Is there an issue that some Hollywood star -- director, producer, actor, actress -- has not publicly commented on? It's hard to name one. Posted on 10/02/2002 3:51:46 AM PDT by SJackson
Is there an issue that some Hollywood star -- director, producer, actor, actress -- has not publicly commented on? It's hard to name one.
Producer, director Rob Reiner has devoted years to imposing onerous taxes on poor people who smoke and to putting perhaps half of California's cigar and pipe stores out of business. Barbra Streisand has devoted yeoman efforts to promoting leftist causes (sometimes with malice, as in her recent letter to House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt in which she writes that " . . . industries, run by big Republican donors and insiders, clearly have much to gain if we go to war against Iraq"). Ed Asner has devoted much of his life to defending leftist tyrannies.
Almost everyone in Hollywood has signed on to anything promoting gun control, higher taxes, saving whales and undoing global warming, while various actresses have posed nude to protest the wearing of fur. The list of stars and causes is almost endless.
There is one issue, however, about which one hears nothing from Hollywood: the terror against Israeli citizens. Far more has been said by Hollywood against potential threats to endangered insect or bird species than against actual attempts to render Israeli Jews an endangered species.
As one Hollywood insider, screenwriter Dan Gordon ("The Hurricane," "Murder in the First"), told the Los Angeles Times: "There's been a puzzling silence. We're in an industry that takes stands on everything. People can't shut us up! I'd love to see the indignation about homicide bombers that is reserved for smokers. You smoke in this town, and you're dead. Rob Reiner will come after you."
Let it be said loudly and clearly that this silence will be a long-lasting stain on Hollywood's moral record. The Palestinian/Islamic/Arab war to destroy Israel is the moral test of our time. If you are silent on this issue, you are either morally confused, immoral or lack courage.
In the case of Hollywood's silence, the first and third are the more likely reasons.
First, the confusion. In an article on the silence of the Jews in Hollywood, the Los Angeles Times quotes writer-director Michael Tolkin, author of "The Player" and "Changing Lanes": "Liberals are on the side of the underdog. The people who've had their cities turned into rubble look like the underdog."
This is a very revealing statement. Many of us have long argued that leftists do not ask, "Who is right and who is wrong?" but rather, "Who is strong and who is weak?" in determining their positions on world and national issues. The substitution of power criteria for moral criteria is one of the reasons the left so often takes immoral positions. It is, therefore, helpful to hear such a candid acknowledgment of Hollywood liberals' moral confusion. Not to mention ignorance -- no Palestinian city has been "turned into rubble."
The other reason for Hollywood's silence on the moral litmus test of our time is lack of courage. Absence of moral courage is in no way distinctive to Hollywood; indeed, it is the rarest of humanity's good traits. But one suspects that many in Hollywood pride themselves on having moral courage, so it is important to set the record straight.
It is sadly illuminating that it takes courage for a Hollywood insider to publicly support Israel. The Jewish state is, after all, one of the most enlightened and liberal democracies in the world, and it is fighting against one of the most morally backward cultures in the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Umm, there is no Hollywood moral record, Hollywood is one big stain. V's wife.
I understand the historic association with civil liberties and the Dem's, but things have somewhat switched around in recent years. And the Pub's are clearly better friends to Israel.
Hollyweird has a moral record?
-Kinky Friedman
This is a very revealing statement. Many of us have long argued that leftists do not ask, "Who is right and who is wrong?" but rather, "Who is strong and who is weak?" in determining their positions on world and national issues. The substitution of power criteria for moral criteria is one of the reasons the left so often takes immoral positions. It is, therefore, helpful to hear such a candid acknowledgment of Hollywood liberals' moral confusion. Not to mention ignorance -- no Palestinian city has been "turned into rubble."
The tendentiousness of the Politically Correct movement is most stark in the case of journalism, which hypes itself as "objective" but actually makes its living delivering entertainment to audiences--and, thereby, audiences to advertisers. But that begs the general question, "Why does entertainment default to anticonservative values?" This seems to provide an answer.Rooting for the underdog on Monday Night Football is "passion without consequence." But in a political context, rooting for the underdog is rooting against the powers-that-be, against tradition and those who prosper under that tradition.
The irony of rooting against American tradition is that our tradition is to give the individual a chance to try new ways of doing things. Conservatives look at an individual who prospers because of the leadership he assumes by dint of his own efforts and see the little guy as compared to the government. PC thinking, OTOH, looks at that same prosperous leader and sees only a fat cat as compared to the poor.
The truth is that in America "the poor" is to a remarkable degree a phantasm, an aprocraphal construct. The so-called "poorest quintile" of the American economy is neither a quintile (only about 15% rather than 20% of the population) nor a static group of people without much money. Although it includes truly poor people it is loaded with young, upwardly mobile people.
The "richest quintile" does include rich people, and its aggregate income is large. But that is partly because it is not a quintile but a full quartile (25%), not 20% and certainly no merely 15%, of American incomes. And even the 80th-percentile (say nothing of the 75th-percentile) income is scarcely rich by American standards. Top-quartile Americans know all too well that it is no trick at all to descend to lower quintiles--which may explain why they work twice as many hours in a year as is typical of the lowest "quintile."
PC is all about emotionalism, excitement, and superficiality. It is the domain not of the little guy who posts logical analysis on a low-cost web site but of the true fat cat who can make money with huge investments in production values--and who is deathly afraid, not of being shown to be illogical and unscientific, but of being out of step with others similarly situated. Mere logic can usually be trumped by great PR, but a flame war with other people who buy ink by the barrel is--horror of horrors--bad PR.
I have both Reform and Orthodox friends. Some Reform Jews are beginning to see the bullseyes painted on their foreheads. Mostly those in NYC.
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