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Michael Moore was on Democracy Now! today for the full hour. You can watch/listen or read the whole transcript here. But I just want to excerpt the very end of what he had to say, in part because it continues the spirit I wanted to evoke this Independence Day.
In particular, what he suggests--which I think is really true--is that if we just had the courage, as Americans, to act on what we really already are and believe, rather than acting out of fear, as conservatives always want us to, then we really would be every bit as great as we like to pretend we are, even while not-so-secretly knowing that we're not.
AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, Michael, the war-the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is your solution that you think should happen now?
MICHAEL MOORE: Well, it was-I think it was-was it last week or a couple weeks ago? We just-the Afghanistan war surpassed Vietnam as our longest war. I think we should start referring to it as what it is: it's Obama's war. Just as Johnson's war became Nixon's war, this is his war. I don't know why he'd want a war. This is a completely unwinnable-I don't even want to use that word, because what are we trying to win? I mean, it's so absolutely crazy....
I just--I think that there's so much good that we could do. You know, if you travel the world, you know that people like us as people, as individuals. There's something charming about our naïveté and our, you know, right? I mean, you know, "Hey! Hey! How ya doin'! Hey, yeah! I'm from Detroit! Yeah!" They could spot us coming. But I think we're capable of a lot of good. And when you have a billion people on this planet that tonight cannot drink a cup of clean water, two billion who don't have clean sanitation, what if we used our money to do that? I read this crazy statistic-and I have not fact-checked this, I'll just throw this out there-but it was something like, for $15 billion or something like that, we could dig so many-x number of wells in the third world that would greatly reduce that number of how many people don't have clean water. And I'm thinking, $15 billion is what we've been spending almost most every month on Iraq and Afghanistan. So, one month of the killing machine could give clean water to virtually all the people that don't have it? Wouldn't you rather be known as, you know, a citizen of a country that a child 10,000 miles away, while growing up, drinking clean water, saw that plaque on that well that said, "Brought to you from your friends in the United States of America"? That's how I'd like to be known.
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