Saw this in Penzance on Saturday night. It was on in screen 1, and they had given it a big write up on the back of the cinema screening leaflet. It was the week's big film. Not all that many people in Screen 1 though, and after it was finished, everyone was loitering, looking around at everyone else with a smile like we were all at the same funeral, or saying "scary..." "scary..." to each other. It would have been a good time for someone organised to gather support for ... something ... .
It left me thinking that the stupidity of the power was their way of telling us how they were all powerful. At first, people in the cinema were laughing at Bush's displays of stupidity. I found the displays fightening, because no intelligence can fight stupidity. There is no strategy against it. There is no consiracy or ideology - just business. The enforcing agencies even work on the same lines. They don't even need to be clever (see chasing up the man who was overheard criticising Bush in his gym), because all they are doing is preserving the presiding confusion where a few people can make as much money as possible under the noses of those who 'elected' them to run the country. By getting on with their own job, everything continues to function without the output ever being brought into question.
The saddest and most frightening thing in the film was the film of the Black residents of Florida delivering their petitions against being removed from the voting register, without Senator signatures, to Al Gore Vice Presiden (did he say President as well?). And the footage of Bush and his brother on the plane laughing and saying "We will win Florida... . You can write that down".
Micheal Moore has made a very good film. But what are we meant to DO with the information? (It does say 'do something' and go to the website, at the end of the film.) It's like reading Private Eye; you might as well assume total corruption and poor standards of work at every level, since they are constantly reported there. However, there are particularly powerful people and companies which need to be broken up or shaken up regularly for their power not to become entrenched because, it seems to me, this DOESN'T happen naturally at present (by laws of Capitalism). See Microsoft, destroying competition in a very greedy and anti-competitive, anti-sharing way. Because we are human, humans then have to intervene to make the markets work smoothly. Because of this, there is differentiation in Power and it can't simply be ignored and left to get on with it, by a depressed population which expects the same corruption regardless of who is in power (and so you should read Private Eye, after all). And this is why it is important that voting systems should be, at least, honestly operated.
How do Private Eye favourite companies like Capita fit in with all this?
Posted by Eleutheria at August 11, 2004 02:56 PM