TRIUMPH OF THE WILLINGLY STUPID

 I've made fun of show business figures getting involved in politics. Not that I dislike them. In fact, some of my best friends have been in show biz! And they're all smart people. You know why? They don't willingly say stupid things in public. Unlike Susan Sarandon and Cynthia Nixon.

Tim Robbins got out of there just in time.

Perhaps because Sarandon didn't learn from her comment regarding a police funeral last year, she really didn't think things through recently when, while starring at a pro-Palestinian rally, proclaimed, "“There are a lot of people afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country.”  

Put aside for a moment how that doesn't sound much different from the usual the-Jews-were-asking-for-it slur that antisemites use to justify the Holocaust. FBI statistics report that there were roughly 200 anti-Arab hate crimes in the US in 2022, which is roughly 200 too many. That same year, there were 3,697 attacks against Jews. 

That's not "a taste", it's a rancid banquet. And it took me only three minutes to find these statistics! Perhaps now that Sarandon has been dropped by her agency, she'll have a little more time to use the Google machine. (In case it needs clarifying, I'm against hate crimes against all people due to their religion, race, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, or whatever else people hate -- which, unfortunately, is an endless supply.) 

Nixon is texting her agent to line up a job,
pronto, so she doesn't miss a meal.

A week later, Cynthia Nixon put her pedicured foot in her mouth at a protest outside the White House, when she demanded a ceasefire in the Israeli-Hamas war -- despite a ceasefire already in progress.  And to show her steadfastness to the cause, Nixon let us know she was going on a hunger strike... but later admitted would interrupt it for "work commitments." 

I've spent the last five minutes trying to think of a witty response to that, but all I can come up with is, If you want people to listen to you, you first have to learn to listen to yourself. Granted, Robert Benchley would've written something better -- but had he ever encountered anyone who so personifies the word "oblivious"?

It's become fashionable to describe show business as a cesspool. I'd call it a high school cafeteria, where kids gossip, wonder why they have to learn history, and claim to be smarter than everyone else. If memory serves, the real smart kids were sitting off in a corner by themselves, doing homework and reading next week's assignments. They weren't the cool kids, for sure, but probably aren't making asses of themselves these days, either.

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