Tuesday, January 01, 2013

No gun, will prattle

The Righties have been passing around links to a video which splices Hollywood celebrities pleading for gun control with scenes from the movies in which they blast everyone around them to Kingdom come. I don't need to look at it.

The more I think about it, the more acutely diagnostic it becomes that we listen to these people in the first place. After all, they are men and women whose signal talent is making believe they are somebody else. Successful fakery. A gift for deception. My old saw about traditional societies wisely ranking actors along with prostitutes.

No one would think to ask bankers or corporate executives to make public service videos. But why not? Like actors, they are hugely wealthy and are used to being treated in ways that the average person could not begin to imagine unless we read about it in the tabloids. As my relative in the business agrees: modern day Caesars. Successful actors, in fact, are even more removed from real life than bankers or corporation guys, much more likely to have their whims and especially their indulgences and vices catered to and even celebrated. Shall we take moral direction from Kanye West and Kim Kardashian?

And of course behind the people on the screens are guess what? Bankers and corporate executives. The actors and actresses, and sometimes the directors, are the faces of an enormous industry that is based, like all industries, on money, on making a profit. (And as I noted recently, in a ruthlessly capitalist mode.)

At least bankers are honest about it.

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