Thursday, July 26, 2007

Made a quick stop in Iowa City for a night last weekend. I have to say it was the most refreshing trip out of Chicago I think I’ve made thus far. Could’ve had a lot to do with the lovely weather (it was about 78 degrees last weekend), and Iowa being a much more lush and bright state in July than it is in April, when I was there last.

The minute we crossed the border from Illinois, Nick, who was driving, got to going about how much he loved Iowa.

“You can literally tell the difference between Iowa and Illinois crossing the river,” he said. “It’s so much more beautiful over here. Everything’s alive. The hills are rolling. It’s just … more comfortable. I miss it.”

I agreed with him. I missed my home state on this day. It all looked … like home. I felt like I belonged. I wanted to pull the car over and just lie on my back in the grass and look at the big sky.

Of course, I pointed it out to Nick that we held the state with such reverence because we were no longer living there. It’s easy, especially in the summer, and when you currently reside in a bustling city, to look back at the small place your spent your simple college days and long for them. The truth is, we were both absolutely ready to leave Iowa City when we did. I didn’t want to spend another month there back in the summer of 2001. We looked back on it with romanticism, but if we were still back in Iowa City we’d be bitching about how we’d rather be living in Chicago.

The grass is always greener.

He agreed. Neither of us wanted to be spending our weekends hopping from Jake’s, The Brothers and Joe’s in our late twenties anymore. Chicago was home, and deep down we knew this.

But once we got there, there were moments that you truly missed the simple life. I’d walk by houses with a heavily wooded yard that stretched acres, and quiet streets where the only noise is the lady across the street tending to the garden, where children played freely in the streets. It was all so peaceful. I was envious.

But I also had to take into account that the tranquility of Iowa City was part of the reason I had to leave the place. It’s just too easy to live there. There’s no struggle. No sense of reality. Iowa City is the closest thing to a utopia I’ve ever lived in, and I started to resent that over the years. Nothing bad ever happens there. The town is progressive and tolerant. Almost everybody’s got a college education. There’s little poverty (mostly just the students), and even less crime. And it’s almost exclusively white.

Obviously, this isn’t reality. As much as I love Iowa City, I feel much more inspired in Chicago. In Chicago you see real life everyday. You see minorities. You see poor people. Every day you come across a scene where you come to the realization of how imperfect a place the world is. The closest thing to an unsettling moment you get in Iowa City is a downtown fight between two meathead frat boys.

On some levels I understand why it’s such a great writer town, but in other respects I don’t. Sure, the rent is cheap, you don’t need a car, and there’s a great talent pool to associate yourself with. But there’s never any sort of struggle. It’s such a simple life. How could it ever be inspiring? It seems the only thing you’d be capable of writing in Iowa City is how beautiful the world is.

But maybe that’s just me.

I stayed with my buddy Tieg, who’s carved out a nice life for himself in the ten years he’s lived there. He took me to a dinner party with some friends of his in the historic part of town. It was a little different talking with Iowa City people as opposed to Chicago people. Everything was more laid-back. The children were playing carefree in the yard. The neighborhood was dead still. People were just relaxing. No worries. No time constraints. It was like the scene from a Norman Rockwell painting.

My life in the big city has sort of conditioned me to look at this lifestyle as overly simplistic. Or to think that what I was doing with my life had more depth and importance than what these people were doing, just because I lived in a metropolitan area. But as I sat on the porch of that crickety old home (that likely cost a fraction of what one just like it would cost in Chicago) I felt a little ping of yearning for that way of life again.

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Sorry, this went a bit long

Went to see the new Michael Moore movie last night, and I must say it was better than I thought it was going to be. He’d taken such a beating from conservatives and the media after Fahrenheit 9/11 that I wondered if he’d come back with something that was as vengeful and pointed towards the Bush Administration. Of if he’d tell a story that focused more on the issue and the little people it effects than the big people that screwed it up (usually in his mind, Bush et al). I hoped for the latter and received it, for the most part.

Sicko starts by putting its focus solely on the people; the poor Americans who either can’t afford their healthcare or have been denied it because “pre-existing conditions” by the big, often times too-concerned-with-profit health care providers. We hear from a guy who saws off parts of his fingers and had to choose between spending $12,000 to get one replaced, or $60,000 to get both replaced (he chooses the one for $12K). We also see an elderly couple (in their 60s, not quite geriatrics ward elderly) forced to moved into their daughter’s basement because health bills after ten years of heart attacks (three from him) and cancer (once for her) forced them to sell their homes. They’d both had solid jobs, with health care, but after all the deductibles accrued, things go so expensive they had to sell their house.

I feel slightly obligated to put in my personal health care situation for a little perspective that it might have been nice to be mentioned in the film (to my recollection, Moore never once mentions the independent HC plans that exist today). As a technically independent employee, I don’t get work provided HC, but I do have a PPO plan with a relatively affordable premium ($75 a month), yet with an annual deductible of around $3,000. If I were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, be rushed off to the ER and had rounds of surgeries, theoretically, everything after $3K and up to $5 million is covered. Which, obviously, could be a good deal. Paying just $3K a year medical for an accident as opposed to hundreds of thousands is obviously better. Still, though, that $3K year in deductibles I’d have to pay would put me in a tough spot.

What I’m trying to illustrate here is that health care is possible to get in this country. The popular trend these days is getting a PPO (preferred provider plan) coupled with a health savings account, which is basically an un-taxable savings account that can be used to saving money strictly for health care bills. The goal of an HSA is to save up now for health care deductibles you might need to cover down the road.

If you’re like me: a young, single, non-smoking male with no previous illness or disease and has no children, you can get some relatively affordable coverage for something catastrophic. Which is something anybody with a decent paying job that doesn’t offer a plan should probably get in the current state of American health care. If something tragic were to happen without it, you could possibly be forced into an insurmountable debt. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t eventually have universal health care in this country, but I am saying that under the current circumstances, there are plans than can prevent truly massive expenses.

The problem, of course, is that people like myself are like the 99th percentile. Anybody with prior health issues or a family, having a plan like this wouldn’t necessarily be a walk in the park. This is where Moore steps in.

The film is fairly consistent with his previous docs; you get a lot of a one-sided, quickly edited scenes that don’t fully explain the complexities of the issue, and many times his perspective comes off as naïve. He spends too much time in the film asking simple/often humorous questions to people in countries that have universal health care (Canada, France, Cuba) than asking experts in the US why we don’t. I could go on and on about the specifics, but if you’ve watched a Moore movie, you get the picture; he points out the wrong way, shows us the supposed right way, but doesn’t do a great job of explaining why it isn’t so easy for the wrong to be right.

As typical with Moore films, is that he does a hell of a job finding sympathetic characters that can get to you. The people he uses appear to be truly screwed by the system. There were tear jerker moments in this movie.

The issue with relying so much on individual stories is that you wonder how much he’s relying on the anecdotal. Did he choose to follow these particular individuals because of their anomalous situations to make his point look more convincing? Where the dozen or so people he focuses on in the film really representative of the entire system, or where they just an unfortunate few that fell through the cracks? Was the table full or relatively affluent looking, mostly Caucasian table in France who gushed about how great their health care was really representative of the entire system? Are poor black people in France as happy about the system as they are? We don’t ever really know, and it would take a team of fact checkers weeks to find out.

The thing I admire about Moore, and the thing that keeps me watching his movies (other than the fact that I do think he knows how to craft a movie you can’t take your eyes off) is that I look at the bigger picture.

Let’s face it, if he were to have a pro and a con for every issue on health care, the film would have likely ran five hours long, been a total bore and probably not gotten anybody motivated to go home that night and do some research on health care in America. Unfortunately, nobody would have likely paid $10 to watch a CSPAN-style documentary, nor would such a film create such a stir with liberals and conservatives alike. Which is the quality function of Moore’s films: for better or for worse, they get people talking and thinking. I remember working with a bunch of high school kids at a JC Penney (I was embarrassingly 25 at the time) when Fahrenheit came out, and I remember how blindsided they were about the mere possibility that our government would maybe exaggerate some facts and invade a country that maybe they shouldn’t have invaded. Maybe some of Moore’s observations were overly simplistic, and maybe he proposes links that he can’t exactly prove, he at least got the mainstream thinking and discussing things they probably wouldn’t otherwise have.

Moore often gets categorized as someone who hates America, which I think is false.

Quick tangent here. The one one thing that annoys me most with the whole liberal/conservative argument is that whenever a liberal, or anybody for that matter, forces discontent with its country, conservatives will reply: “Well, If you don’t like it, then leave.” Which is about as anti-American, narrow-minded a thing there is to say to such sentiment. And I always find it funny when I think of how easily it can be turned against them. For example, how funny would it be for someone to walk up to a group protesting outside an abortion clinic and tell them if they don’t like legalized abortions, then they should move to Peru or Chile (where most abortions or illegal.)

Yeah, it goes both ways. Voicing discontent with your government’s policies is a right that both sides of the fence have. For some reason this never gets brought up. Conservatives bitch as much about America as liberals do.

Moore doesn’t hate America. The fact he keeps making these films centered on America seems to obviously prove the contrary. Why would he put so much time and effort into making films that exposes things he thinks his country does wrong? Moore could very easily afford to live somewhere else, but I don’t think he wants to. I think, deep down, he loves America, he just wished it treated its people better.

Which brings me to the aspect of each Moore film that has left me unsettled, and dissatisfied with America, is that at the end of every one of his movies, you’re left with the thought that this country doesn’t act with as much benevolence and kindness as it should. That’s where it hurts.

Why do sick 9/11 heroes have to depend on Moore to take them to Cuba to get health care they’ve been trying to get in the states? Sure, Moore had to exaggerate the quality of life in Cuba (Castro wouldn’t even have let this film be made there), but why did it even have to come that close? Why weren’t these people promptly taken care of in the states? In a country that prides itself on its freedoms, its altruism, its down-right wholesome goodness, people shouldn’t have to depend on a documentary filmmaker to help them out.

Every time I leave the theater after watching one of this guy’s movies, I feel compelled to do something really nice to a complete stranger. Sure enough, just a couple blocks after leaving the theater I happened upon a family in from out of town that was lost and looking for their way to the Blue Line and back to O’Hare.

“I’m heading right there, just follow me,” I said with a smile and guided them the four blocks down Lake to the stop.

“Thank you, sir,” said the father, who was surely feeling a tad embarrassed by the fact he’d gotten completely lost with his family in tow.

“No problem,” I replied as I walked through the turnstiles. “Safe trip.”

As I walked down the stairs to the train feeling like I’d done a good American deed I wondered to myself, “Where’s a Michael Moore film crew when you need one?”