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To: Condor who wrote (3206)	11/23/2002 12:03:27 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6901

Hi Condor - think I will review Bowling for Columbine here, because although there are foreign affairs implications, the movie really is about the US. Michael Moore is a brilliant, but flawed man. I think I could turn the movie into something more intellectually honest with about half an hour of editing, but I don't mind intellectual dishonesty when it's so obvious. The obviousness is a form of candor, albeit inadvertent. The main question in the movie is why are there so many gun deaths in the US, and there aren't any really good answers. One common answer is that the US has a lot of guns, but Moore points out that Canada actually has more guns per capita than the US, and a very large hunting culture. Another common answer is that the US is ethnically diverse, which is code for "it's the blacks and the hispanics" but Moore points out that Canada is about 13-15% nonwhite, too. Canada has higher unemployment, although as Moore tells it, Canada doesn't really have any indigent people. I don't know about that -- maybe the US has more crazy people living in parks, maybe Canada locks up its crazy people -- certainly Moore doesn't spend a lot of time on this. Canada does have public health care, which got a big round of applause from the audience (we saw it in Arlington, which is a lot further left than Fairfax), but even Moore doesn't suggest that our high gun death rate is due to lack of universal health care. No, he seems to say it's because we are afraid. We kill each other with guns because we are afraid of each other. There is a very intellectually dishonest little cartoon in the middle about the foundation of the US which seems to have been done by the people who do South Park. The thing I found most interesting about the movie was the fact that the people who do South Park (which I find loathsome and never watch) graduated from Columbine High School. The segment I found most interesting was an interview with Marilyn Manson, who seemed very intelligent and perceptive. The concept I found most interesting was the difference between Canadians and Americans. Apparently there are a lot of differences. I am not surprised that there are a lot of differences between Americans and Mexicans, but I do find the differences between Americans and Canadians surprising.