Liberal Lunatic of the Day (4/24/2005) Cameron Diaz

Cameron Diaz is featured in a new MTV series that has Hollywood celebrities praising the developing world's primitive lifestyles as earth-friendly, despite those poor nations' high infant mortality rates and short life expectancies. The eco-tourism show, called "Trippin'," premiered on March 28 and was heavily promoted in the runup to Earth Day. The show encourages environmental awareness and lauds traditional tribal lifestyles, which lack running water, electricity and other basic infrastructure.

Diaz and a rotating crew of "her close, personal friends [who] think globally and act globally," tour developing nations, including Nepal, Bhutan, Tanzania, Honduras and visit remote villages in Chile.

The 32-year-old Diaz boasted that the cow-dung slathered walls of a Nepalese village hut were "beautiful and inspiring" and she called the primitive practice of "pounding mud" with sticks to construct a building foundation, "the coolest thing. Nothing goes to waste," she said. "It is incredible to see how in tune these people are with the environment. They are completely self-sufficient."

Bhutan was praised by Diaz because she claimed the residents voluntarily rejected electricity in order to save the endangered black neck crane. "These people have decided that keeping the cranes in their valley is more important than having the convenience of electricity. My favorite thing about Bhutan is they measure their country's wealth, not based on dollar amount but on gross national happiness," said Diaz who earns a reported $20 million a movie.

Diaz also criticized the lifestyles of many Americans after visiting an indigenous village in Chile. "It's kinda gotten out of hand, how much convenience we think we need," she said. The Hollywood celebrities expressed concern about a proposed highway in the Chilean forest and a proposed aluminum smelter. These projects were criticized because of their perceived negative environmental and societal impact.

Diaz offered an alternative to the aluminum factory. "Each of us can make a difference. If everyone recycled the aluminum cans they used, there would be no need for new smelters." So stop being a f---ng (bleeped by MTV) pig and recycle your aluminum cans," she added with a laugh. Diaz also explained her opposition to the proposed highway. "They are going to replace something that is truly unique with something that is everywhere."

One of the celebrity guests, Drew Barrymore, apparently enthralled by the lack of a modern sanitary facilities, gleefully bragged, "I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome."

Wow! Is the word "airhead" appropriate here? I can't think of another.

Despite the celebrities' praise for the primitive life, "Trippin'" shows them flying on multiple airplanes and chartering at least two helicopters and one boat to reach remote locations over the course of the first four episodes. The series also showed the celebrities being chauffeured to the airport in a full-size Chevy SUV, despite several on-screen, anti-SUV factoids noting how environmentally unfriendly SUVs are.

Paul Dreissen, author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power/Black Death observes, "There's something perverse and immoral when multi-millionaire Hollywood celebrities head off on junkets in the jungle - and then preach to us lesser mortals about the joys of the simple life, and how we should protect the Earth, conserve energy, prevent global warming, and help the poorest people on our planet continue 'enjoying' their poverty, malnutrition and premature death. Life in these developing countries is still nasty, brutish and short. There is a reason our parents and grandparents worked so hard to create modern homes and hospitals and technologies, so they could leave behind the unsafe water, dung fires, pollution, rotted teeth, infant mortality and life expectancies half or ours."

Reading about the slinky blonde Diaz's romantic view of recycling as a panacea for a poisoned earth reminds me of a former guilty pleasure: my dalliances (via video) with another slinky blonde.

Here in San Francisco, there is a long-running cable access TV show called Queen Bee TV that I never missed once I stumbled upon it about two years ago. It features an attractive long-legged mid-to-late twenties woman (think Goldie Hawn in Duchess and Dirtwater Fox or Lorna Patterson from Airplane) who wears a crown and a form-fitting bumblebee costume with a plunging neckline and fishnet stockings. The format of the program is pretty simple: she sets up her video camera, sits on her bed surrounded by her extensive doll collection (Barbies, baby dolls, stuffed animals, etc), stares into the lens, and ruminates about what's been going on in her life and in the news. Sometimes she does what is called "Bathtub Theater," in which she performs what amounts to topically-based puppet shows in her bathtub using her dolls and her cat. I am not making this up.

She never reveals her name, but apparently is (or was) a part-time college student, and while she admits her ditziness, she isn't unintelligent. I was hooked on her when she countered, point by point, a viewer who wrote her a nasty e-mail regarding a statement she made about a welfare queen that was in the news ( I forget the details). Amid the stereotypical blondeness, there was a bit of common sense rattling around in her cranium!

Not having a blue-eyed blonde of my own to look at my life, I would tape the show weekly, treating her twenty-eight minute long chat sessions as one might a blind dinner date with a girl who's fun to be around and really cute, but not your type intellectually. You'll have dinner and part as friends, but you'd never dream of spending the rest of your life with her.

Anyway, the reason why I was reminded of her is because she is another recycling zealot. Another occasional feature of her show is Recycling Faux Pas, in which "Queen Bee goes down to the trash area in her apartment building and rifles through the regular trash looking for recyclable items that could have conveniently been deposited in the nearby recycleable receptacles. See seeks to show how some of her fellow tenants have made mistakes in their attempts at proper waste disposal." One time, with a smile on her face, she talked about one particular tenant who foolishly left his discarded phone bills in his unrecycled plastics. She stared in the camera joking about killing him in his sleep now that she knew his identity. The page linked above includes a dead link to a St. Cloud (Minnesota) State University about "[learning] to live like Native Americans."

If I was able to endure all this nonsense just to dig her hotness, what turned me off to her? When she, opening her show, said something about how she got an abortion so she wouldn't have to stop taking her antidepressants. After rewinding the tape to see if that's what she actually said, I stopped watching, and haven't been tempted since.

That's what swallowing leftist dogma whole does to you: It makes you feel good about saving "the environment" while discounting the life of human beings.

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