my letter to michael moore

Dear Michael Moore:

According to your recent movie Sicko, you gifted $12,000 to an individual managing an anti-Michael Moore website. Before you read this letter, please make note that my Bank of America account accepts automatic transfers through the convenience of just a few clicks on the internet.

Like other modern-day prophets stuck between a rock and a hard place, you probably thought that you were being witty (or at least ironic) in your latest movie. Putting a bunch of Americans on a boat en route to Guantanamo Bay in search of uber efficient health care is an example of your poignant use of wit and irony. You probably thought that placing high-ranking US military officials testifying that health care at Guantanamo is superb, in tension with the inability of Americans to obtain adequate and affordable health care in places like Michigan- was witty and ironic. Mr. Moore, I regret to inform you that you were neither witty nor ironic but rather merely irresponsible and obnoxious. Sicko denies the hell in which Guantanamo detainees have lived and not only the “Al Qada suspects” for the past six years under the Bush regime but also that of the Haitians wrongfully imprisoned there during the Clinton Administration. Despite your possible intentions of wit and irony, your intentional denial of the torture, humiliation, and strife those (often wrongfully kidnapped) prisoners have undergone during the past six years is actively dehumanizing.

I appreciate the first half of your film because you provide an accessible and veracious arrangement of pericopes which depict the personal stories of Americans struggling against the US health care system. I appreciate that you pointed out the lunacy that the work of mailing a letter across town is more of a federalized act and is therefore of higher priority to our government than the work of saving the lives of children running high fevers. I appreciate your knack for revealing the interconnectedness of so many things such as the necessity of a living wage, the disaster in Iraq, the inequities of race and gender - with health care accessibility.

It is just so disappointing that you didn’t bother to do that in your portrayal of medicine in Cuba because it would’ve made your point much more palatable, accurate, and fierce.

You cowardly let the United States off the hook with respect to what our country has done to the Cuban quality of life via our government’s canceling of aid/sanctions/embargo echoing the damage the fall of the Iron Curtain has caused them. For the past twenty years or so, the quality of life in Cuba has rapidly deteriorated. Cuba is a country with a collective memory of slavery. You also deny this in your depiction of life there, and that silence is a sin. Your film suggests that if it is easy and cheap to get an inhaler in Cuba, than life must be good there. * Ok, I will go ahead and give you the benefit of the doubt, and say that you might be trying to make the point here that despite how disparagingly difficult it is to obtain the means for the day in Cuba,- medical care remains a priority. Fine.

But, the true gem you missed for support of your argument about Cuba is the tale of Cuban doctors and the free medical school program there. Cuba provides free medical school. All doctors trained in Cuba are then required to spend two years in a developing country working with the poor. Cuba has more doctors working world-wide than the United Nations’ World Health Organization. A Haitian friend of mine participated in this program and returned to run a clinic in Haiti in a small, rural town were folks used to just go to the grave, not to the doctor. There, within two weeks of his arrival he personally had 27 HIV/AIDS patients under his direct care. The Cuban doctors in Haiti and elsewhere are not spreading “communist political propaganda,” (but in the memory & honor of the strife of the people of Cuba), rather, they serve the least of these of these, across the world.

Why didn’t you talk about this, or any other redeeming aspect of the Cuban medical system? Why did you find it necessary to ignore every aspect of life in Cuba or at Guantanamo, outside of access to an inhaler?

As an aspiring anthropologist it will be my job to tell the story of a thing. Adam Smith believed that if you dealt with a thing for long enough and explored it long enough you could reveal all of its history. You’re not very good at that sort of endeavor, so I think you should stop calling your films “documentaries” and consider a genre more akin to the swift boat movement.

I also accept checks to my mailbox at Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School.

With warm regards.