19 February 2010

Uncommon Commentary #104: The Heads of Hollywood Have Heads of Holly Wood (or Some Kind of Wood, Anyway)

I can think of a much better target for populist furor than bankers who receive bonuses: the Hollywood crowd.  Some film actors and actresses actually get paid upwards of $25 million for a single motion picture; even the wealthiest of bankers (who, unlike the former, have real jobs, and play an important rôle in the functioning of our economy) are paupers by that standard.  The Tinseltown elite are, moreover, objectionable in additional ways.  Their behavior (both personal and on-screen) scandalizes people whose morals have a basis in religion, and not just in this country; offense at our popular culture, as epitomized in Hollywood films, is believed to be one of the factors that motivate Islamic terrorism against the USA.  They embrace every crackpot left-wing cause that comes along, and they further the same in the most obnoxious ways possible. (They don't even practice what they and their fellow leftists preach, for they seek to get themselves exempted from the tax-the-rich policies that they say they favor.)
Shall we, then, see the "Beautiful People" become the new object of the obloquy that is currently directed at capitalists?  Not likely, for that obloquy has been incited by the leftist-dominated media and Obama administration, which will never do anything to antagonize their fellow travellers.  Anyway, people in our fallen world probably need celebrities at whom they can gawk, and about whose real or purported exploits they can read in People magazine or The National Enquirer.  When I rule the world, by contrast, things will be quite different; Hollywood will be razed, and symbolically sown with salt. (This doesn't mean that I think that our cinematic industry has never served a valid purpose; I enjoy most films made in the days when they generally upheld Christian values, but that era ended in the mid-1960's, at the same time when so many other good things died out.)