Something has changed in these past few weeks. My own life has turned a corner and I feel like I’m coming out of a long dark tunnel. Still the world of battle calls to me as it always has. I look at those who fan the confusion and desperation in the world into explosions of rage and fear and the temptation is to fire back with ruthless precision in some vain attempt to shame them into retreat. The election showed us, however, that something in the national psyche has also turned a corner, and there are forces in motion that won’t be stopped by those who offer commentaries based on the past. 

I just watched the new Michael Moore movie, “Capitalism: A Love Story” for the second time and I would like to take my hat off to brother Michael, as someone who has pursued a relentless vision through the seasons of both praise and ridicule without ever surrendering to the expedient. Moore is both a political cartoonist and a dramatist, He weaves political themes into a narrative about the common man by casting himself as the central character in a style that evokes the depression era comedies of Charlie Chaplin. His art is the ability to summon both laughter and outrage simultaneously. 

The current film is Moore’s most ambitious and his best so far. It’s also the most personal, as he takes us back to his roots in Flint, Michigan, interviewing his father, showing us movies of his youth, and playing clips from his first feature “Roger and Me”, the movie that put him on the map and forged his unique style. He shows us as clearly as he can the elements that have influenced his own personal ideology and point of view. “Capitalism is an evil, and evil can’t be regulated, it must be eliminated”, is the central thesis of this film, and it’s a statement backed most forcefully by the religious leaders, priests and bishops, who encouraged the development of a social consciousness in Moore as a child. 

At both showings that I’ve attended the audience has been a mix of young and old and there has been both applause at the end and a considerable number of people staying on through all of the credits (which feature an outrageous and original version of the socialist anthem, “The Internationale”, sung in big band Sinatra, Las Vegas style), both significant signs of appreciation. 

I’ll say no more. Let Michael make his case.

Lastly, I’d like to comment on the Barack Obama Nobel Peace Prize thing. I find it bewildering that so many Americans, particularly those in the media, appear so taken aback by the giving of this award to our very own former hero and now embattled president. Who cares what a bunch of “Norwegian leftists” (in the words of David Brooks) think about Obama? “What has he accomplished,” echoes the disgruntled chorus. 

What all of this illustrates, as if we needed another illustration, is the disconnect of many if not most Americans, between our own internal concerns and squabbles and both the influence and the responsibility we have to the rest of the world. Truly the record of awards given to Americans has been checkered and at times bizarre, when you consider that Henry Kissinger was a recipient, but the consistent factor is that at a given moment in history the Nobel committee appears to reflect an internationally felt political sentiment, and the award is a commentary delivered on a much larger stage than that of internal American politics.   

Barack Obama, just by being elected, and in both actions and words spoken since, has radically altered the image of America and it’s foreign policy more than any president since John F. Kennedy.  The ongoing effects of this on the international mood are incalculable, but undeniable. We are a long way from world peace, but that goal can never be approached in an atmosphere of belligerence.  Can you imagine any starker contrast than between the image of America projected by George Bush and that of Barack Obama? I doubt that we can conceive the sense of relief that Obama’s image has carried across the globe, even in the midst of all the ongoing and terrible wars and traumas that inflict us. If little that is concrete has been achieved and completed since Obama’s election, at least the air we all breathe carries less of a feeling of constriction and paranoia than it did. 

Republicans, of course will say that this new image is one of weakness in the face of the ongoing threat, but that worry doesn’t play with much authority outside of the arena of our own domestic politics. The real battle lines are now drawn not between Americans and all of the nasty foreign threats from outside, but between the international defenders of an obsolete system that serves no one but the wealthy and the machineries of greed, and the re-emergence of a true Democracy, not in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in the United States. Republicans have clearly chosen their sides in that struggle.