Red Herrings

If you haven’t seen the 20/20 clip of John Stossel’s partial interview with Moore, take a moment and watch.  Stossel keeps asking him questions relating to Cuba.  Stossel shows that the data about Cuban life expectancy (and indeed, anything about Cuba) come straight from Castro’s propaganda factories.  He then asks Moore why we should trust what Cuba has to say, which is a completely legitimate point.  My quick transcript of the exchange follows.

STOSSEL:  Why believe what they say about how long they live?

MOORE:  Not to direct your interview here, but you know Cuba’s a red herring.  Let’s stick to Canada and Britain and this stuff because I think these are legitimate arguments that are made against the film and against the so-called idea of socialized medicine and I think you should challenge me on these things and I’ll give you my answer.

STOSSEL:  (Voiceover) So, next week, that’s what we’ll do.

Now, as Jim rightly asks below, if Cuba is a “red herring” then why does Moore feature it so prominently in his film?  I didn’t really get what point Moore was trying to make with the red herring remark.  It was only tonight, when watching this 60 Minutes report about the dust at Ground Zero that I figured it out.

Moore, despite his obvious love for and undying devotion to Fidel Castro and his regime, knows that Cuba is a despicable place.  Moore doesn’t want Stossel mentioning healthcare in the context of Cuba because Moore thinks that by focusing on Cuba the audience will be manipulated into dismissing the idea of socialized medicine by tying it to Fidel Castro.  In other words, don’t use the viewer’s predisposition to be opposed to Castro to attack socialized medicine.  Talk about Britain and Canada rather than Cuba, since Cuba carries a built-in negative emotional response, and Moore wants to debate socialized medicine on its own merits.

In and of itself I think that’s a completely fair point.

Tonight, though, watching the 60 Minutes piece, it dawned on me that this is exactly what Moore did when he took the 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba.  After all, according to Moore our country is littered with the corpses of people who died in the streets while evil healthcare corporations reaped massive profits.  Surely he could have taken a far more random sampling of people to Cuba with him.  Why did he take a boatload of 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba?

Simple.  9/11 rescue workers come with an extremely powerful sympathetic response built in.  We all saw them risking life and limb on that pile of rubble, showing the world the best of America.  Moore wanted the audience to form a bond with his passengers, so he chose 9/11 workers.  When a brewery wants to sell beer they show guys at parties with gorgeous women.  The implied message is that if you drink this beer, women who look like this will want to sleep with you.  It’s associating two disparate items and allowing the viewer to generate the connection in their mind.  In Moore’s case, 9/11 workers were “turned away” by the evil corporate system, but they were taken care of by Cuba.  What does 9/11 have to do with Cuba’s healthcare system?  Nothing at all, but the implied message is clear:  Cuba’s socialist government will treat 9/11 heroes better than our evil free market system.

Moore could have just as easily chosen a convenience store worker from Ohio who has been denied foot surgery for two years and has to stand 8 hours a day in pain, but he didn’t.  He carefully selected the one group of people toward whom, no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, you will immediately feel sympathy.  Moore wanted to use that sympathy to promote socialized medicine.  But when Stossel did exactly the same thing by using Cuba’s negative image to attack socialized medicine, all of a sudden it’s a “red herring” and not germane to the discussion.

See how this works?  See how skillfully Moore can manipulate his audience?  If he had taken a boat full of ex-cons who were being denied healthcare, small time crooks who had paid their debt to society, would you feel the same emotional pull that you do towards 9/11 workers?  Of course not.  Moore knows this, which is why he chose his passengers from a very select group, even though any group of uninsured sick people would make exactly the same point.

Moore is a master manipulator.  When he noticed Stossel tying Cuba’s healthcare system to Cuba’s government—a completely legitimate point—he tried to divert the discussion away from the undeniable truth about his idol El Presidente and the misery of life under socialism.  In his film Moore paints the healthcare debate as the evil and heartlessness of capitalism versus the purity and goodness of socialism.  Not one time does he concede that there are some things our system does much better than theirs.  It was an entirely emotional argument.  When he does Stossel’s interview, however, he wants to direct it so that it is framed solely as a healthcare debate on the merits, devoid of emotion.

As I have said on this blog before, Moore had an excellent opportunity to create a film that showed the positives and negatives of socialized and private systems, then suggest ways in which we could improve our system by incorporating some aspects of the systems in other countries.  He had the chance for his debate solely on the merits, free of red herrings.  Instead he decided to create an infomercial for socialism. 

Emotional manipulation is Moore’s stock in trade, and he’s sure as hell not going to let some reporter tread on his territory.