When celebrities entertain a political opinion, turn and run

There is probably a dumber community in America, but nobody is as hell-bent on proving it in public as Hollywood. The series of brainless rants around Oscar time two weeks ago was the climax of months of escalating public idiocy by people who confuse celebrity with wisdom.

When celebrities entertain a political opinion, turn and run

Glenn Garvin
Knight Ridder Newspapers

Thursday, April 03, 2003

For nine seasons, I've laughed and cried every week watching Jennifer Aniston's character on Friends grow from a spoiled Long Island princess who couldn't brew coffee into a confident, competent career woman.

I cheered last year when she finally won her long-overdue Emmy. But if I could ever get just one moment alone with Aniston, I'd lean over and whisper in her ear: "Shut up. Don't say another word about George W. Bush and Iraq. Just shut up."

Ditto for superstar Barbra Streisand and the gifted actor Martin Sheen, who cannot distinguish between playing a president on TV and actually being one.

The Dixie Chicks, Janeane Garofalo, Ben Affleck, Madonna, Cher, Robert Altman, Richard Gere, Michael Moore: I beseech you all: JUST SHUT UP. You make good movies and records. But you make lame-brained political spokesmen.

The Wall Street Journal once snidely but accurately remarked that if ignorance paid dividends, most Americans could make millions with what they don't know about economics. The Hollywood corollary is that if ignorance about politics guaranteed box office success, every movie would be Titanic.

There is probably a dumber community in America, but nobody is as hell-bent on proving it in public as Hollywood. The series of brainless rants around Oscar time two weeks ago was the climax of months of escalating public idiocy by people who confuse celebrity with wisdom.

"There's a fathomless vanity in Hollywood," observes Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, a former screenwriter and author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced The American Film Industry In The 1930s and 1940s.

"It's not enough to have a lot of money and be famous. You have to be on the evening news talking about Iraq, too."

My problem with Hollywood's political blather is not that I disagree with most of it, though I do. It's that Hollywood's grasp of issues is centred not in its intellect but in its fashion sense. Like a Wonder Bra, they enhance the image and disguise the fact that there's really nothing upstairs.

Purported comedienne Janeane Garofalo let the cat out of the Gucci bag recently on Fox News when she was asked why the same celebrities who denounce Bush for invading Iraq didn't say a word when Bill Clinton bombed Baghdad in 1998. "It wasn't very hip," she replied.

That's why Hollywood is so monolithically left-wing: because it's the fashion.

You might expect that among people so wealthy, there would be a higher percentage who embrace the tax-cutting wing of the Republican Party. You might think that people whose entire lives are built on freedom of expression would be hesitant to get all soft and cuddly over dictatorships such as in Cuba and Iraq.

But you'd be wrong, because in Hollywood, lines are read for dramatic effect rather than actual content. Occasionally, a politically minded actor can talk thoughtfully about the issues -- liberal Richard Dreyfuss is one example, conservative James Woods is another. But most showbiz people have little or no understanding of the concepts they routinely invoke -- for instance, freedom of speech.

Acting couple Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon yammer on that subject all the time. But last week when Roberts met Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, who'd reported -- accurately so -- that Sarandon's mother is a conservative Republican who admires Bush, Roberts threatened him: "If you ever write about my family again, I will (expletive) find you and I will (expletive) hurt you."

That was no oddball exception to the rule. Freedom of speech is a one-way affair in Hollywood. When Hollywood calls on people not to buy products advertised on MSNBC's right-wing talk show Savage Nation, that's a "consumer boycott." When a petition appeared on the Internet a few weeks ago urging moviegoers not to go to movies starring actors who don't support the war in Iraq, that was a "McCarthyite blacklist." If you can't tell the difference ... well, kid, you've got no future in pictures.

That particular site (www.ipetitions.com) is not the only bit of evidence that I'm not alone in wishing Hollywood would just shut up.

The Oscars got the lowest TV ratings in 30 years, undoubtedly because the audience anticipated a lot of know-nothing ranting about the war and decided to avoid it.

Here are a few reasons why Hollywood should JUST SHUT UP:

- The pot calling the kettle stupid. In Hollywood, no attack on Bush's policies is complete without an insulting reference to his intellect. Cher on Bush: "He's stupid." Martin Sheen on Bush: "A moron, if you'll pardon the expression." Bush has degrees from Harvard and Yale; Cher, on the other hand, made it all the way through the eighth grade, and Sheen flunked an entrance exam at the august University of Dayton.

Then there's Barbra Streisand, who in an unsolicited memo to Richard Gephardt (then Democratic leader in Congress) spelled his name "Gebhardt," then issued a press release saying Saddam Hussein was the leader of Iran.

- Stay away from big words and hard math. Actor Richard Gere says the war in Iraq proves the failure of American democracy: "Why is it when we have 10 million people who say 'no' we still have a president who says 'yes'? In a democracy something's wrong here." Actually, Richard, the population of the United States is 290 million, so your side is a little bit behind. Get your agent to do the math for you.

Consider also Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, who in accepting an Oscar two weeks ago equated opposition to the Iraq war with "respect of human rights." There are a number of reasons intelligent people might oppose the war in Iraq -- its cost, doubt that Bush proved his claim that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, fear of post-war instability in the Middle East -- but "human rights"? Deposing a dictator who feeds political opponents into plastic shredders and locks their wives in so-called rape rooms is disrespectful of human rights?

- You were there HOW long? Sean Penn, in the most infamous overseas trip since a smiling Jane Fonda posed on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, went to Iraq for three whole days in December and at the end of his trip "confirmed that Iraq is completely clear of weapons of mass destruction," according to the Iraqi News Service. Cracked the New York Post: "After Shanghai Surprise, Penn certainly knows what a bomb looks like."

- Nonviolent is as nonviolent does. Though Penn doesn't think the United States has the right to take any action against Iraq over nuclear weapons or germ warfare, he's not some silly pacifist -- he understands there are times when violence is necessary. Like, for instance, if somebody points a camera at you. He's beaten up so many photographers that he eventually went to jail for it.

I don't know if he's ever met Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders, but I bet they'd hit it off. At a recent concert in San Francisco, she screamed: "We (expletive) deserve to get bombed. Bring it on ... Bring it on, I hope the Muslims win!" When someone in the crowd yelled his disagreement, she invited him up on stage -- so she and the band could beat him up.

Mostly I wish Hynde would shut up. But I'll admit it's kind of fun to imagine Saddam Hussein winning the war and taking over the United States. Then the rest of us could organize a pool on how long it would take him to cut her tongue out.

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