Anyway, we walked right past Morgan in the lobby as he was stirring creamer into his coffee and telling someone about the detox diet his wife put him on. I offered to take my kid back to meet him, but the offer was declined.
The movie’s kind of all over the map. Over consumption, people who spend their way into huge credit card debts, some lady who has hundreds of outfits for her dog (one of the ugliest rat-like dogs you have ever seen), the evils of Wal-Mart and sweatshops. Most of it focused on the Reverend Billy, the alter ego of an activist and actor from New York. He casts demons out of credit cards and leads a red-robed choir in rewritten carols. He reminds people that Christmas isn't about giving heaps of stuff. But if Billy's a Christian, it's not obvious, so it didn't seem Christmas was about much of anything, except maybe buy less, and what you do buy should be made in America and purchased from a small shop.
The one thing the kid has taken away is about sweatshops, clothes made in Bangladesh by 13 year olds who work 19-hour days and fall asleep with their faces resting on their sewing machines. One worker who tried to start a union in Sri Lanka got his kneecaps broken.
What was kind of scary were all the people in the movie who had no trouble answering “What would Jesus buy?” X-box, Play Station, or a Wii seemed to be the universal answer.
There were only a couple of hundred people in the theatre, but last night we saw the movie, Mogan and Reverend Billy featured on both the local and the national news.
