Borderland

With less than 72 hours left before the polls close, the election is what I’m mostly thinking about now. Michael Moore has been busy thinking about it, too. He was interviewed on Democracy Now yesterday, talking with Amy Goodman about the election. Like a lot of progressives, he’s nervous looking at optimistic poll results, and he’s warning us not to begin celebrating Obama’s lead too early.

Michael Moore: But I have no sense of optimism, as I sit here. You know, way too many times in the past, we’ve gotten far too giddy way too soon. And I am just not going to succumb to that feeling right now. I mean, I hope. I hope it all looks good on Tuesday, but for many reasons, there is a chance that McCain will win on Tuesday. And we have to operate with that attitude in mind, because—I mean, let’s face it….They’ve always been well funded. They’re very smart about it. They are committed. They are up at the crack of dawn, and they will be on Tuesday. Trust me. We have not lived under the Republicans for twenty of the last twenty-eight years by their side being a bunch of slackers.

Moore pointed out that McCain and Palin have raised the stakes by framing Obama as a socialist, and that if the Democrats win, the majority of Americans will have essentially endorsed the idea of socialism. “So I guess,” he said, “if Obama is president when we wake up on Wednesday morning, you know, we should all go dance around the May Day pole.”

Speaking of slackers, I watched Moore’s movie, Slacker Uprising, which is a documentary about a speaking tour he did at the end of the 2004 election, where he gave Ramen noodles and a change of underwear to “slackers” who’d promise to get out and vote. It’s an upbeat, angry, amusing, anti-war, anti-Bush campaign documentary, with some good music (free online to US and Canadian residents) and a sad ending, which I wrote about in one of my first posts on this blog. As I was watching the movie, I tried to imagine how it’s going to play after the election. It reminded me how much the 2004 election was about the war, and who was a patriot, while this time it’s more about the economy, and who is a socialist – or something. The McCain/Palin character assassination-by-association smear campaign won’t give the faux anti-American theme a rest.

The movie finishes with the message, THEY DON’T WIN UNTIL WE GIVE UP. But this is something that progressives need to remember no matter what happens, because politicians from both parties know this all too well.

In his interview with Goodman, Michael Moore discussed his Election Guide 2008 and some presidential decrees he suggests for Barack Obama’s first 10 days in office, to include:

• Bring back the draft, but only draft children of the rich;
• Make it a crime to make a profit off of somebody being sick;
• Ban high-fructose corn syrup;
• Americans should pay no more taxes than the French (by relieving us of expenses for things like health insurance, daycare, and college tuition – which are “hidden” taxes – and instead return something of real value in return for the taxes that people do pay);
• Make it an American mission to ensure that the entire world has clean drinking water;
• Require the rich to pay their fair share of social security (since they currently don’t pay anything into the fund);

After all, we’re voting for a socialist…

Looking past the election, Bill Moyers Journal had a great interview last week with filmmaker Mark Johnson, who put together a world music video featuring street musicians from around the world, playing the same songs, together. Playing for Change was described in this review/interview as a “…global concert film, recorded on the streets of New Orleans, Barcelona, South Africa, Tibet and elsewhere.”

BILL MOYERS: What do you hope comes from this?

MARK JOHNSON: Well, I mean, with Playing for Change, my ultimate thing would be that people understand that in a world with all this division, it’s important for us to focus on our connections.

It’s an amazing project.

This clip of Stand by Me from the film (and Moyers’ show) was posted on youtube:

“The future isn’t something hidden in a corner. The future is something we build in the present.”
–Paulo Freire