~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Filmmaker-documentarian-activist Michael Moore has released another thought-provoking movie. In “Where to Invade Next” he tells his audience that in order to bring back things we in the U.S. need, he will intrude in countries populated mostly by Caucasians with names he can pronounce.
Unlike the explorers of a few of those very same countries that invaded this hemisphere over the centuries, Michael will not be hunting for gold or the fountain of youth. He’s looking to dig up ideas . . . the ideal kind of invasion and take-away: ideas belong to everyone–I can take an idea but the idea is still there when I leave.
The ideas he thinks we need involve education, incarceration, vacation, drug usage, school lunch.
He pretends he has been assigned this desperately needed mission from the military might of the USA — the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. He talks to the photos of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, having them admit defeat in their heroic efforts to help, alter or run over the rest of the world. These chastened men tell Michael they have made everything worse: in declaring war on drugs and terror, they have increased wide participation in both.
Off goes Michael Moore on a U.S. carrier to Italy. There he learns that Italian workers get eight weeks of vacation a year, three extra weeks if they get married, and three years for the mom of a new baby. One of the owners of a multi-million-dollar company called Lardini that makes clothing for Versage and Burberry says, “It is the law.” Michael explains that in the U.S. there is no law, anywhere, that says employers HAVE to give vacation to anybody.
A Lardini employee says, “That’s ridiculous!” The owner of the Italian motorcycle company Ducati says, “Welfare is a good word — the welfare of the people is important. No clash between the profit of the company and the well-being of the people. We still make a healthy profit. What’s the point of being richer? People are smiling here.”
Recently released reports from the 30-country Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that the U.S. and Papua New Guinea are the only two nations that have yet to figure out how to guarantee paid maternity leave for working mothers.
Michael flies off next to a lower middle class grade school in France to eat lunch with students. They sit at round tables, six to eight kids to a table, and the lunch ladies set before them china, glassware and silverware, then they serve each child lamb skewers over couscous with dessert of fruit and cheese (camembert is their favorite, says the chef). Everyone drinks water. These well-balanced, attractive lunches cost less than the mac and cheese lunches of the U.S., says Michael as he shares a lunch hour with kids learning how to cut their meat, pass dishes of food and discuss interesting topics.
Michael flies off to Finland, the country that in 1960 was on the low end of educational excellence. Now they’re #1. We’re #11. “We took many of our ideas from America,” says a principal. “To be happy — it’s in your Constitution — to respect others.”
In Finland all the schools are the same, no poor schools and rich schools, just equal schools. “Nobody has to shop for schools,” a teacher says. “We can’t charge for schools, so rich parents make sure the schools are good.” She says that what she understands about U.S. schools is that they are “a business and they teach to a test.” In Finland they try to teach their students “everything they need to learn to help them use their brains.” The Finnish schools have short school days, no homework and teach many languages as well as an insistence on art, music, poetry and civics.
The main point of a Finnish education is to see that every child has exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income or geographic location. The goal of universal public education in Finland, as it initially was in the States, is to even out the players and the playing field.
Michael then went off to Portugal to investigate their legalization of drugs — all of them. The change in law has been practiced now for 15 years and according to their drug czar, “Since drug usage is no longer considered a crime we now have fewer people using and less crime in general.”
He added that it’s essential to have a health care system that is universal in order to handle former druggers who want and need rehab. “The dignity of the human being is the important thing here,” he said, and then looked directly at the camera.”Get rid of the death penalty. It is against human dignity,” he said.
Michael pursued his prison agenda by going next to Norway where no crime gets the offender more than 21 years in prison. Their penal system is based on the principal of rehabilitation, not retribution. The only punishment of the inmates is that their freedom has been taken away. A warden said, “It’s an American idea that we adopted: No cruel or unusual punishment. We treat our criminals as human beings.”
Norway has a 20 percent recidivism; the U.S., 80 percent. According to the International Center for Prison Studies, the U.S. has the world’s highest rate of incarceration with 724 per 100,000. Russia is next with 581, the UK 145, Norway 71.
Michael made a brief visit to Slovenia, formerly part of what was once Communist Yugoslavia, to talk to college students, some from the U.S. There, tuition is free. All students graduate with just a diploma, no debt.
Next, Michael flew to Tunisia, which is a predominately Muslim country in North Africa. There, the government funds women’s health clinics. In 1973, Tunisian law changed to allow abortion (the same year this happened in the U.S. with Roe vs Wade, although here that law has been heavily edited by new laws in most states). “This helps women to be the equal of men,” a healthcare worker said, adding that because inequality between genders promotes major problems in the world, Tunisia in 2014 began working to eradicate violence against women.
In 1975, all the women in Iceland went on strike. No schools opened, banks kept their doors closed, buses remained in their sheds, no children got fed. The women based their general strike on the premise that if all women are idle, all work comes to a screeching halt; they were tired of “a few thousand yes-men calling all the shots.” Within five years, Iceland elected the world’s first female president, Vigdis Finbogadottir, who served two terms. “We have the same chances as men now,” said one of three female CEOs playing golf like the big boys. “Where women have power and are treated as equals, everyone is better off,” one of them said. “My belief is that woman use their intelligence not to make war, they use their words looking for peace — to save humanity, to save the children.”
After megacriminal bankers melted the world economy in 2008 and created the worst depression since the 1930s, Iceland prosecuted 22 of its bankers and sent about half of them to jail. Their economy has completely recovered . . . and nobody got away with the crimes, let alone got bailed out.
Moore finally wound up in Germany to investigate how that country has dealt with the genocide of millions of people during Hitler’s reign. Although it took a few decades for Germans to get with it, now in every school they teach the enormity of the genocide of the Jews and everyone else not Aryan. They make sure their youngsters know the history so that it will never happen again; so that they can be humbled by the shame and tragedy of it. Even though today’s students had nothing to do with the horror, one of the most shameful eras in history was perpetrated by their ancestors, and no one is brushing it under the rug of history any longer.
The idea Moore thought to acquire in Germany and bring back with him is for America to acknowledge its history of genocide of Native Americans and its continued mistreatment and persecution of African Americans.
Unlike in his other films about corporations (“Roger and Me”), firearms (“Bowling for Columbine”), war (“Farenheit 9/11”) and health care (“Sicko”) in which Moore filmed the worst of America, “Where to Invade Next” concentrates on how other countries do a few things that are worth looking at and pursuing. Many times throughout the film, Europeans mention that these socialist-sounding ideas they’re working with — equality, generosity, excellence, tolerance, fairness — came straight from the once enlightened USA.
Although Moore is obviously ignoring glaring problems in a few of his invaded countries, he purposefully concentrates on the good ideas each country fosters. And he reminds the viewer that if countries less well off than the U.S can manage these social practices that truly take into account the dignity of humans, surely we could rearrange our budget to concentrate on us, the humans this country is supposed to be about . . . and not the corporations, the military industrial complex and how we are often fooled into the hubris of thinking we’re better than we are.
