Michael Moore hangs out with "real" Americans--White, high school (un)educated, work a day Americans. He explains why they love Donald Trump.
These are the losers in our capitalistic society, the masses of workers who do not own shops, do not invent things, but who more or less passively passed through the doors of factories where they were taught to assemble cars, computers, shoes, clothes and were paid a living wage to do it.
They often had little schemes and scams on the side to supplement their wages, and they had health insurance and even some of them had pensions. Actually, they never had any of this stuff--their parents who worked at GM and Ford and US Steel had these things, and the current masses remember dimly this Ozzie and Harriet life, which seemed, through the nostalgic lenses, a Great America.
Now Mr. Trump promises to bring those golden days back again--factories back to Flint and Dearborn and Pittsburg and Cleveland and Gary and Oakland and with those factories, jobs, jobs, jobs.
Of course, those factory jobs ain't never coming back. The factories may come back, but the workers will be a thousand robots and three dozens workers supervising the robots.
But never mind.
The fact is, the country under President Trump will be Christian again--no Muslims will get across our borders because radical Islamic terrorists want to chop off American heads and we don't have to stand for that.
And no more Obamacare--those 20 million newly insured will have health care savings accounts, which their first hospitalizations will drain dry.
And no more abortions, or gay marriages or transgenders using the locker rooms or Black guys getting away with shooting White police, and maybe, if Mr. Trump's fans are really lucky, we'll go back to the days when women stayed at home and took care of the kids, like June Cleaver or Edith Bunker.
We'll all be happy again, just the way we were in the 1950's, when nobody talked about sex, and Blacks could not eat at a lunch counter or stay in a White's only motel or vote, when abortions were done in motel rooms, when we started on the long road to endless war, beginning in Korea, and slogging through Vietnam and beyond, when most people lived in homes which to today's Americans would look like carpeted chicken coops and luxury was having a box TV, a clothes washer and dryer and maybe even central air conditioning, when cars got 12 miles to the gallon, but gas was only 29 cents a gallon, when most adults smoked and died of lung cancer or heart attacks by age 63, when there were only three TV channels and the interstate highway system hadn't been built yet, so most people shopped in their local towns and never got much beyond their home towns, except for those adventurous vacations to Florida or Maine, which took two weeks, and you packed a bag of sandwiches in the car because you couldn't afford to stop at Hot Shoppes. But mostly you camped out or went to the beach and that was Great American life.
All that Mr. Moore's people know is they feel like losers; they see the glitzy world soaring past them and they get no respect. I see the same thing in Haverhill, Methuen and Lawrence, Massachusetts and in Salem, Kingston and Stratum, New Hampshire.
There are people out there who just stew in their own juices, or as Anon has said, time and time again, "Can't fix stupid."
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