Bert Schneider: 1933 — 2011

“Who???”  I hadn’t heard of him either until I saw his obituary a few days ago.  But his work lives on.  Bert Schneider brought us “The Monkees,” “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “The Last Picture Show” and “Hearts and Minds.”

I never watched the Monkees’ TV show but I liked a lot of their songs (there, I’ve admitted it).  Quite a leap from TV pap to heavy hitters like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show.

Heaviest of all was his Oscar-winning “Hearts and Minds” (1975) about the Vietnam War.  The movie was named after Lyndon Johnson’s speech where he said we need to capture the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people if we want to win the Vietnam War. Or maybe it was unofficially named after Charles Colson’s “grab them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.”

It’s one of those movies where you’re glad you saw it because it’s so deep, but you’re reluctant to recommend it to anyone.  It’s too much of an emotional roller coaster.  The movie was mostly a series of short interviews and film clips, juxtaposed for maximum emotional impact.  A person is sitting there, giving an emotionless recital of all the bombing runs he made, all the people he’s killed.  Then the camera moves further away and you can see for the first time that he’s in a wheelchair.  Another scene shows a Vietnamese funeral.  Bereaved relatives are sobbing, stamping their feet, clawing at the casket.  The next scene is General Westmoreland saying “You know, Orientals don’t place the same high value on human life that we do here in the West.”

Stuff like that.

Sometimes you just want to tune that shit out and watch The Monkees.

U.S. Navy’s New Goal: Using Military Power to PREVENT War

Good God, a bunch of leftwing girlymen have taken over the U.S. Navy! Preventing wars??? Will Halliburton and Exxon even permit this?

The new strategy of the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard states: “We believe that preventing wars is as important as winning wars.” But, but look at all those ignorant primitive Third World countries out there. They have trillions of dollars worth of natural resources which are rightfully OURS Goddamnit!

According to this article, the strategy is to use aid, training and other cooperative efforts “to encourage stability in fledgling democracies.” This will create relationships around the world which can be leveraged if a crisis breaks out.

The strategy is contained in a 16-page document titled “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower.” It says “Although our forces can surge when necessary to respond to crises, trust and cooperation cannot be surged.”

This is the first time the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard have collaborated on a common defense strategy. Admiral Gary Roughead, Chief of Naval Operations, gave a speech calling for more international partnerships to make the Navy a “force for good” around the globe.

And Admiral Mike Mullen — who has just become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — said he sees the Navy's humanitarian work as the way to defeat terrorism by winning hearts and minds.

“Hearts and minds” — that’s the phrase Lyndon Johnson used during the Vietnam War: “The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there.”

Well, we saw how that worked out. Maybe it'll be different this time. We’ll see…

Sicko

Yes, it seems like everybody who sees this movie has to do a post on it. OK, here goes:

This is by far Michael Moore’s best movie. It still has Moore’s trademark combination of humor and anger, but it’s much more of an emotional roller coaster. It almost rivals Crash or Hearts and Minds for pushing those emotional buttons.

We’re all aware that 45 million Americans (or whatever the number is) are without health insurance. As disgraceful as that is, the nightmares documented in Sicko are suffered by working Americans who HAVE health insurance. Crippling injuries, deaths and grief-stricken families are the result of one slippery move after another by HMOs.

There's a 100-page list of diseases that aren't covered, period. If that isn't enough, there's that trusty old standby, the “pre-existing condition,” and there's a huge number of treatments that aren't covered because they're “experimental.” Don’t worry; one way or another, your HMO will find a way not to cover you.

Even though the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are cranking up their smear campaigns against this movie, Sicko probably won't alienate as many conservatives as Moore’s other movies have. After all, Biblehumpers, rednecks and Iraqi-war supporters are just as likely as anyone else to get sick and go into bankruptcy because of medical expenses. You remember the expression that “a conservative is a liberal who just got mugged.” Well, what happens to a conservative who just got fucked over by his HMO?

Some of the most moving parts of the film are the interviews with HMO employees. A woman broke down crying when she was telling Moore about interviewing a couple who was applying for HMO coverage. The couple was ecstatic that they were finally going to have health insurance. The interviewer wasn’t allowed to tell them, but she knew — by some of the answers on their application form — that they would be denied, but they wouldn’t find out until they received a boilerplate denial letter in two weeks.

There was an interview with a former HMO employee whose job was to find a way — any way at all, whatever it took — to get money back from patients (or get them dropped by the HMO) after they had already had their treatment approved. His most common method was to do an excruciating background check on a patient until he found a minor ailment — no matter how insignificant — in the patient’s distant past. It could be a stubbed toe, a cold, a mild rash or any other condition which cured itself without treatment; anything. Then, if it turns out the patient hasn’t mentioned this “pre-existing condition” on the application form — Gotcha! They instantly lose their health coverage for failing to disclose their pre-existing condition.

At the end of the interview, this same HMO ex-employee said “people don’t fall through the cracks. We put the crack there and then we push them towards it.”

Think what you want about “socialized medicine,” or the Big Business-generated hysteria about “you don’t even get to choose your own doctor!” “You have to wait six months just to get into the doctor’s office!” But in countries that have universal health care — that’s every industrialized country in the world except us — the people love it and wouldn’t give it up for anything. Moore traveled all over Canada, France and England, interviewing local citizens and American expatriates. Not one of them echoed the rightwing spewbuckets back in the States. Everyone he talked to, regardless of income level or political views, was very happy with their health coverage and the quality of the care.

And now, for the sake of equality and fairness, here is an opposing view of Sicko.