The Bigger You Get…
Recently watched “Roger & Me” and “The Big One”, Michael Moore’s documentaries on big business in America. “Roger & Me” is about Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan; home of General Motors and how the closure of the GM plant there affects the town and its people. The Roger in the title refers to Roger Smith, the then Chairman of GM and the film ostensibly charts the travails of Moore as he unsuccessfully tries to meet Roger (kinda James Bond-ish, ain”t it?)… to get an explanation about the closure… and why GM is closing the plant even though it has made record profits…..
“The Big One” is about the 47 city book tour that Moore undertook to promote his book “Downsize This: Random Threats from an Unarmed American”.
Both the flicks take some heavy-duty pot shots at corporate America and have lots of genuinely very funny moments…. then there are the excellent soundtracks… good ole rock ‘n roll and country… and Moore indulges in some pretty raucous shenanigans in both….. in “The Big One”, an especially hilarious scene is where Moore marches into the Johnson Controls plant in Milwaukee (which is about to close down and open up in Mexico) and presents to some Manager a cheque for 85 cents (the first hour’s salary for the Mexican labour they”re about to employ)……
But amongst all this, are some really sobering moments that made me stop and think…. especially poignant to me were the scenes in Roger & Me where the townsfolk go about trying to make Flint a tourist attraction with an air of quietly desperate optimism…. a scheme that fails spectacularly….. apart from the ones obviously meant to tug at heartstrings like watching people get evicted from their homes on Christmas Eve….
And in The Big One…. an interview on radio where Moore shows to the jock a photograph of the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing… gutted building and all that…. and another photograph of a building in downtown Flint a few years after the plant closure…. the photographs are virtually identical… I’ve got the book and trust me.. they are…. and he asks the jock… "tell me Studs… what you see in Oklahoma is definitely terrorism… when you blow up a building and kill 168 people in it…. but what do you call it.. when you politely ask the people inside the building to leave and then blow it up?" … ”cause sure as hell these folks are gonna die too… maybe not in one blow like in Oklahoma… but over time, they’re gonna die … of drugs… of crime… of suicide.. of abuse…."
As a product of a business family and business school, I’ve grown up believing that profit is all that matters…. "maximizing shareholder value" is the mantra to live by….. big business making big profits is good for the nation… good for you and me… that everybody fending for their own economic interest is how society progresses….. that collectivization of the workforce is evil (and I do not use the word lightly here..)…. but then one thinks: How much is enough?… a billion dollars in profit vs a billion-and-a-half????
Think about it.
