Category Archives: Hollywood

Grotesque Or Precious?

Aesthetics, Film, Hollywood, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason, The Zeitgeist

“There’s the most enormous, fat black chick I’ve ever seen. She is enormous. Everyone’s pretending she’s a part of show business and she’s never going to be in another movie. She should have gotten the Best Actress award because she’s never going to have another shot. What movie is she gonna be in?” That was degenerate DJ Howard Stern on Gabourey Sidibe (yes, she’s American-born), the mountain of human flesh that stars in the film “Precious,” pushed by Oprah.

Stern reminds me of the claims made repeatedly on the O’Reilly Show, that “Shangri-La of Socratic disinterest.”Have you heard them? Not speaking proper English, behaving like a rapper, not studying—these will get you nowhere. That’s so not true. And he says it to rich rappers who’ve followed exactly that path.

This is the age of the idiot first—but also the age of the halt, the lame, the plain dysfunctional, the retrograde, the exhibitionist, and above all, the black person, in all shapes and sizes. Sidibe will do just fine, embraced as she will be by the constellation of flesh-creeping cretins in Hollywood and beyond.

What’s grotesque here is not the actress, so much as the film Precious, the story. From what I’ve gleaned (I’d never go see such a film), it’s designed to schlep every sentimental fiber of a stupid person’s being.

The ugliest, fattest, most abused and tormented girl gets kicked around some more after spending her formative years as the ugliest, fattest, most abused and tormented daughter in the world. Then she hits the big time. Or delves into herself, and with the aid of a lesser version of “To Sir With Love,” finds some reservoir of strength and talent to prevail. She makes everyone involved in unleashing her gifts see the light. They are lucky to bask in her riches. Am I wrong? Is it about something totally different?

If Stern was anything other than a shock jock he’d have zeroed in on the obscene sentimentality pervading this film and the culture at large. If you think I’m heartless for excoriating sentimentality in the strongest of terms, think again. Sappy sentimentality is the opposite of compassion. It causes a person to misplace compassion.

Update III: Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values (Senegal Does It Right)

America, Celebrity, Christianity, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Media, Morality, Political Economy, The West, UN

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column: “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values”:

“… in all its self-serving displays, humanitarianism is, overwhelmingly, a Western affair; a Judeo-Christian thing. It’s as simple as all that. Liberals like Angelina Jolie will trace Western generosity to the founding of the United Nations, to the League of Nations, or to some other supra-national structure.

I suspect that what is at play in Haiti, and in countless locales around the undeveloped world, began with the revolutionary, universal, elaborate moral and legal injunctions encoded first in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus – and, thereafter, throughout the Hebrew Bible – to protect and do justice by the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widow and the stranger. The people of Israel were enjoined to practice what Christians later perfected.

That stuff stuck.

A different set of beliefs animates Haitian society, and helps explain its helplessness and hopelessness. ‘Haiti is not a Catholic country, Haiti is a Voodoo country,’ Erol Josue told National Public Radio. Josue is a Voodoo priest in a country whose former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, officially recognized Voodoo as a state religion.” …

The complete column is “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Jan. 22): Martin’s comment hereunder reminded me what I clean forgot: the Obamas’ very public giving. I’m also grateful to Martin for bringing to our attention the DIRECT injunction in the New Testament against showy charity. Martin quotes the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.” How has this country forgotten something as foundational as that?

Self-righteousness has replaced righteousness and self-aggrandizement has supplanted simple goodness.

Update II (Jan. 23): CHILD SLAVERY still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone. In the West this would be considered perverse in the extreme; in Haiti owning a Restavek is a status symbol. CNN has done stories on Restavec children, but has never connected the dots, as the favorite phrase goes. The angle is, invariably one of, “Look how good I am [Dr. Gupta here]; I’m crying.” Coupled with, “This happens in the US too.

No it doesn’t. When a slave is discovered, usually in the home of immigrants who imported their bad habit, American society shames and punishes the offenders.

Update III (Jan. 24): SENEGAL DOES IT RIGHT. Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has offered Haitian refugees a “parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,’ he said.”

Wade “insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area – not in the country’s parched deserts.”

Wade’s got the right idea, or at least the righteous one. He is offering Haitians a most generous chance at self-sufficiency; at working the land.

“Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, holds that the most praiseworthy and effective means of fulfilling the commandment of Tzedakah [charity] is through offering an impoverished person a business partnership, a business loan or a job. … the Prime Minister and [former Finance Minister] of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently understood this well. Speaking on the benefits of workfare reform in Israel, Netanyahu was once quoted in the press as saying that it is not enough to be a Thatcherite, a Jew should go even further and become a Maimonidite. [Excerpted from the monograph titled Judaism, Markets, and Capitalism: Separating Myth from Reality, by Corinne and Robert Sauer of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, with which I am affiliated.]

[SNIP]

Will Haitians be tempted by a chance at an honest living when hand-outs abound?

Once There Was ‘A Christmas Story’

Christianity, Family, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

From “Once There Was A Christmas Story,” Now on WND.COM:

“Set in the 1940s, ‘A Christmas Story’ depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of 9-year-old Ralphie Parker, who yearns for that gift of all gifts: the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

This was boyhood before ‘bang-bang you’re dead’ was banned. Family life prior to ‘One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads’, and Christmas without the ACLU.

If children could choose their families, most would opt for the kind depicted in this film, where mother is a homemaker, father is a regular working stiff, and between them they have zero repertoire of psychobabble to rub together. …

Lucky is the little boy who has such a family. Luckier still is the lad who has both such a family and…a BB gun…”

POSTSCRIPT: Bob Clark, the director of this magical movie, and his son, were killed by an illegal alien. This says as much about modern-day America as does the dissolution of the prototypical family unit depicted so magnificently in “A Christmas Story.”

My libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society, is back in print. The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL,
ilana

Once There Was 'A Christmas Story'