You can lead a horse to water but when you get there he’s still a horse. Or is he? Maybe he’s teabagger/death-er/birth-er. “The Age of Stoopud”, a new documentary by Michael Moore, explores the vast wasteland that exists between the ears of everyday Americans as he follows them on their coast to coast odyssey for purpose. Living in the age of unreason, which began with the election of Ronald Reagan, Americans have seen their fortunes wane and their values warped by the phenomenon of “conservative” radio, television and daily newspapers wholly owned by corporate interests determined to mold their gullible target audience into unknowing dupes. As becomes blatantly obvious in the film, the America of our forefathers has been sliding inexorably into the toilet bowl of history. The country whose manufacturing base and standard of living used to be the envy of the world has become the planet’s largest exporter of jobs and Treasury IOU’s with a shrinking middle class that depends on credit cards to support its downwardly spiraling lifestyle.
Touring the nation’s schools, Moore interviews teachers and administrators who acknowldege that they have given up on education in favor of teaching students to pass multiple choice tests. “Those who can’t do, teach, says Merlin Ferguson, superintendent of education in Akron, Ohio, “and those who can’t teach usually wind up teaching high school students how to completely fill in the little boxes and circles on the answer sheets.” Economists point to statistics that reveal American schools turning out semi-literate burger flippers while China and India crank out engineers and physicists like link sausages. “It’s getting more and more difficult for U.S. high school graduates to find work, says leading economist Paul Krugman, “there are only so many minimum wage jobs to go around and most of those are being taken by undocumented workers who don’t demand outrageous perks like bathroom privileges.”
In an attempt to understand the netherworld of right wing broadcasting, Moore goes undercover to discover how Fox News develops its daily portions of nonsensical gibberish for the masses. “I was able to walk right into one of their editorial meetings where they decide what to cover each day. You see, because I’m morbidly obese and pasty white they naturally assumed I was one of them.” Moore goes on to reveal how subjects like healthcare reform are picked apart in order to find out- of -context quotes and scary sounding subject headings that can be manipulated. “End of Life Choices” for instance, which covers living wills and hospice care , becomes “Government Ends Your Life: You Have No Choice”. A red telephone in the center of the table at the meeting connects directly to John Boehner (pronounced Boner) the House minority leader to make sure that all talking points are locked in. Corporate sponsors who fund Fox News are the same as those who donate to Republicans in congress, so the “follow the money” strategy of journalistic investigation is amply demonstrated in the film. “You might think that Americans are too smart to be manipulated like first graders on a special education bus, but it turns out that those on the bus are light years ahead of this country’s right wing population,” said Moore. He points out that for decades the GOP has been able get average Americans to routinely vote against their own self interest. Representative Boehner himself has gone on record in this regard. “The GOP voted against the 40 hour week, against paid overtime, against paid vacations, against workplace safety, against Social Security, against Medicare, against Medicaid, against unions…. and yet we tell the yokels that we’re ‘the party of the working man’ and they believe it! It is truly remarkable. Of course, we have a lot of help from ex-carnival barkers like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, these guys could sell condoms to the Pope.”
Moving on, the documentary touches on the influence of the weird and supernatural on the least educated of the populace. “Shows about ghost hunting and UFO’s have replaced wrestling and roller derby on TV these days”, says David Ackerman of Northwestern University’s communications department, and the same people are watching them, a can of beer in one hand and a remote control in the other. Corporations that want to divert attention from their pollution of the environment and poisonous food products sponsor these as well as the ever increasing flood of ‘reality programs’ where witless viewers watch even more witless participants being tortured and humiliated during prime time. It’s like the last days of the Roman empire where the population was held spellbound watching gladiators at the Coliseum while the barbarian hordes sacked the cities.”
Moore ends the film on a lighter note, showing statistically that in the 21st century, America’s melting pot is more likely to contain frijoles than mulligan stew, and that the street names and store fronts are becoming unintelligible to the dwindling white population as Koreans and Chinese snap up the properties that once were considered strongholds of the Anglo Saxon demography. As the credits roll, white elementary school students are shown struggling to learn the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish and Korean while their unemployed parents carry signs outside on the sidewalk raging impotently against a tidal wave that has already swept them out to sea.