People Needs Come First in Many Countries

“Where to Invade Next?”

American documentary film / 2015

Written, narrated and directed by Michael Moore

The movie has Michael Moore’s humorous banter but is deadly serious. The searing theme: the United States spends trillions of dollars on wars but relatively little on health and welfare of the American people.

The social benefits guaranteed by a host of other countries frequently brought tears to my eyes with Moore’s comparison to the shabby values of the United States, the richest country in the world.

“The American dream seems to be alive and well everywhere except in America,” Moore rightly concludes the film.

So many of the marvelous social concepts originated in America. Examples: the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, abolition of the death penalty, the eight-hour day, the Labor Day holiday and women’s rights.

(In America, Michigan abolished the death penalty in 1846. But most states still cling to that inhumane sentence.)

The countries Moore visited and what he learned from people there:

• Italy: free college education, paid maternity leave of eight weeks, three weeks paid vacations, free 13th-month “salary,” two-hour lunch breaks, paid sick leaves, paid honeymoons and powerful unions.

• France: free universal health care and free college schooling along with cradle-to-grave socialism.

• Slovenia: free university education and pre-kindergarten schooling.

• Portugal: no death penalty, decriminalization of drug use but free treatment, low recidivism and paid holidays.

• Norway: solitary confinement prohibited and maximum-security prisons are picnics compared with those grim ones in America.

• Finland: free university education, little homework and no standardized tests.

• Germany: a fine balance of work and play and strong unions.

• Tunisia: strong women’s rights including reproductive health, easy access to abortion and women helped draft the Tunisian constitution.

• Iceland: predominantly women in political power, world’s first democratically elected woman president, pro-abortion and a special prosecutor for criminal investigation of bankers.

(In America, Michigan abolished the death penalty in 1846. But most states still cling to that inhumane sentence.)

Michael Moore has many other socially conscious documentaries, including “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Bowling for Columbine.” His first, “Roger & Me” in 1989, showed Moore chasing down Roger Smith, General Motors CEO, to question him about closing auto plants that caused massive economic harm to the Flint, Mich., region.

This one, “Where to Invade Next?,” is a film all Americans should see. It shows that America is NOT “the greatest country on the planet,” as Moore keeps saying ironically.

FILM’S LIBEL OF MOZART

The movie “Amadeus” won eight Oscars in 1985, including best film, best director, best actor and best adapted screenplay. It was a wonderful film, but my, how it libeled Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in telling of his life and death in Vienna in 1791.

Writer Clemency Burton-Hill told about the falsehoods in a BBC Culture program recently, beginning with the purported murder of Mozart by Antonio Salieri, a good Vienna composer but no genius like Mozart.

The movie is shamelessly inaccurate about the historical facts, portraying Mozart as a stuttering, foul-mouthed, baby-talking idiot who wrote letters full of vulgar buffoonery.

The one thing marvelous about the movie, however, is the soundtrack playing the glorious music of Mozart. It was conducted by Neville Marriner and sung by the choir of the Academy of the St. Martin-in-the-Fields of London. (Marriner died recently at 92.)

“Listening to the thrilling Symphony No. 25 or the wrenching ‘lacrimosa’ from the ‘Requiem’ moved me,” Burton-Hill rhapsodized. “And I thought my heart would stop at the sheer beauty during the opening of the ‘Gran Partita for winds’ when I first saw the film.

“F. Murray Abraham as Salieri talks us through the opening of the piece, introducing each instrument, and ending with the words: ‘This was a music I had never heard before, filled with unfulfillable longing. It seemed that I was hearing the voice of God.’ ”

Perhaps. But in my judgment the greater, more profound composer, was Beethoven with his sturm und drang (storm and stress).

ERASMUS BETRAYED

The biography “Erasmus and the Age of Reformation” by fellow Hollander Johan Huizinga, is yet another badly written book by damnable academics who never learns to write.

Filled with irrelevancies and wordiness, the book is 50 pages longer than it needs to be. Each chapter is headed by an unnecessary 10-line summation. Erasmus’s most enduring work, “The Praise of Folly,” is muddied by overwriting, untranslated Latin and references to too many ancient literary figures.

Erasmus, a great humanist in the 16th century, deserves a much better account of his life.

Jake Highton is an emeritus professor from the University of Nevada, Reno. (jake@unr.edu)