We're All in Hypocrite Hell

Busted Knuckles, aka the Ornery Bastard is just wrapping up a flame war with a gun-toting liberal who threatened to blow his head off for dissing Michael Moore.

Such trolls put me in mind of that South American mercenary in Commando who brags about how slitting a little girl's throat with a survival knife is like cutting warm butter. After being told to shut the fuck up, the bad guy then confides to his employer, "I laugh at your soldiers when they try to talk tough."

Given my Navy SEAL experience and the things I was forced to do for flag and country, I can afford to laugh at BK's troll, too.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

As alluded to earlier, the whole brouhaha began when Busted Knuckles took Michael Moore to task for being "a hypocritical fuck." You can't say BK doesn't have a point. The whole premise of Moore's first documentary, Roger & Me, is based on a lie. Moore did, in fact, meet with Roger Smith, then head of GM. In fact, he met with him several times offcamera. The infamous rifle scene at the bank in his native Michigan is also misleading, making the viewer think the bank kept loaded guns in their vault when, in fact, they were delivered after the account was established. In Fahrenheit 9/11, in my mind still the best political documentary ever made, Moore railed about Halliburton while simultaneously owning Halliburton stock (which was immediately dumped when right wing bloggers and loud, sweaty, bug-eyed conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones turned up that little gem).

He is a self-publicizing whore where even philanthropy is cynically looked upon as an investment. It was a damned nice thing for Michael Moore to pay for the medical care of the spouse of his biggest online enemy but a damned low thing to announce it at the end of SiCKO. His hare-brained and dangerous stunt of chartering a boat and taking Americans on the outskirts of Guantanamo Bay could've gotten himself and his charges killed.

His self-aggrandizing stunts at the front doors of some of our most evil corporations are, while beloved of liberals everywhere, carefully edited and choreographed stunts that are short-lived and ultimately self-defeating.

And the biggest irony of all is Michael Moore taking American corporations to task in both SiCKO and especially in the tired, uninspired Capitalism: A Love Story while going through corporate entities to make and distribute said motion pictures. His bestselling books are published by publishing powerhouses sold in super book stores like Borders, Inc. and Barnes & Noble.

He's made millions from the very same corporate elite that he criticizes. They are not his targets but his patrons, a bloated court jester serving at the capricious pleasure of the king.

This got me thinking like some latter-day Diogenes: Where is our truly honest hero, that true symbol of selfless socialism who will neither enrich himself nor corporations in getting the word to the masses? Does s/he even exist and how could s/he keep themself from being as hypocritical as Michael Moore?

Well, let's start at the top: It's a well-known fact that 100% of our mainstream media is owned by five corporations. Every TV network, every newspaper, every slick magazine, every radio syndicate is owned by one corporation or another, seemingly, as with Major League Baseball and HMO's, openly flouting the very antitrust laws put in place to break up their monopoly. So TV, radio, newspapers and magazines are out.

The next alternative, naturally, is the internet, specifically the blogosphere. Problem: The wankers who own my hosting site and that of millions of others is Blogger.com, which is owned by Google. Even if we could get around that and find some hosting site with wide distribution that isn't a corporate entity, we'd still have to navigate the internet with software made by Microsoft or Apple installed on PCs or laptops created by other corporate entities such as Macintosh, Dell, Compaq, HP and others. MacAfee or Norton anti-virus programs would protect us from the malware that isn't distributed by online corporate entities.

So the blogosphere is out. What does that leave? Pamphleteering? A noble idea and a wonderfully retro throwback but there's a problem with that too: Unless you don't have a problem cutting down a tree with an axe that wasn't made by Stanley and sold by a corporation like Ace Hardware, Lowe's or Home Depot then gumming the wood to a pulp with your teeth, you're looking at buying paper at Staples or Office Max made by Georgia Pacific, using toner made by Epson, HP, Ricoh, etc. and on printers made by them.

Well, that leaves standing on a street corner somewhere atop a soapbox and reaching hearts and minds one disinterested pedestrian at a time holding up a cardboard placard reading, "THE END IS NEAR", "WILL BLOG FOR FOOD!" or "KEEP YOUR GUBMINT HANDS OFF MY MEDICAIDE!"

Problem: The soapbox was either made by Johnson & Johnson or some subcontractor, the cardboard was made by, once again, Georgia Pacific and the message was probably scrawled by a Sharpie, which is owned by Sanford North.

What does that leave? Shitting in your hand and writing with your own feces on the side of a building that somehow wasn't built, owned, rented or leased by any corporate entity whatsoever. (Coal wouldn't work: That was probably mined by some poor black-lunged bastard working for Murray Energy).

The reality is this: Corporations have so infiltrated and claimed ownership of our lives that it is a virtual impossibility to impart any ideas, no matter how true and honest they are, to others without any kind of corporate involvement that automatically makes hypocrites of us.

Essentially, if we tried to eschew corporate involvement in the act of human communication, we'd be forced back to the pre-Caxton Press days of the late 15th century.

Ergo, when you get down to it, Mr. Knuckles, we'd all be hypocrites like Michael Moore except not on as grand a scale. When you get right down to it, when you look at things from that dreary perspective, there's really no way around it. Whatever Michael Moore says about corporations gets from his lips to our ears only when the corporations with which he deals allows him to.

We're all hypocrites, whether or not we like it. The question is, what are we gonna do about it?