Word: blunderbussing
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Since his debut in 1979's Roger and Me, documentary filmmaker/agitator Michael Moore has aimed his blunderbuss of a lens against large American corporations and the institutions that he believes have flat-out screwed the working class. In his latest film, Capitalism, Moore ridicules the business philosophy that has blown up the economy, resulted in 6 million job losses and required more than a $1 trillion in bailout money to keep the banks afloat - while millions of people have lost their homes to foreclosure. He's a man who has made perpetual outrage an art form in every sense...
...particular historical moment. Culturally speaking, every age has its signature crack-up illness. In the 1950s, an era of postwar trauma, nuclear fear and the self-medicating three-martini lunch, it was anxiety. (In 1956, 1 in 50 Americans was regularly taking mood-numbing tranquilizers like Miltown - a chemical blunderbuss compared with today's sleep aids and antianxiety meds.) During the '60s and '70s, an age of suspicion and Watergate, schizophrenics of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest sort captured the imagination - mental patients as paranoid heroes. Many mental institutions were emptied at the end of this period...
...them, each with different mechanisms that make the fight diabolically difficult. The most pernicious forms of cancer--among them, pancreatic, lung and brain--are still nearly invincible. Survival rates in rare forms of cancer aren't budging much, either. And the cancer arsenal is still heavy on the blunderbuss--blasting the body with harsh chemotherapy and radiation that take a huge toll on healthy as well as diseased tissue. Nor has the national health-care system done a great job of prevention and early detection. Worst of all, many people don't have access to care. Overall, the death rate...
...from the international financial community (banks in other countries did not want to jeopardize their U.S. business by trading with Banco Delta Asia), thus severely restricting the North Koreans' access to their accounts. Meting out similar treatment to Iran "is going after them with a stiletto rather than a blunderbuss," says one Western diplomat...
...what they are, but fine minds are working on trying to sort out what could get support." Still, Washington's allies know that it's tough to design economic restrictions that will hurt the regime without hurting the Iranian people and realize how effectively Iran's leaders could use blunderbuss penalties to unify the nation behind them...