Weighing on me

A pervasive sadness has lain on me lately. The 2009 Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove, which describes the annual killing of dolphins in a national park in Japan, went back to the library yesterday unwatched. I told the librarian, "I just didn't have the courage to watch it."
    As I waited in line at Costco's optical shop on Friday, I had, on several huge HDTV screens, watched the complaisant exultation of two overfed fishermen who had just landed a huge fish on their boat and were displaying it for the videographer.
    For several days, I've been listening to Timothy B. Tyson's 2004 account of the racially motivated 1970 murder of Henry Marrow, a black man, in Oxford, North Carolina, Blood Done Sign My Name. Forty years later, we still haven't seen the last of white supremacy in this country, and we may be as unlikely ever to see it as we are to see the last of the human presumption that dolphins and fishes and other creatures have less right to live than we do.
    I don't know why the weight of this racial immorality should be lying so heavily on me precisely now, but its balance could have been tilted on Saturday night by my watching Michael Moore's 2009 expose, Capitalism: A Love Story. I think that its incontrovertible thesis that Jesus would not have approved of capitalism thrust a sword into my breast for having theretofore had little reaction to the causes of the financial crisis of 2007–2010. I suspect, that is, that I'm suffering remorse for my own apathy, as well as despair that the weak and powerless of the earth will continue to come in last.

Michael Moore's funniest movie to date, not

It may be too late for a Must See (MS) recommendation for a 2007 documentary, but if you still don't know (but care) what are some of the salient issues in the "health care debate," then Michael Moore's "Sicko" is a film you must see.
    However, I don't get the blurbs on the Special Edition DVD. "You'll laugh till it hurts"? (Peter Travers) "Michael Moore's funniest movie to date"? (A.O. Scott)
    Not. Not.
    No, I agree with D. Maass, who wrote on November 6, 2007:

"Sicko" is about shame. The shame we should all feel as a country for allowing a health care system where profit's made by not providing care. The shame we should all feel for not standing up to it, for shrugging off the tremendous influence insurance and pharmaceutical industry lobbyists swing and wield with our elected officials. The shame we should all feel for not caring for every human being within our borders. And perhaps, the most American shame of all: the shame of falling far behind the rest of the Western world.

Knowing the film's main conclusions from other sources, except for some of its squeamy details (like the man who sawed off two of his fingers and had to choose which finger he could afford to have reattached), I found the documentary a challenge to watch. Funny it's not, except possibly some of the shenanigans gotten up to by the liars who have been bought off by insurance or pharmaceutical companies. But these portrayals incite more to anger than to laughter.

I said some of the salient issues. One Moore overlooks is the question of America's being "overtreated," to borrow a phrase from the subtitle of Nortin M. Hadler, M.D.'s indispensable book, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (2008, University of North Carolina Press).
    If you have to choose between a Must See movie and a Must Read book, read Worried Sick. You'll learn infinitely more to your own personal advantage. And it's an enjoyable read, Hadler's right there with you, mind to mind.