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Air Kiss by http://moscowdoesntbelieveintears.blogspot.com/2008_05_25_archive.html
I come here before you today in defense of the most
reviled creature on earth: the Hollywood liberal. This pampered pooch, this spoiled child, this
diva who contractually demands Cyprian yogurt in her dressing room and rose
petals in the potty is the best person in the world.
Okay, that's a stretch; let me take it back a step. The Hollywood liberal is the best rich person on Earth, and I think I can prove it.
Compare overpaid Hollywood stars, who are mostly liberals, to overpaid business executives, who are mostly conservatives. The former seem to be acting against their best interests, while the latter seem to care for nothing else.
It's a kind of miracle, really. The most self-involved, self-important, preening, vain, obnoxious, demanding, needy personalities imaginable, the Hollywood Celebrities, are the most liberal. It's guilt, sure enough, but the important thing is that they feel it.
Can you say the same about the hedge fund guys? The oil company CEO's? Can you say it about Wall Street emperors for whom Hollywood money is a bad year?
It's much tougher to be a Hollywood liberal than a corporate conservative.
Jack Welsh and Mitt Romney can go on and on about how the common man needs to quit whining and pull his lazy ass up by his own bootstraps, and nobody pukes themselves hearing it.
But if Alec Baldwin puts in a good word for Obama, Fox News gets epilepsy. And the suggestive jokes Ellen DeGeneres endures for her vocal support of the rainforest aren't fit for a family blog.
It's courageous, isn't it? Famous people who are beholden to us for their fame, who are obsessively image conscious and protective of their "brand," nearly always self-identify as liberals. Yet if you believe the polls, the population in general is more likely to call themselves conservatives.
That isn't an easy way to pursue popularity; that's swimming against the tide. Yet they do it, almost all of them do it, almost all of the time.
Hollywood liberals understand that they're privileged, not entitled. They know they're lucky. They don't think their success is the inevitable product of an efficient market working its wonders. They know better.
They've seen too many of their friends, with even more talent than they have, steaming lattes on Sunset Boulevard. They know how much raw luck is involved in success. They know that hard work is no guarantee. They know a hundred equally pretty kids working equally hard who haven't made it, and probably never will.
Contrast that with your average CEO, who got his or her MBA among classmates who mostly did make it. They may not all be running Xerox, but nobody's grad school buddy is fixing the copier.
Hollywood stars have to be close to the "customer." They want us to thrive and prosper. We are the source of their everything, without us they're nothing, and they know it.
And the way the Hollywood celebrity expresses his or her best wishes for us is by being flagrantly, extravagantly, liberal.
Cloying, mushy, liberal sentimentality is infinitely more annoying than conservative indifference and disdain. I get it.
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