one of the most structured transitions in the film. He considered the question of fair treatment for the least among us, taking these poor and elderly women as examples, before asking about fair treatment for the greatest among us, taking the heroes of 9/11 as his new examples.

In this part of the movie he focused on three of the 9/11 rescue workers who had gotten sick as a result of their 9/11-related work and who were now in need of medical treatment that they couldn't afford. I'm not sure where he got the idea of linking Guantanamo Bay into it. Something about the mixture of inhuman incarceration with frequent accusations of torture mixed with glowing descriptions of the medical treatment the prisoners received? Anyway, I don't feel like he even tried to establish a basis for expecting they could get any medical treatment there, but the real point all along was to make an excuse for comparing America's medical system to Cuba's. In a more classic documentary, I think the director would have made much more of the differences in national priorities and the results. Cuba is a very poor nation under intense pressure for many years, but because they give a very high priority to health care, they are able to provide care that on average is quite close to what America provides with a very low priority. He did mention how Cubans have longer life expectancies than Americans, but mostly this section felt like he was just trying to make America feel ashamed. I felt like he did a pretty good job of it, actually, though I suppose the cold-blooded documentary approach would have been to focus more heavily on the cost-effectiveness aspects, which he only touched in passing.

After that, the movie ended rather abruptly. Lightly structured to the end. However, there were a couple of interesting items in the credits. I already mentioned the Canadian website. However, the big item was a sharp dig at one of his critics, and this incident struck me fairly powerfully, which is enough justification for Michael Moore to have included it in the film. It was handled in a rather ironic way, but he got me curious enough to investigate the details and they were easily found. Turns out his critic had some financial problems related to the lack of universal medical coverage in America. Now this is not just some guy who dislikes Michael Moore, but (based on viewing his website) an angry lunatic who has dedicated a large part of his life to attacking him. It's not just an amusing hobby for this guy, but a major expense, and when his wife got sick he was reduced to begging for money to keep his anti-Michael-Moore website up. This already seems absurd to me, but maybe that's because I have this weird thing against begging. Me, I'd just say sorry, but I need the money for something more important. However, this guy made a public announcement about needing money so he could continue attacking Michael Moore for advocating a social policy that would eliminate his need for the money he was begging for. (I already said the guy struck me as a lunatic.) Anyway, Michael Moore slipped him the money anonymously, the guy accepted it, and now he's angry about it. (I already said he was angry, too.) So if that's how he feels, why doesn't he return the money? Oh yeah, he doesn't want to shut down his website that attacks the idea of eliminating his real need for the money. I visited the website in question, and he has a prominent blurb with links that are apparently supposed to explain why Michael Moore is still a terrible person, but he didn't manage to make anything very clear. Angry lunatics are like that, eh? Next I thought about looking for his substantive policy statements on universal health coverage, since that's supposed to be the issue at hand and he hadn't mentioned it anywhere I could find. Maybe in light of his own experiences he had reconsidered the issue? After all, that would be another ethical solution, and he could still continue to insist that Michael Moore is a terrible person. Unfortunately, his search engine just returns an error, which seems kind of a shame if he's spending all that money on the site... Perhaps he's a bit of a technical fool, as well?

I guess that's enough for the particulars, and now it's time to try and tackle the movie from a higher level perspective. I've decided to take a kind of backwards approach by focusing on the criticisms I've heard, though bear in mind that I mostly didn't read the reviews because I wanted to see it and make up my own mind.

I remember running across one review that liked the movie, but described it as a polemic rather than a documentary. Perhaps I've been spoiled by perfection, but when I think of a polemic, I think of one of Lenin's works. Now there's a polemicist! The point of a polemic is to be negative and to attack, and Lenin was a real polemicist. When you finish a polemic, there should be no doubt about who you hate and why. However, by that standard, the movie comes up quite short of being a "polemic". A polemic is supposed to be focused on the villains, and it's pretty clear that Kaiser Permanente is one of them, but overall they are barely mentioned. Where's the spotlight on the evil villains? My assessment would be that there were basically only three sections that had enough negative focus and energy to be regarded as polemical, and all of them were brief. One was the scene with the names of insurance companies featured, second was the taped discussion with Nixon about HMOs, and third was the list of pharmaceutical companies. Yes, there was lot of negative stuff in the film, but it was mostly leavened with positive stuff and humor, so I'm having trouble making the label stick.

The other dismissive label is of course "propaganda", but that's a word of such breadth that it's almost impossible to assign a substantive meaning to it. If you go by the common dictionary definitions, then anything that has any point of view would qualify as propaganda. What would you exclude? However, it's pretty clear that the critics who use that label intend to associate it with the most negative uses of the term, when it was applied to things like racist Nazi propaganda or the old South African propaganda in defense of apartheid. Well, I've studied quite a bit of that sort of thing, and again Michael Moore's work falls quite short.

The label that the critics of Michael Moore's works uniformly reject is "documentary". Not just the critics, but even many of the people who like and recommend Michael Moore's movies describe them with other labels, such as the "polemic" example mentioned earlier. I quickly pulled a list of 14 definitions, and there was only one entry (of a three-clause definition) that would seem to allow excluding Michael Moore's works on the grounds of bias. Many of the other definitions explicitly acknowledge viewpoints, and one of them even mentioned Triumph of the Will as an example of documentary as propaganda, with Why We Fight as the "propaganda counter-attack" (sic)... I would certainly agree that there are many styles of documentaries, but I would not agree that any of the many that I've seen are truly impartial and unbiased, though they often try to sound like they are coming from godlike perspectives. Actually, the most effective propaganda documentary is the one that does the best job of pretending to be unbiased. Michael Moore is certainly not making any secret of his beliefs, but... To me the biggest difference between his documentaries and others is that I come away from a Michael Moore movie with a fresh bunch of questions about the topic, feeling rather like I've been teased, whereas many other documentaries try to leave you with the sensation that you've become an authority on the topic.

Overall conclusion? I actually feel like this movie is about a relatively more important topic than any of his previous subjects, but that the movie is relatively less forceful than the others, and in particular has less impact than Fahrenheit 9/11. To date, it certainly seems to be eliciting less reaction, though I think some of that is due to a new kind of blacklisting targeted at Michael Moore. They can't stop him from making movies, but his critics can certainly repeat over and over again that his movies are not worth watching, regardless of the importance of the issues involved.

A Study in Scarlet

In the strangest places... Not even sure what pricked me into reading it, but I just finished the very first Sherlock Holmes book, A Study in Scarlet. It was probably first published in 1887, but it bears shockingly hard on the American political insanity of 2008, and for that reason I encourage you to read it. It's actually an excellent story in its own right, but...

One of the leading (=least implausible) neo-GOP presidential candidates is Mitt Romney. So far he's been doing a pretty good job of distancing himself from his Mormon background, and this book helps explain why. More concretely, it led me to understand one of Romney's more mystifying comments. Do you remember when Romney said that polygamy was the most evil thing? Why not unnecessary war or genocide or slavery or mass murder? What is it about polygamy that bugs him so much? Well, evil is in the eye of the beholder, and polygamy is the specific evil that could hurt Mitt, so no wonder he regards it as the #1 evil. This old classic from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle reveals why Mitt thinks polygamy is the #1 evil: Because the Mormon history surrounding that practice could prevent him from becoming president. Ultimate horror!

I actually thought I was someone who knew a fair bit about the Mormons. I even knew a few of them when I was young. They have this thing about mingling with the infidels, befriending them, and converting--but certainly *NEVER* marrying a gentile. Actually, such unholy marriage is a violation of old Rule 13 of their original holy code as written by Joseph Smith (and now repudiated--at least in public). That's just one of the interesting tidbits in the book, along with my first introduction to the Danite Band AKA the Avenging Angels. Now that I know where to look, I was able to find out quite a bit of ugly information--but mostly I was impressed by how skillfully the Mormons are suppressing that part of their still recent history. Yeah, everything's on the Web, but some data is much harder to find than other data...

In conclusion, I encourage you to read this book and to pass the word around (even though his landscape is rather hyperbolic at the start of Part 2). I had certain reservations about Romney before, but they are greatly increased. We do *NOT* need another religious lunatic anywhere near the White House. If Romney isn't a religious lunatic, then he's a coward who's too afraid of the Mormons to get the heck out of that pseudo-church. <joke type="nuts versus loonies">After all, the Catholics assure us they have a monopoly on all this religious stuff.</joke>

Next strange topic for discussion: Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Ever heard of her? I'm in the middle of her old Gift from the Sea, and it seems to be a very impressive piece of philosophy... Light reading, and maybe it drowns in the philosophic shallows a bit farther on, but so far I'm finding it quite interesting and somewhat thought provoking.

Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints

Context of this rather rushed review is that I noticed this library book as I was browsing for something else, but I want to write a quite review before returning it. The topic has been much in the news of late, and for the usual set of bad reasons.

Review of Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints edited by Teresa O'Neill

This is a book of historical background information, obviously intended for a college history course on the topic. It's actually part of a series of topical books, and for each topic, they apparently collect excerpts from various prominent spokesmen. In this book, the most prominent contributors are probably Senators such as Henry Cabot Lodge and George F. Hoar. Or perhaps pride of place should go to Israel Zangwill, the London-born Jewish immigrant who coined the famous expression "the melting pot" to describe the immigrant experience in America? There are also spokesmen from prominent pro- and anti-immigration organizations, leaders from organized labor, religious leaders, professors such as John Bodnar, and various others. Most of the pieces are a only a few pages long, but there are some shorter snippets inserted into longer ones. The editor has added a bit of contextual information to introduce each of the authors. The time of the selections spans well over a hundred years. Even though there's some perspective here because of the long time since many of these pieces were written, the editor doesn't offer any conclusions, but is apparently making a sincere effort to just stay out of the battles. There is a chronology of historical events included in the end matter, but basically it's just food for thought.

The main thing that struck me as a read the book was the historical consistency. Basically the same issues are rehashed over and over again, right up to the present day. The big changes are the labels of what sort of immigrants have become undesirable. Usually they are racial labels like Irish, Germans, Italians, Jews, Russians, Poles, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and most recently Mexicans. I'm sure I've left out some of the nationalities that were targeted at various times... Amusingly enough, or perhaps it's simple hypocrisy, but quite often the loudest critics are descended from 'races' that were previously on the list of 'bad' immigrants. Other times the undesirable immigrants are characterized more on the basis of their beliefs, skills (or lack thereof) or other non-racial traits, starting most prominently with Catholics, but including lots of other groups such as laborers, mental defectives or others who might become a burden on the state, illiterates, morally deficient people (but especially women of loose morals), communists or anarchists, transient farm laborers, and most recently Moslems. Again, I'm sure I've missed some of the target groups, but the details don't seem to matter much.

At this point it seems I need to clarify my own biases, because I ultimately conclude that they limit my ability to fully understand the anti-immigration perspectives. The most important bias is just that I think freedom is a good thing, including the freedom to live where you want to. The only 'restriction' I'd put on it is that there should be sufficient accurate information available so that the person who wants to move to a new country can make a reasoned decision. Yes, there'd be a certain amount of disruption, but things would balance out in the end--and it even seems rather inevitable to me as the costs of migration continue to decline. To me, the significant issue is not really addressed in this book: Is it a zero-sum game, or can things get better for every one. If you believe it's a zero-sum game, then letting a immigrant have some of your pie is a loss for you and it makes sense to be greedy as long as you have sufficient force to protect your pie. However, if you think the pie is getting bigger and better all the time, then the best thing to do is make that happen as quickly as possible. To me, looking at the big historical perspective, that seems to be very clearly what has been happening for thousands of years, and it's going to continue. It's the growth of science and technology and modern economies, including immigration. Fighting against the tide is always a losing proposition. Putting it in concrete terms, I think it would be better to let Chinese workers migrate to America to sustain the strength of America's industry rather than to allow the strength of America's industries to continue migrating to China. Actually, now it seems quite possible to me that the real strength of America was tightly linked to the freedom to migrate within such a large region, and that may be the real reason for the increasing strength of the EU. (Another point of personal bias, since I've invested in Euros? Which reminds me to note that I'm an immigrant to Japan and the grandchild of immigrants to America.)

Where does that lead me as regards the book I'm supposed to be reviewing here? Well, mostly the anti-immigration perspectives don't seem very substantive to me. In some cases they seem intellectually dishonest or obviously mistaken. I suppose the most clear example is the table on page 216, which was supposed to demonstrate how the literacy test would work to exclude "Undesirables". The table listed the illiteracy of various nationalities of immigrants--and then averages the averages to draw conclusions. Excuse me, but that is incorrect math. If each of the immigrant groups was exactly the same size, then it would make sense. Or if each component of a grouping had the same exact illiteracy then it would also make sense. However, neither condition holds here, so it's simply bad math that proves nothing. (There's another point of what might be personal bias here, in that Hebrew is reported as having around 30% illiteracy (in a group with an average over 40%) whereas they are generally regarded as being more educated and literate than average.) This is an especially clear example, but most of the anti-immigration positions seem to be on similarly shaky ground. They keep focusing on imminent economic disasters that never happened. Some of them also worry about racial purity, again without any evidence, then or in hindsight. To really make their case, they would need to consider how America has changed over the decades, they would need to establish that some of those changes were bad, and finally they would need to prove that some immigrants were linked to those bad changes. I read the book closely, and didn't find any of that here.

TImes up, so I'm going to wrap by just saying it's an interesting read, but mostly an example of "The less things change the more they stay the same." The immigration issue has basically been going in circles for a long time.