Good Advice Dept.

     I just saw this on X:

     I wanted to applaud. The cult of celebrity has done great harm to these United States. It’s time for it to end. Perhaps a mass exodus of “celebrities” to countries they prefer – North Korea, perhaps? – would start the trend.

     Few remember how it started. Television was the enabling medium. Instead of having to “go to a show,” you could have entertainers of all sorts in your living room. Athletes – really, just another species of entertainer – soon followed, as local television stations started to broadcast the games of local teams. The media collaborated in foisting these intrusions upon us, perhaps in the hope of boosting their own “celebrity” status.

     Quite recently, a friend spent $7,000 – that’s seven thousand US dollars — to take her granddaughter to a Taylor Swift concert. (Please don’t ask for the details; I’m already on the edge of nausea.) If that isn’t a symptom of a severe illness, I can’t think of a better one. It’s an illness that must be headed off while the target population – young Americans – is most susceptible. Once it takes hold, the disease usually proves incurable. The afflicted stumble through life worshipping singers, actors, power hitters and quarterbacks. Sometimes they take their values and political positions from those... persons. Take note, parents.

The One-Way Door

     People die. All of us, eventually.

     Yeah, yeah, I know: In other news, sitting in a comfortable chair for an hour or two will rest your legs. But the above is among the truths we strive hardest not to think about.

     Just yesterday, Ragin’ Dave wrote of the passing of Larry King:

     Dude was 87. What the hell did you think happens to people, folks? Yes, he was famous. Had a TV show. And he got old, and he died, which is what happens to people. Why the hell do random people freak the hell out whenever some celebrity dies? I'm not saying I'm happy about it, I'm saying that he was an old man and old men die.

     When my father kicks the bucket, I'm going to be weeping and wailing, but he's MY FATHER, not some celebrity that I never met.

     Dave has a point. We routinely attribute excessive importance to celebrities. Most of them are “famous for being famous,” and very little else. If the touts and columnists had never mentioned them, they’d lack significance to the rest of us.

     However, now and then a celebrity becomes emblematic of an era and its values. His passing acquires extra significance from that association...perhaps far more than his achievements, whatever they may have been, would have brought him on their own.

     Consider the 1999 death of “the Yankee Clipper:” Joe DiMaggio. Joltin’ Joe was a fine player, arguably the best center fielder and one of the best hitters of his time, but baseball is merely a sport. It has entertainment value, but little other significance. DiMaggio’s passing acquired extra significance from the era in which he played, 1936 through 1951, and from his excellent personal qualities. The importance of those years to American and world history, added to his superb play and his fine character, gave him a stature unavailable from baseball alone. His admirers’ memories of him come with all of that and more besides.

     Subsequent sports stars who’ve departed this vale of tears haven’t borne the glow that surrounds DiMaggio. Mickey Mantle, DiMaggio’s center-field successor and himself a fine player, doesn’t share it. Ted Williams has a fraction of it, even though he played for (shudder) Boston.

     I know little of Larry King, but I doubt that his memory will have anything like it. King was a capable commentator and interviewer. He occupied a high place among his colleagues for many years. But he didn’t impress the nation in an emblematic way.

     So yes: we generally attribute an absurd degree of importance to celebrities, living or dead. But there are a few exceptions. They stand apart from the rest not because of their achievements, but because of their personal qualities, their association with eras of great events, and with other persons who characterized them. They become emblems of times that we old ones, our rose-colored glasses never far from us, remember as “the good old days:” the days whose values we honored and whose passing we lament. The days when the streets were safe...when homeowners rarely locked their doors...when neighbors looked after their neighbors’ children, properties, and other interests...when immigrants were expected to assimilate and were happy to do so...when the schools taught rather than indoctrinated and propagandized...when journalists reported the news without slanting it toward their preferred political positions...when lawyers counseled their would-be clients not to sue...when politicians occasionally told the truth and didn’t regret it afterward.

     Forgive me, Gentle Reader. I must turn away from this subject at once. Have a nice day.

Choosing Sides Against America

     There appear to be a fair number of entertainers – writers, musicians, actors, actresses, sports figures, stand-up comedians, what have you – who not only dislike President Trump; they dislike anyone who supports him and wishes him well:

     For a while one message rang out from Team Hollywood in the Age of Trump. The industry didn’t want you as a customer if you wear a red MAGA hat.

     Oh, celebrities didn’t actually mouth those words. Instead, they embedded their disgust for both President Donald Trump and his admirers in nearly everything they did.

     Recently, a few have become explicit in the extreme. For names, read Christian Toto’s article. The message certainly is clear: these...persons believe it their right and duty to trash the president of these United States, and be damned to any potential customer who’s offended by it. The loss of revenue, actual or potential, doesn’t seem to trouble them.

     Oooooo-kay. Concerning the “entertainers” named in the article – and yes, those are “sneer quotes” – I was never interested in their “art” anyway, so I have no way to chastise them. But I do have an interest in good entertainment to be enjoyed in my leisure moments. I suspect quite a lot of conservatives are with me in this. How shall we replace the offerings of a cadre that’s decided to flap its privates in our faces? Is it possible to partake of them without giving the offenders anything for it?

     In the world of the written / printed / pixeled word, there are plenty of alternatives, and more becoming available all the time. I’m far from the only conservative lunatic writing Christian-flavored fiction. That’s especially so in the speculative genres, which have seen an explosion of conservative talent. I post my recommendations of worthy writers here as I encounter them in my own travels.

     I understand that popular music is experiencing a similar expansion of possibilities. This is a field with whose most recent artists and trends – say, since about 1987 – I’m not acquainted. However, there are others who make it their business. I tend to trust Charles Hill. You might want to ask around.

     Sports? Stick to baseball and ice hockey. So far, at least, they’ve gone untouched by the plagues that have afflicted football and basketball. Whether that will continue, no one can say, so enjoy the moment.

     If comedy is your thing, I’m told there are several rising, capable comedians who exhibit consistent respect for our political sentiments...mainly by not talking politics. Steven Crowder may be the best known. I followed Michael Loftus for a while, but he appears to have dropped off the radar. This is an area where some research would be worthwhile.

     Movies? Good God, Gentle Reader! Have you never explored the market for used DVDs? After the original retailer parts with it, a resale nets the producers not one cent. Unless you simply must see the thing in a theater, practice a little deferral of gratification and keep an eye on Ebay! Among other things, that way you get to keep the movie and watch it as many times as you like, in the privacy and comfort of your own home, where the beer, chips, and bathrooms are available at the touch of a PAUSE button.

     Mind you, we mustn’t expect to change the political orientations of the folks currently insulting us. An end to the insults is the most we can expect. And it might well be the case that our current “entertainers” will prove ineducable. Even if that’s so, We the People have long memories and are reluctant to grant forgiveness for gratuitous denigrations from wealthy celebrities. A few years of sharply reduced revenues just might do for Celebrity World what it’s already doing to the NFL, and you can have a hand in it.

     Think about it.

“Passengers,” A Few More Words

     ...and not about the movie.

     Way back when – years when I was too short to reach the stove – the opinions of celebrities on social, political, and economic issues didn’t matter to anyone except perhaps their families. Shortly after that – though I believe I was still too short to do the dishes – the television became a staple of the American household and the Cult of Celebrity was born. People whose talents for singing, dancing, joking, or otherwise entertaining us had become “evening guests” in our living rooms. And shortly after that, interviewers foolishly began to inquire about their sociopolitical stances.

     I didn’t care then about a celebrity’s politics. I still don’t, except about the way in which the whole Celebritarian phenomenon has warped the minds of Americans.

     Conservatives have legitimately mocked celebrities who’ve spouted political bilge. The ridicule is well deserved; even the most sensible of the lot are generally under-educated, misinformed about innumerable things, and pumped far too full of themselves by the adulation of their fans. Yet conservatives have gone on from that to lionize celebrities – including very minor celebrities – who spout political opinions with which we agree. How is that consistent?

     As little sense as that makes, it makes even less sense to promote a celebrity’s political stances above his value as an entertainer.

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     Yesterday evening, when I posted this piece, a distraction flew past that caused me to omit something I’d intended: specifically, to forbid comments on the piece. So of course the comments immediately poured in – try a Google search for “Jennifer Lawrence” and see what you get – and not one of them was about the movie. And equally of course, I smacked myself on the head, deleted them all, and closed the piece to comments.

     Conservatives, Christians, and others offended by the public caperings and pronouncements of celebrities have been told many times not to patronize their wares. I regard this as bad advice. Ours is a division-of-labor society. Entertainers entertain (and we don’t) because they’re good at it (and we aren’t). People consume entertainment because they want it; indeed, we often need it, given the fractious state of the world and the various ways in which it impinges, undesired and wholly unwelcome, on our lives. So we need to learn to separate the entertainment wheat from the sociopolitical chaff.

     The Left would never do that. To the Left, everything is political. That’s the underlayer of the Leftist psyche. It’s what makes leftists intolerable. And we must rigorously avoid becoming intolerable by aping this characteristic.

     The pseudonymous Ace of Spades, one of the most perceptive writers in the DextroSphere, once wrote that despite the Left’s tendency to view everything as political, it’s we of the Right who seem always to be talking politics. He had a powerful point. It’s a behavior we should expunge. It makes us unwelcome in places where we’d otherwise be welcome. And it pollutes our ability to enjoy pleasant diversions such as music, movies, and sporting events featuring performers whose politics we dislike.

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     I wish, most profoundly, that celebrities would keep their sociopolitical opinions to themselves. (Then again, a lot of people wish I’d do the same.) But we can’t always have what we want, and in many a case the desire itself is bad for us and should be squashed.

     Not long ago I read a most excellent book: When Jesus Became God, by Richard Rubenstein. It’s a history of the 4th Century struggles within Christianity over the divinity of Jesus and His precise relation to God the Father. The whole thing is eminently worth the time of anyone interested in the history of Christian thought, but the part that comes to mind just now is early in Rubenstein’s saga:

     The almost obsessive quality of these disputes is nicely captured by a famous churchman, Gregory of Nyssa, writing twenty years after the lynching of Bishop George. In a sermon delivered in Constantinople, Gregory decried the contentiousness of his fellow Christians. “If in this city you ask a shopkeeper for change,” he complained, “he will argue with you about whether the Son is begotten or unbegotten. If you inquire about the quality of the bread, the baker will answer ‘The Father is greater, the Son less.’ And if you ask the bath attendant to draw your bath, he will tell you that the Son was created ex nihilo.”

     This was not good for Christianity. It sometimes escalated to violence: Christians spilling other Christians’ blood. It had to be ended. The Council of Nicea, by proclaiming official doctrine, attempted to put an end to it...and failed. It resulted in the earliest known Christian schisms, which have never healed.

     So also with excessive attention to the sociopolitical opinions of celebrities – and I must state this plainly: any degree of attention paid to the sociopolitical opinions of celebrities is excessive.

     Enjoy what entertainers offer (if you find it enjoyable) and dismiss the rest. Otherwise, you’ve been lured into playing the Left’s game – and since it’s a game in which they hold all the cards, it’s one you cannot win.

     I have spoken.

Today’s Reminiscence Of Hillary Clinton

     I possess a very retentive memory. It has its drawbacks; I remember the bad stuff just as vividly as the good. But it also provides me with material for these tirades when I most need it.

     On May 23, 1993, with the inauguration of Bill Clinton only four months past, the New York Times ran a canonization piece on Hillary Clinton. Here are a few choice quotes about (and some from) the quondam First Lady, as they were immortalized in the Paper of Record:

     Driven by the increasingly common view that something is terribly awry with modern life, Mrs. Clinton is searching for not merely programmatic answers but for The Answer. Something in the Meaning of It All line, something that would inform everything from her imminent and all-encompassing health care proposal to ways in which the state might encourage parents not to let their children wander all hours of the night in shopping malls.

     When it is suggested that she sounds as though she's trying to come up with a sort of unified-field theory of life, she says, excitedly, "That's right, that's exactly right!"

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     The point of all this is not abstract or small. What Mrs. Clinton seems -- in all apparent sincerity -- to have in mind is leading the way to something on the order of a Reformation: the remaking of the American way of politics, government, indeed life. A lot of people, contemplating such a task, might fall prey to self doubts. Mrs. Clinton does not blink.

     "It's not going to be easy," she says. "But we can't get scared away from it because it is an overwhelming task.'

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     The Western world, she said, needed to be made anew. America suffered from a "sleeping sickness of the soul," a "sense that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy and freedom are not enough -- that we lack at some core level meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively, that sense that our lives are part of some greater effort, that we are connected to one another, that community means that we have a place where we belong no matter who we are."

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     "What do our governmental institutions mean? What do our lives in today's world mean?" she asked. "What does it mean in today's world to pursue not only vocations, to be part of institutions, but to be human?"

     These questions, she said, led to the larger question: "Who will lead us out of this spiritual vacuum?" The answer to that was "all of us," all required "to play our part in redefining what our lives are and what they should be."

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     Now, asked if she has always been impelled by what she called, in a recent interview with The Washington Post, "a burning desire" to "make the world . . . better for everybody," Mrs. Clinton says, with a slight, self-conscious laugh: "Yeah, I always have. I have not always known what it meant, but I have always had it."

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     IT IS AT THIS POINT that some awkward questions arise:

     If it is necessary to remake society, why should Hillary Rodham Clinton get the job?

     Can someone who helped lead the very generation that threw out the old ways of moral absolutes and societal standards now lead the charge back to the future?

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     Today, she asks "what do our governmental institutions mean? What do our lives in today's world mean?"

     At the heart of the Wellesley speech, she argued for what she then called the "experiment in human living" and would come to call "excessive individualism" and "rights without responsibility."

     The "prevailing, acquisitive and competitive corporate life," she said, "is not for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living."

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     Yes, she really said those things, and the Times really said those things about her. The article was graced by a glowing white portrait photo of Mrs. Clinton which appeared on the cover of the Times Magazine. Its title, whether meant seriously or tongue-in-cheek, was “Saint Hillary.”

     Whereupon I must cite an old wisdom, well known among Catholics:

Every saint has a past.
Every sinner has a future.

     Perhaps Mrs. Clinton will make a constructive, non-political use of her future. At any rate, we can hope.

Quickies: Romantic Travails Of The Rich And Famous

     We’ve all heard the jokes about “first world problems.” Well, above that category are the problems of mega-rich, mega-famous celebrities. For example, it’s one of today’s lighter news items that Jennifer Lawrence can’t get a date.

     Now, it’s one thing to just say “How sad” and return to your bagel. It’s another to take such a problem seriously and resolve to fix it, or at least understand it. And really, what else is a Certified Galactic Intellect for?

     So I decided to think through the possible reasons the beautiful, talented, and wealthy JLaw is unhappily unmated:

1. Intimidation. Quite a lot of “regular” men would never dare to approach a major star like Jennifer Lawrence. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the men in her “peer group” – i.e., other celebrities – are users and untrustworthy philandering assholes with vacuum for brains. Fame can do that to you.
2. Exclusion. A celebrity is expected to spend his time in the company of other celebrities and their rich, powerful backers. That naturally limits Lawrence’s exposure to potential romantic candidates.
3. Occupational conflicts. A good man will have a career of his own. How many such would be willing to abandon their careers for a shot at the affections of a celebrity? Celebrities are notoriously flighty, which is part of the reason most celebrity romances are brief and go down in flames. That’s what made Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward so noteworthy.
4. Nastiness. Celebrities often express themselves with no thought for the consequences. Lawrence has done that at least twice: once on Christians, the other time on “equal pay for women.” Many a good man would immediately recoil from her: first because she’d condemned three-fourths of the country on the basis of her narrow exposure; second because she allows herself opinions on subjects about which she knows nothing.
5. Other personality quirks. Jennifer Lawrence is widely celebrated for her “quirky” personality. To many men, that presents the appearance of instability. Instability is a highly undesirable trait in a lover or spouse, no matter what other assets she might bring to the match. I’m here to tell you.

     Well, she does like dogs and guns. Maybe you should spend more time at animal shelters and shooting ranges, Jennifer. I’ve met some very nice people there. Or maybe try going to church. Perhaps at a Catholic parish, if you can find one in Tinsel Town where Catholicism is actually practiced. I understand that’s getting to be rather difficult, but you could consult Jim Caviezel for a suggestion.