Roger Ebert and his wife Chaz, 2001
Posted on 07/16/2004 9:21:03 AM PDT by RightWingAtheist
was at a health ranch last week, where the idea is to clear your mind for serene thoughts. At dinner one night, a woman at the table referred to Arizona as a "right to work state." Unwisely, I replied: "Yeah -- the right to work cheap." She said, "I think you'll find the non-union workers are quite well paid." Exercising a supreme effort of will to avoid pronouncing the syllables "Wal-Mart," I replied: "If so, that's because unions have helped raise salaries for everybody." She replied: "The unions steal their members' dues." I replied, "How much money would you guess the unions have stolen, compared to corporations like Enron?" At this point our exchange was punctuated by a kick under the table from my wife, and we went back to positive thinking.
"The Corporation" is not a film my dinner companion would enjoy. It begins with the unsettling information that, under the law, a corporation is not a thing but a person. The U.S. Supreme Court so ruled, in a decision based, bizarrely, on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. That was the one that guaranteed former slaves equal rights. The court ruling meant corporations were given the rights of individuals in our society. They are free at last.
If Monsanto and WorldCom and Enron are indeed people, what kind of people are they? The movie asks Robert Hare, a consultant who helps the FBI profile its suspects. His diagnosis: Corporations by definition have a personality disorder and can be categorized as psychopathic. That is because they single-mindedly pursue their own wills and desires without any consideration for other people (or corporations) and without reference to conventional morality. They don't act that way to be evil; it's just, as the scorpion explained to the frog, that it's in their nature.
Having more or less avoided the corporate world by living in my little movie critic corner, I've been struck by the way classmates and friends identify with their corporations. They are loyal to an entity that exists only to perpetuate itself. Any job that requires you to wear a corporate lapel pin is taking more precious things from you than display space. Although I was greatly cheered to see Ken Lay in handcuffs, I can believe he thinks he's innocent. In corporate terms, he is: He was only doing his job in reflecting Enron's psychopathic nature.
The movie assembles a laundry list of corporate sins: Bovine Growth Hormone, Agent Orange, marketing research on how to inspire children to nag their parents to buy products. It is in the interest of corporations to sell products, and therefore in their interest to have those products certified as safe, desirable and good for us. No one who knows anything about the assembly-line production of chickens would eat a non-organic chicken. Cows, which are vegetarians, have been fed processed animal protein, leading to the charming possibility that they can pass along mad cow disease. Farm-raised salmon contains mercury. And so on.
If corporations are maximizing profits by feeding strangelovian chemicals to unsuspecting animals, what are we to make of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that living organisms can be patented? Yes, strains of laboratory mice, cultures of bacteria, even bits of DNA, can now be privately owned.
Fascinated as I am by the labyrinthine reasoning by which stem cell research somehow violates the Right to Life, I have been waiting for opponents of stem cell research to attack the private ownership and patenting of actual living organisms, but I wait in vain. If there is one thing more sacred than the Right to Life, it is the corporation's Right to Patent, Market and Exploit Life.
If I seem to have strayed from the abstract idea of a corporation, "The Corporation" does some straying itself. It produces saintly figures like Roy Anderson, CEO of Interface, the largest rug manufacturer in the world, who tells his fellow executives they are all "plundering" the globe and tries to move his corporation toward sustainable production. All living organisms on Earth are in decline, the documentary argues, mostly because corporations are stealing from the future to enrich themselves in the present.
"The Corporation" is an impassioned polemic, filled with information sure to break up any dinner-table conversation. Its fault is that of the dinner guest who tells you something fascinating, and then tells you again, and then a third time. At 145 minutes, it overstays its welcome. The wise documentarian should treat film stock as a non-renewable commodity.
Someone married Ebert? I wonder what his boyfriend thinks about that.
Yep. If I recall correctly it was one of the “actresses” that was involved in his failed film making (writing – whatever it was) career long ago.
It’s pretty funny – how someone can be involved with a movie that consists almost entirely of extremely top-heavy females – and make it *un-watchable,* is quite an accomplishment.
I saw a small portion of his movie review show on Sunday. Whatever his medical problem is, it’s getting worse. Either that or they’ve got him on medication or something that’s messing him up worse.
Regarding Ebert's question about how much money the unions have stolen compared to corporations like Enron, if you include in the definition of stealing the tens of millions of dollars every year they throw at politicians their members don't support, I'd say they're in the same ballpark. At least.
(BTW, has there been any studies done of a correlation between body mass and slavish devotion to one-sided documentaries? Just wondering.)
And when corporations steal, they (and their principals) can be prosecuted.
"And when corporations steal, they (and their principals) can be prosecuted"
True. Well, the unions CAN be prosecuted. They just aren't.
Brings to mind the teacher's unions in RI. Maybe elsewhere, too. Way back when, the teachers, by law, couldn't unionize. So a compromise was reached - they could form a union, but it would be illegal for them to strike. Illegal. Period.
Every three years, they go out on strike en masse - and the heavily Democrat state with it's almost exclusively Democrat judges sometimes - sometimes - pays lip service to the law (go figure!) and postures about contempt and even imposes daily fines. All of which are remitted after the strike is settled.
They actually go through this charade every three years. And seem to actually think nobody notices.
That's perhaps the most insulting part of all.
Instead of Agent Orange let's substitute DDT. Now millions are dying worldwide because GOVERNMENT abolished its use.
Hate corporations? buy stock
You haven't avoided the corporate world, bozo! You are a DIRCECT beneficiary of that world and of all the legal protections it enjoys. Your prosperity and fame WOULDN'T EXIST without the entreprenurial and technological advances bestowed upon you by corporations.
Is there anything more blockheaded than a leftist discussing economics? I don't think so. Ebert apparently doesn't know that the Sun-Times and every TV network he appears upon is a corporation.
And the Ubergeeks at Microsoft have patented the human body.
Nor all the movies he gives us his opinion on are made, financed and distributed by corprations.
I would bet that he was at Canyon Ranch, perhaps the priciest of these "health ranches." And he's claiming to speak for the working man. What a joke.
Oprah Winfrey learned that it is not wise to incite panic about the meat industry. Roger Ebert may be about to learn a similar lesson.
But in addition to that consider the pure ignorance of his economics. He just refuses to recogonize the essential role competition plays in keeping an economy dynamic, growing and prosperous. That's a typical leftist position, and Ebert is nothing if not a typical leftist, right down to the fact that as a kid he was undoubtedly holed up in his room by himself watching movies and daydreaming while other kids his age were learning about team effort and competitive spirit on the playground. Leftism is the pursuit of daydreamers.
Competition can be ugly, exasperating and painful, but it's also the core element of the human drive to improve not only ourselves but the whole world around us, too. Without it we'd still be living in grass huts on the African savannah eating berries and hiding from predators.
Ebert and his fellow daydreamers think we can simply discard this element of human nature without harm, that the values of the "union" (i.e., fear of and resistance to change, antagonism towards profit and investment, competition, feather-bedding, no-work biases, diminished productivity) can sustain the economy. Nevermind that every economy so constituted has failed miserably over the last one hundred years. Nevermind that our own fantastic prosperity over the past twenty-five years springs directly from Ronald Reagan's successful breaking of the unions. For simpleminded Ebert, unions are good and corporations are bad.
Ebert also has his facts wrong when he claims to "have been waiting for opponents of stem cell research to attack the private ownership and patenting of actual living organisms, but [he] waits in vain." There has been a great deal of discussion about this with many pro-life groups opposing such patents. Ebert makes this kind of error frequently when he writes on politics. He's a dilletante, dabbling in areas where he has no expertise but affecting great expertise just the same. He's an excellent example of the kind of misguided notions that populate the minds of those who live their lives in the world of make-believe.
A lot of people believe that Ebert married the actress who played "Junkyard Sal" in "Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens", which he pseudnomously wrote, but that isn't ture. Ebert is married to a lawyer named Chaz Hammersmith; June Mack, the actress who played Junkyard Sal, is deceased, and if I remember correctly, it was murder.
Roger Ebert and his wife Chaz, 2001
Nice beard.
Roger was at Rancho La Puerta, because he was rude to me also. But I gave him the irish eyeball and he shut up.
Very rude man. Nice wife.
I blogged about my encounter.
http://www.theirishlass.blogspot.com/2004_07_03_theirishlass_archive.html#108884194944287339
the irish lass
rancho la puerta.
http://www.theirishlass.blogspot.com/2004_07_03_theirishlass_archive.html#108884194944287339
the irish lass
Good job, and welcome to Free Republic. You got under Ebert's skin enough to make it into a column -- he's probably not used to anybody disagreeing with him!
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