Technically speaking, I suppose my childhood and early adulthood took place during the cold war. In my mind, the term propaganda conjured forth images of posters with mostly primary colors, usually depicting some type of equipment, airplanes and ploughs and such. Believing these posters were somehow related to an ongoing war, and that they were also somehow connected to the term propaganda, words like “Soviet” and “republic” scared me a bit. They had bombs, I’d been told, and they did not like us. In Hong Kong, the flashiest gay bar – as of early 2006 anyhow – was called Propaganda. As is the case with most of the gay bars in that city, it was hard to find and shadowy with a vaguely illegal vibe about it. Last night I watched Capitalism: A Love Story. Michael Moore annoys me: he’s a little too quick with explanations that strike me as a little too simple. But when I was watching the movie last night, it occurred to me that in order for me to be annoyed by someone, a certain portion of my mind has to also be intrigued. After watching the movie, I do still wonder why Larry Summers has a job in the Obama administration (he played a key role in deregulating the financial industry during the Clinton years, then made a nice profit as a consultant advising the companies he’d helped deregulate). I do wonder why we don’t hear more from the U.S. representative who stood before her chamber and suggested people who’d been foreclosed upon simply demand to see the paperwork before surrendering their homes (her name is Kaptor, and she’s from Ohio). And I wonder why Elizabeth Warren doesn’t get more air time. She’s the Harvard professor overseeing some of the money maneuvers, and she said on camera that she’s asked the former treasury secretary, many times, why he didn’t put some conditions on the bank bailout.
But what really stood out about the movie, to me, was the explanation of the term propaganda. The guy talking about it was handsome in an odd sort of way, big white hair, big white beard, sort of mischievous in a way not normally pulled off successfully by men older than me. Propaganda, he explained, is the art and science of convincing people to believe and act against their own interests, and it’s at the heart and soul of capitalism. I thought it was a great definition, succinct and easily applicable. What surprised me, initially anyhow, is that the guy Michael Moore was interviewing was a Catholic priest.
