“Live Earth is officially the largest global entertainment event in history,” said Al Gore of last Saturday’s 100-artist concert series. The event’s Web site also bills the effort to involve people in solving the “climate crisis” as the largest grassroots organizing program in history.

Apparently televised concerts given by attractive, talent-challenged pop stars and sponsored by multinational corporations including Microsoft, Pepsi, Philips, VeriSign and eBay counts as “grassroots organizing.” Who knew?

I flipped to Live Earth a few times during the day, catching Madonna’s pitiful squirms, Alicia Keys’ assault on Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy Me” and John Mayer pouting through another lite-rock mess.

Gore must do much better than Live Earth and “An Inconvenient Truth” to rally a public drive for the government-mandated changes he wants.

This story continues below
Advertisement

Michael Moore’s “Sicko” is a different, and potentially much more effective, attempt to use a medium of popular culture to bring regular Americans around to a viewpoint cherished by the left. Moore’s “documentary” subject this time is the American health care system and how it compares unfavorably with socialized medicine in Canada, the United Kingdom, France and — wait for it — Cuba.

“I always thought the health insurance companies were there to help us,” Moore disingenuously intones near the beginning of the film. He then introduces us to several people with heartbreaking accounts of being denied doctor-ordered tests, medications or surgeries by greedy HMOs.

“How did we get to the point of doctors at health insurance companies actually being responsible for the deaths of patients?” Moore asks after a former HMO exec confesses to a Congressional committee that her cost-cutting led directly to unnecessary deaths.

Though Moore essentially admits to cherry-picking cases for the film, the emotional segments offer the strongest indictment of health care in America, imparting a palpable sense that something similar could happen to any of us.

Moore’s expose of the passage of the 2003 bill creating a Medicare entitlement for prescription drugs for seniors is also effective. But he’s upset only by the fact that HMOs and drug companies will profit from it, not that the American people will owe trillions of future dollars to pay for it.

Indeed, Moore seems blithely unconcerned that someone, somewhere must pay for health care. In his travels through the four socialist paradises he spotlights, we’re treated to shot after shot of doctors, patients, bureaucrats and politicians happily explaining to Moore how “free” health care works.

Milton Friedman taught us —some of us, at least — that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Moore apparently believes that economic law does not apply under socialism, which he explicitly advocates, citing Medicare, Social Security, public schools and the U.S. Post Office as socialist programs that work in America. Yeah, really.

Universal health care would work too, Moore says, if we stopped thinking about “me” and focused on “we.”

This is what happens in Cuba, where “Sicko” takes us in search of medical attention for some of the desperate people we meet throughout the film.

He marches them to Havana Hospital into the literal embrace of smiling doctors and nurses who admit them and promise them that everything’s going to be OK.

I wonder how that segment would look like to the enemies of Castro’s progressive regime rotting in tropical gulags that make Gitmo look like Club Med?

Moore didn’t focus his camera there, but only on fodder for what must be called a cynical polemic, not a clear-eyed documentary.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.