This Space for Rent

Yeah, well lucky for him that Michael Moore didn’t have anything new this year. It would have placed a serious brain strain on the Oscar voters having to decide between those two.

Michael Moore’s stuff is fun (particularly when you watch the conservative reaction to it. You can tell when he hits a nerve because of the shrieks of “but he’s FAAAAAAAAAAT!!!” that immediately show up in basically every one of the pro-torture websites) and sometimes interesting, but Al Gore’s little movie about how we’re committing self-immolation seems, at least to me, a much better production (and I don’t, as a rule, even watch movies.)

I’d guess that if you were a conservative you’d not actually notice this; I don’t tend to hang around conservatives much (except at work; there are a lot of hobby farmers at work who thought that measure 37 would give them the big bucks, but who have since discovered that, no, they need to apply to the rich republican’s asset-stripping association because their multi-thousand-acre farms aren’t in the right place to be converted into sterile apartment complexes. They’re not particularly pleased with this, but we don’t tend to talk about show business so I’m not sure what they think about lefty documentaries) but from what I’ve read the typical american conservative can give a Soviet apparachik a run for the money in the “Art Must Be Subservient To The State!” competition.

I’d hate to have those sorts of blinders on. Going through life without reading Winter’s Tale (written by an extraordinarily sleazy GOP speechwriter (but I repeat myself), and it does try to parrot the GOP talking points, but it’s beautifully written) or Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady (written by a gun nut royalist right wing kook? Sure, but it’s good enough to make me buy all of her other books I could find and is almost enough to have me read her columns in the anti-Clinton review) would be very sad, even though I violently disagree with 99% of their worldviews, and I feel sorry about people who are so blinkered by political correctness that they don’t even want the chance of discovering that the world exists outside of the confines of the Party.