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“Where to Invade Next”

where-invade-next-mag-03-20

It’s easy to dislike Michael Moore. He’s rude, and he looks like a slob. But his documentaries fill an important need, because he tells us what we otherwise wouldn’t hear.

In this blog, I’ve often mentioned the Overton window. That’s the window of allowable discourse, the range of ideas that the mainstream media will talk about because it’s assumed to be the range of ideas that the public will accept.

For years, the Overton window has been pulled hard to the right. It was assumed that European-style socialism was something that the American people just didn’t want to talk about until Bernie Sanders proved otherwise. With “Where to Invade Next,” Michael Moore shows that Europe is not the decaying freedomless hell hole that the right-wing media say it is. The American people are deeply immersed in their delusion of American exceptionalism and rarely question the notion that we Americans are the best at everything, that the whole world envies us.

In “Where to Invade Next,” we are reminded that, in many ways, the civilized world feels sorry for us Americans. Even Tunisians feel sorry for us. Moore doesn’t whitewash Europe’s history or Europe’s problems. He sheds a lot of light, actually, on how Germans deal with the shame of their history and how even peaceful Norway has to grapple with right-wing terrorism and mass murder.

And you will definitely want to know what French schoolchildren have for lunch.

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