‘Occupy Wall Street’ Issues First Official Declaration



Since the occupation of Wall Street first began on September 17th, the mainstream media has criticized the general assembly for its lack of a cohesive list of complaints or demands.

Not to be rushed by expectations of corporations and the elite they serve, the Occupy Wall Street action took its time fulfilling this demand.

On Thursday night, Occupy Wall Street participants voted on and approved the first official “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City.” It it reprinted in its entirety below.

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

“Bear Necessities,” GA Voice story published.

Click here for the story.

Interview with gay paper Georgia Voice

1. What prompted your interest in studying bear culture? Has there been any effort in the past to do work similar to yours? Were there any prevailing schools of thought that had been correctly or incorrectly applied to the bear community before you began your own research?

In the mid 1980s a I became aware of the latest local fad, of guys calling themselves :bears: in San Francisco. Everyone else treated as just that, something cute and gimmicky, typical of creating trends in The Castro/South of Market communities. However, it kept going on and was spreading, and my sense, after participating for a while, was that it was something much bigger, and going on for a variety of reasons. Other “bears” at the time told me I was making a mountain out of molehill, that it was just something very silly and of no consequence.

There were other members of the  community who were paying attention to what was going on, but obviously no academics (i.e., the queer theory people across the Bay at Berkeley) in any way aware. It would be anachronistic to ask if there were any schools of thougth being applied to something that was not yet on the radar.

2. What is the bear community? A sub-culture? A counterculture? A tribe? (Playing devil’s advocate here) A fetish? What term would you use to define the community and why is that term most appropriate?

From the beginning, one asked the question, is beardom a community, a subculture, or a movement? I can unequivocally say it has NEVER been a “movement.” It has no  agenda for social or political change.

Bears are definitely a tribe, in the sense of being a group that self-identifies and self-organizes around a set of sexual and social attributes. This is perhaps the  most accurate way of describing  how bears fit in to the overall gay/queer community.

It’s hardly a counterculture, int hat it has become the epitome of niche-market consumer-capitalist marketing category. Bears ar enot socially or politically opposed or alternative to anyhting; they are exemplars and paragons  of the consumerist  mainstream middle class of today.

To some degree bears are a mostly gay male sexual subculture. They have their insider coded language, they has community-wide practices and events, and there is often a sexuasl component to collective gatherings. One attends a bear weekend to eat, drink, socialize, and have sex (just like other folks). Being gay, bears tend to be more upfront about the sexual component of social events.

Are bears a community? I must confess that I have spent my adult life in search of gay/queer community, in a variety of venues and geogrpahci8al places. I must admit I am not even sure what “community” means. If it’s defined analogous to ethinic minority or immigeant communities, thewh I would ay we used to have a gay community, with many of the same components as, for example, an immigrant community. As LGBT folks have become mainstreamed, we have shed much of those old mutual aid dynamics. In the erarly years of beardom there were a good number of such community components in place, rather along the lines of the old subterranean, under the radar gay world before Stonewall. Nowadays, community seems to be synonymous with marketing niche. In the sense that gay community is applied nowadays I would say bears constitute a community. Buyt I personally feel we have most much of our sense and institutions of community, and am personally uncomfortable calling us an LGBT “community: nowadays.

3. What makes bear culture a unique point of study within queer theory? Are there specific themes that separate bear culture and the study of bear culture from queer culture, black gay culture or transgender communities? Can they be seen as equally relevant as sub-groups in the whole of LGBT culture?

Bear culture is unique. Well, it breaks down into a couple of ways of thinking about it. The radical/.queer interpretation sees bears as queering gay masculinity. What struck me in the early years was that bears were equally comfortable being gay as being men. They adopted the rubric that theirs was a “natural” masculinity. This was in contrast to the hypermasculinity of the leathersex community, and an extension of the “all American” image and values of the Castro/Christopher Street clones, which bears in part evolved from.

I suppose bears are both in and outside the “queer” notion of contested gender identity and sexual orientation identity. There are bisexual and trans bears, who in some places are accepted as bears, in other places are rejected as not bears.

I would not see bears as comparable to black gay culture or transgender communities because these latter have community formation around being rejected by larger communities, i.e., black homophobia informs the black gay culture and transphobia form both gay and straight society informs transgender community and identity.

The “natural” enemies of bears are “twinks”–the polar opposite and exact mirror for the bear cicuit in the party circuit of the “twinks” crowd. Bears have become identified as a very white and very mainstream middle-class subculture. Bears of color, trans bears, etc, tend to become invisible in the larger order of things. I thinik the phenomenon bear identity and community has been largely ignored by QT academic precisely because it is seen as “middle class white men.”

4.  It seems that defining what it means to be a “bear” has been difficult from the moment the word was used to describe gay men. Why do you think it’s so difficult to define?

From the beginning there was tension between schools of both of what is a bear. some maintained it’s about “beards, bellies, and body hair.” Other maintained it’s about an “inclusive, easy-going  attitude.” Some maiontgained bears had to be both. Of course, once the bear press got going, it all became visuals for advertising, It’s far easier and more profitable to use pictures of burly hairy men than to try and convey something as elusive as “inclusive” feelings. Asa bear presence in the media grew, bears also transformed from being a kind of word-of-mouth community to one that was known primarily or solely by its advertising presence, and became stripped of some of the subcultural elements.

Everyone now “knows” what is a bear. Some bear clubs and groups have attempted to monopolize the right to designate who is a bear, etc. And so we now end up in exactly the same place we started from: everyone makes up his, or her, own definition of what is a bear. And there is no ultimate authority, so to speak, to refer the question to. You’re a bear if a group of self-identifying bears include you, or if they take your ticket at the gate.

5. Are there any specific characteristics (beyond identifying as a bear) that ALL bears share? Less specifically, how would you define the bear demographic? Some of the most interesting research points out that bears are usually middle class and share an affinity (or even fetish) for working-class presentation. Is that true of most bears? Are there other qualities that bears similarly (or unknowingly) share?

Along with middle-class I would add urban or gay urban-identified. There are plenty of bears who are actual blue-collar gay men as well as rural gay men, who see bears as a way of identifying that is NOT middle class (consumerist values), i.e. they dress and comport themselves in a way that aligns with bear dress and behavior.

Beyond that I have to confess I am not up to date on the research.

6. On one hand it seems that the definition of a bear has expanded greatly to include many body types and hair patterns, but on the other, despite this inclusion, it seems there are still anxieties about “being bear enough” for some communities. Has the bear community, over time, become more inclusive or exclusive? Has the answer to that question helped or hurt the community?

Over time the bear community has clearly become more exclusive. There are bear groups and events that may go out of their way to be clear they are “inclusive” (bears and admirers or friends). I thik it is a very sad sign of how exclusive bears have become that there should be folks worrying whether they are “bear enough”–it seems like a betrayal of the original values of identifying as one. I am very old school on this, I suspect. I feel this exclusivity habit has been very detrimental to the bear community. It has been a HUGE turn-off for me.

7. What are the primary differences in bear culture at it’s genesis and now? How have the internet and proliferation of bear media played a role in this? What would the fathers of this movement think about it today?

I thin there is a clear thread in my answers that answers this question. I know plenty of old school bears who have given up on the bear community and see it as having gotten completely too ‘serious.” Also, most early bears are now ion their late fifties sixties and seventies, and we find ourselves written off and invisible due tot he rampant ageism of the gay/bear community. A few have clung to the early ideals and see their presence and efforts as a way to keep offering an inclusive vision. And there are some who have simply gone along with the flow and continue to want to be a part of whatever is happening.

The internet and bear media have taken control of mediating who or what a bear is. Belonging to the bear community seems to be about going to commercial bear events, buying bear-favored stuff, taking vacations at bear events, etc. To be a bear means to have money and spending it in a certain way.

8. Are there any health or social issues that affect bears more than the rest of society? Is there any information available about HIV rates in the bear community?

Bears have a higher incidence of diabetes and problematgicbody  weight issues. It has liong been politically incorrect to talk about these health issues, as it might be perceived as not accepting one self as one is (once a core bear value).

I am not aware of any studies about HIV in the bear community. I would imagine it to be in consonance with the gay mainstream rates. Bears are, after all, quintessentially mainstream now. I have been living with HIV/AIDS for 30 years now myself.

9. What has been the reaction to your work from the non-academic bear community? Do the working-class ideals that in-part typify the bear community generally inhibit their interest in this research? What lessons should the bear community take from your work?

Where bears are aware of it, they are very happy and grateful for my work. Some have complained that my books are “too academic.” and have asked me to write a popular book about bear history and culture. (Do you know any publishers interested?)  Bears/gay men are not the readers we used to be when reading was a primary pay to learn about gayness (I came out on the cusp of Stonewall and knew well the pre-Stonewall gay subculture.)

My intention in writing and editing the bear history books was to create a case book of a particular gay subculture and the “take snapshots” of it in its earliest formative years. Most history is written after the fact, and it is the interpretation of the winners that gets told as “the truth.” The bear community has evolved quite a lot, and I feel if my books had not happened when they did, the roots of us would have been cast very differently. As it is, it seems most bears know nothing about the history of the community and have no interest in it either. I hope my work is seen as an example of doing history from the grassroots up. I know I learned a lot, and came to understand that the bear community has evolved in exactly the expected trajectory, moving from outsider to insider status.

Interview with noirpink.com in Italy

Herewith the original English language transcript with me by pinknoir, a gay blog in Italy. It will appear in Italian translation, and quite possibly edited down in length.

1 – You study the history and the evolution of the bear subculture. Could you sum up, broadly, which are the roots of this subculture? How did fat and hairy men “become” sexy?

The short answer, of course, is—read my books!

But seriously … “bear” has  long historical associations with certain types of male bodies and behaviors. People still refer to “bearish men” in this manner. In the 1980s gay men began to refer to themselves, or each other, very playfully as “bears” in this sense. Anecdotal reports in my early research indicated this was happening in many places across the US.

Bears coalesced into a gay identity in a specific time and place. One may ask, so why the 1980s? and why San Francisco?

First and foremost, the AIDS epidemic played a pivotal role. As the AIDS plague spread and no one really understood WHAT was going on, the gay community went into hiding. We were afraid to have sex. We even feared the gay community itself would collapse and disappear. Because of AIDS-related wasting syndrome, some gay men believed gaining weight might stave off AIDS. Being heavier LOOKED healthy by comparison.

During the early 1980s in the big gay urban enclaves in the US, as I mentioned, everyone went into hiding. The bars emptied out. The bath houses closed. Gay men stopped having sex with each other. After all, gay men were dropping dead left and right. In the midst of this terrifying situation, gay men began to peek out of their bomb shelters, yearning to connect again, socially and sexually.

In San Francisco this manifested in several ways: the Lone Star, the first “bear bar,” opened South of Market, among the numerous leather bars there (and all the now closed baht houses) it was something different. All sorts of gay men showed up there.

Because the bath houses were closed, an alternative was invented–private sex parties for invited guests. The Bear Hugs play group began, and became quickly very popular. Richard Bulger capitalized on this “bear” theme and started “BEAR” magazine, which was originally a small photocopied ‘zine consisting of sex ads and nude photos of gay men who did not conform to the classic “young and slim” ideal of beauty.   Indeed, at the bar, at the sex parties, and in the pages of the ‘zine were all sorts of gay men. What they had in common was their failure to embody this beauty ideal– or, often, their lack of interest in it altogether there was a collective rejection of the “Castro clone” and all the social climbing and social posturing associated with that. there was a political dimension to this, even though most bears of the time would have laughed at the idea.

Add into this mix the birth of “cyberspace.” There was no Internet yet. As it happened a number of these bears worked in the high-tech industry of nearby Silicon Valley, and they were experimenting with email and BBS’s (electronic bulletin boards).  And, so what did they communicate with each other about? Well, Who did you see at the Lone Start last night? Are you going to the Bear Hugs play party? Guess who I met through my BEAR sex ad?

San Francisco became a natural incubator and transmitter.  BEAR magazine became internationally popular. Electronic communications exploded.  San Francisco as gay Mecca and home to a huge gay sexual tourism culture drew lots of bears to the city’s venues. Pockets of self-0idenitfying bears elsewhere suddenly found themselves part of something much bigger. And the rest is history.

2 – Bear appearance is the opposite of the mainstream concept of beauty, but it’s judged beautiful by a lot of gays. If we consider beauty as a source of power, could we consider bear aesthetics as politically revolutionary and subversive?

“Bear aesthetics” has the POTENTIAL to be politically revolutionary and subversive.  On the one hand, there is an undercurrent in the gay male community, an unstated dictum that the more beautiful you are the more sex you will have. The more sexual capital you have, the more social power it will net you. In short: “ugly” gay men do not, should not, and do not deserve to have sex. Ugly gay men have little sexual capital, and therefore “deserve” little social capital. They are, or “should be,” weak, powerless, marginalized in every way. In this sense, “bear aesthetics” could be said to have had some subversive effect.

Unfortunately, the possibility for “bear aesthetics” to serve a broader disruption of the order of power relations has largely been unfulfilled. Indeed, since it is the desire of the vast majority of of middle-class society, I would say the effect of “bear aesthetics” has in fact been counterrevolutionary. And most of the self-identifying bears I can think of would vehemently insist on their right to be conspicuously consuming, middle-class gays.

This points in the direction of assimilationist American “gay rights politics” and the failure of such politics to help anyone beyond  mostly white, mostly middle-class  American gay men (and lesbians). And that is a whole other discussion.

3 – Do you think that the complex and detailed classification system for bears is in contrast with the “freedom from beauty” promised by bear culture? Is there the risk to arrive to an excess in formalizing, to  a sort of standard of bear beauty?

We are already there–at a “standard of bear beauty.” We are already there, at least in the US.

You know, the whole bear classification system was invented by two scientifically trained bears as a JOKE. They used the star classification system to poke fun at how absurdly gay men objectify each other. But the whole spirit of “camp” is now totally missing in the bear community. I wonder how those guys reacted when they saw their joke get taken seriously and then promulgated all over the world.

In reality, there is a vast and nuanced hierarchy of bear beauty. Just as gay men in general have subjected themselves and each other to the same beauty system that has historical oppressed women, bears have happily embraced their bear icons–what the bear media has been able to sell so successfully. “Jack Radclilffe” was the first embodiment of this new bear beauty ideal. (If you look at early BEAR magazines, it had not yet developed such a clear, and traditional, aesthetic.)

So now we have “A-list” “musclebears” and the assertion of “body fascism.” We have “ordinary” bears and a lesser hierarchy of beauty. We have an often completely separate “chubby-and-chaser” aesthetic which objectifies gay men who weigh in the 300-400-pound range. Mix in the dynamic of body hair and how much of it is needed to qualify as a bear. T you see how complex and nuanced it all is.

Ironically, it’s all there, but it is impolite, as well as “politically incorrect” to point it out. It reminds me of the historical “shade” issue among African-Americans: the lighter your skin color the more “desirable” you are,the more social capital you have. The darker you are, the more “African you are. Again, this was something most African-Americans have been painfully aware of, but something you would mention, especially outside of black circles. More self-oppression. And so much for “freedom from beauty.”

4 – Bears are often represented as very masculine men. Which is the connection between virility and bears? Could a real bear be a fairy?

It’s interesting that you choose the word “virility,” and not “masculinity.”  The latter is a simpler, more direct question: “Bearish” men, in the old and broader sense of the term, points to the secondary sexual characteristics of adult males: the broad and deep chest, physical strength, the presence of copious amounts of body hair among certain ethnicities (Celtic, Mediterranean, Semitic men, for example), the tendency to a thickening of the body, especially as a man ages.

“Masculinity” also carries the implicit “male gender role” expectations, which vary from culture to culture. In the US men are expected to not be emotional nor even be able to articulate feelings; men should be quick to violence: you resolve an argument with a fist fight and you pull a gun on an intruder in your home. Men are “physical”– drawn to sports, to outdoor activities, to action (and not thinking things through). I am exaggerating American stereotypical thinking here. But I’m sure you get the point.

Since the Middle Ages, and thanks directly to the Catholic Church, male same-sex attraction has historically been conflated with effeminacy. There is no “natural” correlation between the two, but it is a long-standing cultural “truth.” Among those early bears back in the 1980s, a lot of them were blue-collar, or “turned off” by urban gay male (middle-class) culture, or came from the leather community, or actually were truck drivers, cowboys, bikers, construction workers, etc. They happily embraced the new pronouncement form BEAR magazine: “masculinity without the trappings,” they were “naturally” masculine gay men. What was new and different was that gay men had been all about being “gay.” And except for the leather community, they did not address their being “men.”

Two points here: (1) not all early bears WERE “naturally masculine” to begin with, and (2) to the extent that masculinity is about expected gender role performance, there is nothing “natural” or inevitable about masculinity per se. Hypermasculine, effeminate, or “typically” male–it’s ALL a performance, regardless of how deliberate or unconscious one is in the process of developing a gender role for oneself. One is not natural, nor naturally “superior” to another. (And now we enter into the unsolved issue: nature or nurture? And that is another discussion.)

You use the term in English “fairy.” I am guessing here oyu mean what might better be termed “sissy”– effeminate-behaving gay men. In English, when you use the term “fairy” I immediately go to “radical fairie,” the subculture founded by Harry Hay in the 1970s, as a radical alternative to assimilationist gay politics of the time.  The fairies are alive and well, and there are even some fairies who identify as bears, and vice versa.

To my sensibility, the definition of “bear” is still fluid. A bear is SELF-identifying to me, so I see no discrepancy with being a bear and being a fairy. Often, as I have observed,  one’s definition of a “bear” is wrapped up in what one finds sexually desirable–so someone may exclude effeminate men who self-identify as a bear because that particular person is not sexually attracted to effeminacy.

What I find really interesting about this question is that it points to the “Masculinity Police.” who the fuck are these gay men who are dictating who IS and is NOT masculine, who IS and is NOT included among the bears? Obviously, there is no elected or officially appointed police squad. But there might just as well be–because there IS some mechanism of judgment and (dis)approval in action. Again, this is a whole other discussion of what Foucault called the “panoptical gaze.”  It’s VERY real, and omnipresent, even as it is difficult to pin down explicitly.

5 – Do you think that there are differences between American bears and “Eurobears”?

I have completely missed the developments of bear identity in Europe over the last ten years.I had, in fact, taken a personal hiatus from all things bears from roughly 2003 to 2010. So, I am like Rip Van Winkel (or Cinderella), awakening after a long sleep and being confronted with a community I scarcely recognize any more. As I am becoming re-engaged, I look forward to doing new work on what has happened in Europe, and in taking a more politically engaged position.

What I learned from living in Germany for most of the 1970s and being involved with gay-left politics there may now be outdated. “Gay” as a social identity used to be VERY American. Europeans tended to be more “discreet” about sexuality: what you did was your own business. It was a worse to discuss your sexual affairs than to engage in them–as contracted with the US and its policing efforts to discover sex perverts wherever they could: self-confession led directly behind the political strategy to “come out” as gay.

So, I am fascinated by the question myself. How do European bears conceptualize themselves? Are there now actual, physical enclaves of gay bear communities? Have European gay men enslaved themselves to media-generated ideals of male beauty they way American men have done over the last 30 years? To what degree do European bears fetishize the ‘American-ness” of American bears? Has gay American cultural imperialism taken total root, and is now totally accepted? Have European bears, or Europeans in general, embraced the consumer-capitalization (“you are what you consume”) of society as much as their American counterparts?

Indeed, please tell me more!

When “Gay” Was Radcially Inclusive

A fellow Billy recently posted the link to a group that calls itself “LAGAI for Queer Insurrection.” It warms my Gay Liberationist heart to see the old radical spirit is still alive. There was a time, like back in the 1960s, when radical left values got a wider airing and support. In more recent times the radical queer impulse seemed to blur the lines between revolution and shopping. (Remember the incantation, “We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re going shopping”?)

While I eschew doctrinaire politics of any stripe, my sympathies lie closest to these folks. The GLF argued that marriage was a heterosexist, patriarchal, oppressive institution that should be abolished. I was stunned and baffled when the “gay” (assimilationsit) movement adopted same-sex marriage, a gauntlet thrown by the radical right, as its primary political focus. For a long time I remained on the fence about this particular campaign. Eventually I embraced the cause of same-sex marriage as a strategy to force the US government to honor equal civil rights for all. Nonetheless, queer folk should continue to be free to choose marriage or not, and not be pressured by the new gay conformity to “fit in”–to mindlessly repeat the heterosexual, patriarchal institutions. All that leads to is obedient consumerism.

And my support for the LAGAI folks remains partial, for they repeat the revisionist error of defining “queer” as “excluding gay white males.” They write that drag queens and butches participated in the Stonewall revolution, and blithely exclue the gay white men who also participated, who in fact created the radical political groups, the GFL and GAA, which grew directly out of those sweltering June nights in Manhattan. The recent documentary Stonewall Uprising gets it right: they interview eye-witness participants and reveal that EVERYONE was there.

While ti is lamentable that the mainstream queer organization overlooked some of their queer brothers and sisters, this is no excuse for those queer fellow travelers to mete out an eye-for-an-eye exclusion, and keep on writing off their GWM radical brothers. Both feminist separatism and gay male separatism have fallen by the wayside for most people. When are the “inclusive” folks finally going to act inclusively?

Jeff Mann on Bears in Gay & Lesbian Review

Bear author and professor Jeff Mann has written a user-friendly, informative, and up-to-the-minute accurate article on the state of bear culture in 2010. It appears in the September-October 2010 issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review.

Observations On the Polemics of Michael Moore’s Sicko

In Sicko, Michael Moore polemicizes against the corporate ruler-owners of America today, the advanced and growing state of corruption, greed and malfeasance of what Eisenhower famously described as the “military-industrial complex,” and pleads for the restoration of democracy in the United States, for universal self-governance, for universally shared values of compassion, mercy, reason, fairness, for the restoration of altruism, and for a return of American to the world community.

He takes as his teaching example the case of the thirty-year transformation of medicine as practiced in the United States, from caring for the sick to exploiting the sick for base profit. Through numerous examples in the US and abroad, Sicko demonstrates just how far the American healthcare system, and the underlying ideology (profit, literally by any means) which justifies it, has departed from the global standard of the Hippocratic oath. A parallel development in US healthcare ideology has seen a drifting tendency away from practicing preventive medicine (things like healthy diet and exercise) toward cultivating chronic illnesses, whose symptoms can be treated for handsome profit by prescription drugs. Big Pharma, Moore makes clear, regulates itself today and, along with corporate healthcare, dictates the rules of healthcare service delivery.

At its core, the most radical observation Moore makes in Sicko is how the Orwellian Newspeak of America’s present ruling class has succeeded in demonizing basic human decency, where universal healthcare is equated with a phantasmagorical boogeyman Americans fearfully call “socialism.” Moore playfully, mirthfully turns the lights on to chase the monsters of the darkness away. He counters what is basically a rhetorical and psychological strategy with his own. Intersplicing clips of numerous Cold War-era “pro American values” anti-communist propaganda films, he contrasts this historical group-think against numerous present-day interviews with ordinary citizens, local figures of authority, and Americans, lots of American alien residents, in Canada, Britain, France, and even Cuba. (Since Americans may not live in Cuba, Moore brings a band of ailing US citizens with him to discover the Cuban heathcare system together.)

Moore’s pro-universal healthcare Canadian uncle turns out to be a Conservative. Moore makes his point: the discourse in the United States has slid so far to the right, that traditional conservatives now fall in the “extremist left” of the American political landscape. Like a good classroom teacher, Moore repeats the point, contrasting the demonizing anti-Castro propaganda with flesh-and-blood everyday Cubans, the present state of “communistic” medicine in Cuba, and Cuba’s beneficent 40-year tradition of being medical provider to much of the so-called Third World. The impression begins to arise that we are witnessing a Greek comedy unfold, wherein the K Street vilification of universal healthcare more approximates jealous and outraged prostitutes wreaking vengeance because loving wives and lovers and courtesans are stealing their business.

As a polemical documentary, Sicko first states the problem: the present system of managed healthcare is failing to provide healthcare to increasing numbers of Americans. It is predicated on the historically demonstrated flawed logic that capitalism is self-regulating by enlightened self-interest. The system seeks to maximize profits by minimizing services. Unregulated “free market” capitalism is amoral, drawing no ethical or moral distinctions in its single purpose of maximizing profit, of converting anything and anyone into a quantifiable and assessable commodity.

It has become part of a uniquely 21st-century, insane American version of systemic corruption, similar to what Gogol scathingly satirized in his novel Dead Souls. In that novel the protagonist Chichikov maximizes his wealth and social standing through a clever and devious self-serving plan to buy deceased serfs not yet expunged from tax roles. At least Chichikov was buying and selling abstractions, the imaginary remains which created an illusion of living people; corporate medical America magically transforms living, suffering, ailing human beings into mere abstractions of commodities, categorizing them as profit gain or loss, to be developed or dumped as useless inventory.

Sicko proceeds to a quick historical overview of how things could have come to this. He finds the usual suspects, Tricky Dick Nixon, colluding, as evidenced by his own audiotapes, with Ehrlichman to conspire to defraud the American people with the adoption of the for-profit model now known as Kaiser-Permanente. The Reaganomic counter-revolution of the 1980s accelerated the transformation, and today’s climate of fear, wherein the middle classes are now owned and beholden to the owner-ruler corporate entity, prevents most people not just from resisting or speaking out, but even of allowing themselves to see the truth that lies all about them. Americans have, by and large, been persuaded, through fear and intimidation, to “not see.”

A word about the dithering over the perceived absence of objectivity in documentary filmmaking may be in order here. All narrative requires a point of view, and thus a subjective stance. Objectivity itself is but one point of view. Not all points of view are equally valid or merit equal representation. It has become increasingly fashionable in the American corporate-owned media to label right-wing points of view “objective” and left, liberal, progressive, even centrist points of view as “subjective,” “irrational,” and even “slanderous.” This is an alarming Orwellian development. The persuasion techniques of advertising and public relations, and the rise of “spin” in place of reasoned argument, has so thoroughly saturated American discourse that increasing numbers of Americans are incapable of distinguishing between “fact” and “opinion,” let alone between rational argument (reason) and emotional persuasion (propaganda).

The style of propaganda has become more subtle, no longer the crude, heavy-handed threats of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Soviet Russia, or exceptionalist Manifest Destiny America. Today’s friendly-faced fascisms, from “Jesus loves you (but hates those faggots)” to the specious freedom to choose between 18 types of cola beverages, are no less relentless and perhaps more effective. When all else fails, as Moore points out, a fearful population, despairing and demoralized, will never speak out, let alone act up. Americans are increasingly buried in debt, living in a society that literally sells the American Dream, compelling its consumer citizens into deeper and deeper debt, thus enslaved to the corporations which provide or withhold both the means and the ends – the jobs, the lines of credit, the consumer commodities, and the dream itself.

As the shame and stigma of bankruptcy began losing power, recent legislation has vigorously increased the penalties, and raised the bar making it increasingly difficult for individual consumers to successfully declare bankruptcy, while directing the federal government to bail out corporate bankruptcy through increased taxes. Interesting to note, too, how George W. Bush’s involvement in the great savings and loan collapse in the 1980s has been conveniently forgotten by history.

The apparent fact that Moore truly loves his country and agitates for the return of real democracy, in principle, in practice, and in the hearts of his fellow countrymen, makes this film much more radical than most folks want to admit. His rhetorical and psychological strategy is to assume the position of the Greek chorus, repeatedly intoning the moral values of the community, rather like the chorus in Antigone repeatedly reminding Creon to not place himself above laws higher than himself. Today, the Bush White House and all the military-industrial powers it serves see themselves so far above the laws of man and nature that the catastrophe they are creating and which they blind themselves to may have already become inevitable.

Moore tells his story, making his points in very broad, comic-book strokes. Sicko is not just nor just primarily about reforming healthcare in the United States. He speaks in headlines, in part because that is the degenerated level of public discourse in today’s advertising-saturated commercial media. The only counter to the poison may be counter-poison. In any event, as the adage goes, desperate times call for desperate measures. This is the most desperate the American Union has been since the Civil War. And it is the most desperate Planet Earth has ever been. And, as Moore quixotically attempts to convey, America is still on Planet Earth and history, even American history, goes back a bit further than the fabulous Fifties and the birth of the Cold War.

Signs of how out of balance and out of control affairs are can be seen in the corporate-owned American media’s reception. Even the most sympathetic reviews of Sicko have tended to take a “balanced” view, quoting corporate insiders’ rebuttals as if the latter were sober and reasonable, rather than mere repetitions of the Big Lie. Instead of addressing the questions Moore raises, the corporate-owned media reaches into its bag of rhetorical tricks: belittling, ad hominem attacks, distracting, misleading, trivializing, and outright dismissing. (“Never mind the man behind the curtain, Dorothy. Look at the pathetic lot of you.”) It’s as if Moore were objecting to Hitler’s concentration camp system, his critics reacting petulantly, reminding us that Uncle Adolf has built a fabulous freeway system, made the trains run on time, and gotten everyone back to work. (“Ohmygawd! It’s, like, you know, so unfaaair!”)

Instead of paying somewhat more in taxes and knowing medical care is always available, as a resource like clean water and reliable public utilities, Americans worry constantly, are forced to choose between medical care and other basic necessities. Moore’s example of the man who, having cut off two fingertips in an accident, was forced to choose which of the fingers to save, based on his ability to pay, apparently does not sink in. And so Moore goes on cataloging and commenting.

For example, when one critic opines that Moore fails to mention how much the French pay in taxes for their socialized medicine, this critic colludes in the neo-con Big Lie. Europeans may pay more taxes for health care, but they are not at the unregulated mercy of the American “system” (Big Pharma and for-profit healthcare): Moore has just documented, over and over, how more and more Americans, when faced with catastrophic illness, are driven into profound physical and mental distress, bankruptcy, desperation and despair.

Another reviewer trots out quotes from spokespersons for various healthcare corporations to defend “the other side.” Such “fair and balanced” coverage mindlessly repeats the Fox News tactic, of relentless right-wing spin. (And when all else fails, just wear the enemy down.) This is the classic approach: keep the patient too sick to fight back. If they hire a lawyer, well, that’s why corporations have teams of lawyers in their pay. Get more lawyers, if necessary. Hire lobbyists and buy the politicians to serve your purposes as well. As we learned during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, corporations know if they stall long enough, the sick will simply die and the problem will go away by itself. But higher taxes?! How “communistic”! It is every corporation inalienable right to make as much profit as possible, by any means they deem expedient.

Perhaps the most terrifying example of what we as a society have become lies in Moore’s example of the now common practice of “patient dumping.” Moore puts a human face on this practice and asks the audience, pointblank, is this what we have become? The anecdotal case he follows is of what appears to be a homeless woman, a drug addict, whom the county hospital can no longer afford to treat in its charity ward. The patient has been “released” from the hospital, placed in a taxi, and the driver then literally shoves the patient out of the cab at the doorstep of a skid-row shelter.

The message is clear: the United States harbors an underclass of people it no longer feels the slightest obligation to care for. The underclass are commonly, if but tacitly, judged subhuman. They have already been left to die in the streets, but when the 911 system collects them into the medical treatment system, it slaps a symbolic band-aid on them and spits them out into the street again. I myself had the dubious pleasure of surviving this system with life-threatening AIDS-related conditions in the early 1990s. Seeing it in a movie and living it are two totally different experiences.

The system is a machine gone mad. Moore exposes the underlying system and values, which connect the dots between the now deteriorating medical services to a once comfortably well-off middle class, and points out the direction we are all headed in. Either we all hang together, or we hang separately. The social and economic decline of America could not be spelled out any more clearly. And yet, hardly anyone in America seems to notice still.
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© 2007 Les Wright