On Thursday, April 16, actress/comedienne/harridan Janeane Garofalo was interviewed on MSNBC by erstwhile newsman Keith Olbermann, who asked for her take on the April 15 “tea-bag” protests against high taxes and wasteful spending. In her inimitably gentle fashion, Garofalo stated of the peaceful protestors that “they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks.” She went on to say that “the limbic brain inside a right-winger or Republican or conservative or your average white power activist, the limbic brain is much larger in their head space than in a reasonable person, and it's pushing against the frontal lobe.” Here we have it, straight from no less an authority than the former “Funniest Person in Rhode Island,” the apparent acme of whose career was her appearance on Comedy Central’s prophetically titled “Freak Show.” Nevertheless, Keith Olbermann’s handlers thought enough of her credentials to invite her to opine on the exercise of free speech by fellow Americans, all while Olbermann nodded and grinned foolishly.
Am I alone in wondering whether this country’s cult of celebrity worship has passed the critical mass and is awaiting the tiniest spark to conflagrate and consume us all? For God’s sake, the vacuous Al Franken is about to be seated as a United States Senator from Minnesota, and my most complementary recollection of him is as the moronic baggage handler making monkey faces in Trading Places, a role that was no doubt written with his comedic range in mind. Meanwhile, Barbra Streisand has just celebrated her 67th birthday and has announced that, during the election, “I was so incensed, so passionate about having a Democrat in the White House, I was insane. I was just crazed. I trust this administration. I trust Barack Obama and his intelligence and have faith that he'll do the right thing . . . so I've been able to relax the last few months." Thank goodness that she can now relax, and that she has been gracious enough to share her state of mind with us. How pathetic is it that some among us apparently care?
I saw a cartoon recently where two women were viewing a gravesite. One of them, the likely widow of the recently interred, was lamenting: “I never got a chance to tell him to shut up!” While I find it difficult to imagine a wife who did not have the opportunity in life to tell her husband to shut up (much less avail herself of it), this cartoon did intensify a longing, even a yearning, for an opportunity to tell the entire celebrity-class to shut up. Maybe they won’t; celebrities are also guaranteed free speech. However, wouldn’t it be nice if the media would exercise the barest modicum of self-control and discretion, rather than inundate us with the projectile spewing of celebrity inanities?
If you have followed the recent emergence of Twitter, you know that you are now able to instantaneously access the musings of anyone to whom you are linked, particularly those whose self-image leads them to conclude that their musings are worth a tweet (I didn’t make that up; that’s what it’s called.) Justin Timberlake has announced that he intends to be the first to have one million tweeters hanging on his every word, and the response has been so enormous that the loading site has been temporarily disabled. For some reason, this calls to mind the image of Tippi Hedren being attacked by seagulls in The Birds. If only those same birds could be re-summoned to visit young Justin. I am forever grateful to have been spared by the timing of Twitter’s invention from his innermost thoughts upon suddenly spying Janet Jackson’s withered and pierced dug at the Super Bowl. The silence was truly golden.
In a recent article for National Review, Rob Long referred to actors as “often insane or wicked or both....” Unfortunately, the same seems to be true of much of the celebrity class, and one of life’s mysteries is why we indulge them. Think of the admittedly talented Woody Harrelson as an object lesson in the perils of overindulgence. Harrelson is a strident activist in support of the legalization of marijuana and hemp, and once traveled to the west coast with a hemp oil-fueled biodiesel bus. He is a professed peace activist although he recently attacked a photographer that he said he mistook for “a zombie.” Yet when he chains himself to the gate of a nuclear power plant, he is given a soapbox and interviewed by the fawning likes of Keith Olbermann. In perhaps his finest role, as the “chump” in White Men Can’t Jump, he played one scene directly from the heart, as he unleashed several minutes of non-stop harangue onto the opposing team, seemingly without pausing for breath. Of course, this was intended to be and was in fact funny, a distinction apparently lost on those with underdeveloped limbic brains, if we are to believe the former “Funniest Person in Rhode Island.”
New Orleans is currently home to several of Hollywood’s finest that break from this pattern, and for this they should be commended. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have done a lot of actual “boots-on-the-ground” good in New Orleans, but you rarely see them on the news pontificating for the good of the unwashed masses. Similarly, it was just announced that Nicholas Cage is selling his two New Orleans homes; so reticent has he been that I had forgotten he lived here. I’m going to miss him; he was like that good neighbor that never borrowed anything, never made a ruckus, and, especially, never expected you to care what he thought about anything and everything. Bravo; why can’t they all be like that? With that said, before my wife has to tell me, I’m going to shut up.