Rage Against DiPCo-think
As a reward for meeting the 8-student minimum I needed in order to earn full pay for my summer school class, I skipped the assigned reading and instead took my “Five Faces of Power” students to see Michael Moore’s new movie Sicko last night. Afterward we talked about it over dinner–or rather, I asked questions, they did some reflecting, and I kept falling into fierce (manic?) little rampages.
In retrospect, I wish I’d been a bit more disciplined, kept my mouth shut for longer periods. Most of the students shared my (mostly) approving perspective on Moore’s film and his critique of the flawed “health care” system in the U.S. anyway and could have gone on their own rampages. (Actually, a couple did.) But I was a bit triggered by one student who in my mind encapsulates a certain type that circulates in my expensive private university: the not particularly bright, legacy conservative, whose conservatism is not anchored by any particular value commitments beyond the sacred right to make money for self-centered ends without feeling guilty about it. To put it bluntly, these kids are conservative because their parents identify with conservatism, because they are business majors–which is not to say all the business majors at my school are conservative–and because they believe that untethered capitalism is The Way. I have a private acronym for the female version of these kids: DiPCoGs, or Dumb Pretty Conservative Girls. (The cultural, Christian “family values” conservatives at my school are another type altogether, but that’s a different post.) I guess the male version would be DiPCoBs.
The student, who is usually rather quiet, seemed like he’d downed a few espresso shots this time. Fired up, he kept dominating the conversation with comments along the lines of, “even though Michael Moore is pretty unAmerican and I really disagreed with his other movies, especially Farenheit 911, he had some good points in this one. But health care in Canada is not as good as he implies, and things are actually f*d up in France, and anyway the French are lazy workers, and I couldn’t believe Cuba has such nice hospitals given that they’re Communists–” and on and on. I don’t think such blathering would have bugged me that much except that his was the first voice talking when we got out of the theatre, and the main one running on at the dinner table until I started pulling others in and then went on my rampages. It was the old “Michael Moore’s a liberal, so he must be lying and biased” reaction, a reaction that pisses me off for the way that it denies conservative lies and bias, which in my mind are the great Goliath of modern political culture. American liberals in general are a much less courageous David than the biblical one. But Michael Moore is a hero of mine because, whatever else you think of him, the guy has guts. He is constantly speaking truth to power, insistently urging American citizens to live up to the ideals of participatory democracy, calling LIBERALS to account along with their conservative counterparts, and, particularly in this case, showing us that alternatives to the status quo do, contrary to popular delusion, exist.
For that reason, I just couldn’t stomach the DiPCoB outbursts. So I went on a rampage about the difference between “bias” [as in Fox News] and “critical point of view” [as in political documentary], because I don’t think most students or even most Americans understand the difference. Then I went on a rampage about the kinds of health insurance premiums these kids will be paying when they’re on their own, especially if they aren’t covered through work. (Pause for comments.) Then I talked about the many years I did not have health insurance because I couldn’t afford $350 a month on my own. (Pause for students’ personal experiences.) By now my stomach was beginning to seize up, apparently from gas brought on by a fruit smoothie I had earlier in the day, but maybe from manic dismay. And I could tell I was, well, not being as interactive in my pedagogy as I usually am. So in an attempt to stop the galloping of my own voice (and intenstines), I shifted the conversation to visions for change.
Visions for change. What do you guys think, I asked, will turn the tide on this issue? What would it take for Americans to create a system that serves all of its people in this area–the 911 rescue workers who haven’t been covered, the middle-class families going bankrupt to pay the costs of heart attacks and cancer, the poor folks literally tossed to the curb on Skid Row by the hospital itself, the people insurance companies are rejecting because of “previous conditions” such as yeast infections? Michael Moore put this on the table, showed us all kinds of alternatives that are working, even in a nation as poor and economically quarantined as Cuba, so now what?
It was this part of the conversation that kept me up last night. Almost every major social change movement across cultures and time periods has been envisioned and catalyzed by young people, the proverbial idealists, the generation that pursues what their parents and grandparents see as “impossible.” But in my experience this Generation Y (or is it Z?) struggles to locate its idealism, because kids are overwhelmed by the scope of the problems. I am overwhelmed, but I still believe we are collectively capable of great transformation, incredible change. If I did not believe that I would not be teaching classes geared to raise young people’s political consciousness and try to set it into motion.
It would thrill me to see the kids walk out of the universities and into the streets. I want them to rage and rage against the machine (hell, I want Zach from Rage to come back and start the revolution), to turn the system upside down, to call their parents’ generation to account for the selling off of their future, for the enslaving of such massive human and natural resources in service to greed. My deepest hope is that they, that we, finally rebel.
Instead, they talked about how the pharmaceutical lobbies are too powerful, how the legislators are whoring to the insurance interests (all true). How people don’t protest anymore (not true), how it doesn’t really work to protest anyway (not true). How Americans won’t pay higher taxes for health care (though we have for these wars). How we’re too work obsessed to ever support balanced lifestyles, as the French do (maybe, but look at our epidemics of anxiety and depression; do we really think this is fun?). How we’re too into “personal responsibility”–even if it’s impossible in the realm of health care, even if it kills us. How “this is just the way it is” and people aren’t going to get off their asses because we’re lazy and/or don’t think anything can change. What can we really do about it anyway, they said.
And so I gave it my best, suggesting the kind of change Americans have been capable of when no one thought it was possible (abolitionism, civil rights, women’s rights), but still I spun for a long time in bed worrying. Finally I worked on shifting my own thoughts, fleshing out my own vision
of a world where Americans turn their hugely generous volunteerism to a loving overhaul of unAmerican policies that kill and maim our own citizens while pharmaceutical and health industry executives feed off of grotesquely bloated profits (knowing, deep down, that it’s wrong)
of a world where we channel our anxiety into not just demanding change but becoming it, refusing the addiction to toxic, unrewarding lifestyles and limited comfort-seeking behaviors
of an America where it is finally dawning on us that we are driving around in vehicles of mass destruction and we begin creating more and better transportation alternatives that bring us together, make us healthier, and wake us up; where celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio are sponsoring full-length films on green technology to spur a green revolution
of health care professionals beginning to speak out against being forced to be cogs in a machine that hurts people, against participating in the banality of evil, as did the doctor in the film that confessed having essentially killed people by declining medical procedures for patients as part of her job, as did the insurance policy reviewers who volunteered to be in Moore’s movie
of a United States where citizens stop taking no for an answer and demand that we prioritize the distribution of our massive material, political, and economic resources in ways that affirm life, not just a lifestyle, that support human beings, not just bank accounts, that circulate care, not just money
of an all out rampage of equality and political nurturing, and justice–behaviors that suit a revolutionary democracy
and so on, and so on.
