“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
–The Great Gatsby
While writing yesterday’s tirade about the conservative industrial complex and their poverty pimps, I kept thinking about the weirdness of the people who populate the upper reaches of the conservative think tank rackets. They obviously make enormous amounts of money doing very little, which is not the world of most Americans. They don’t keep regular hours at work, coming and going as they see fit. They live in communities that are set apart from the rest of America. They have little interaction with normal people.
None of this is new. Normal people learn quickly that the rich are not like the rest of us, despite the Hemingway quip to the contrary. The lack of want changes a man. Struggle, fear and the sleepless nights are the crucible of resourcefulness and creativity. The result is not just resourcefulness, but caution and prudence. It is the instinctive understanding of risk that comes from failure, what economists call moral hazard¹, that is at the heart of prudence. Pamper a man long enough and he loses this.
It is most obvious with our carny folk. Young people go into the circus hoping to become stars, but most spend their youth waiting tables, doing odd jobs and never doing more than some small parts in small productions. Some kick around as extras, making a decent living, but working hard. These are usually very sensible people because they know how hard it is to maintain their spot and they appreciate how quickly it can go away. It’s not an accident that these are the most right-wing people in Hollywood.
Then we have the stars who are magically plucked from the gutter and made rich, glamorous and famous. It’s rare for a mega star to have had a long apprenticeship or have struggled in bit parts for a long time. They tend to hit it big early in their career. Whatever sense they had is quickly squeezed out of them and they become spoiled toddlers, complaining about the unfairness of the world. Meryl Streep is a classic example. She hit the acting lottery and now lectures the peons about our lack of morality.
Now, Streep was probably nuts before she entered the carnival, but it does not take long for someone living like a noble to start thinking they are noble. If serendipity led you to a one-percent lifestyle, you can be forgiven for thinking that you were chosen. Further, you can be forgiven for thinking that things like hard work, prudence and loyalty are a sucker’s game. After all, the people who cherish those things live down in the valley, while you live up on the hill with the rest of the Cloud People.
This seems to be the dynamic in the managerial elite. They went off to college, ticked the right boxes and were magically transported to the top of society. Look through the biographies of famous pundits, media people and public intellectuals and you don’t find a lot of time in the fields with the sons of toil. Instead, you see biographies like the soon-to-be-president of France. Macron was literally plucked from the crowd, like Billy Ray Valentine from Trading Places. Why would Macron value hard work and struggle?
The consequence free world of the ruling classes not only makes them reckless; it makes them contemptuous of the lower ranks, particularly the middle class. It’s probably why the American Left adopted the anti-bourgeoisie language of Continental Marxists, despite living exaggerated versions of the bourgeoisie lifestyle. It just felt good. That appears to have been the motivation of those who sponsored Barak Obama’s political career in Chicago. The aging radicals who sponsored him knew he would offend normal people.
This witch’s brew of reckless disregard and seething contempt is on display in this story about Left’s next great mongrel hope.
A California Democrat looking to flip a House seat in next year’s midterms believes he can appeal to both sides of the aisle — and even pitch progressive ideas to President Trump.
Ammar Campa-Najjar, a 28-year-old communications staffer and former campaign worker of Mexican and Arab heritage, says his background and resume put him in a position to succeed in the red district he hopes to represent.
“I talk about never being Arab enough in Gaza, Hispanic enough in the Barrio or American enough in the post-9/11 world,” he told The Hill during a recent interview.
“I just don’t come in with this preconceived notion of prejudice. … It allows me to have an open mind and be tolerant, see the world from their vantage point.”
I don’t know about the Arab and Mexican stuff, but I do know the reason he went from rent boy to political rock star is that he is “not American enough.” If he was an Irish guy named O’Shea, he would be working the business end of a shovel, rather than entertaining the Cloud People. Like an actor waiting tables, this guy’s whole existence is about cultivating a look in the hope of catching the attention of the right people. He may as well be an actor, as he is just playing a character he thinks will be in demand in the big show.
Read the rest of the article and it is clear that Ammar is as dumb as a hamster. He’s just repeating phrases he has picked up as an extra in his minor gigs in Washington. But, he has the look in demand with the Cloud People and he is about as alien to the native stock as you’re going to get, so he has a future in Progressive politics. It’s not hard to imagine a Prog version of Tom and Daisy Buchanan backing this clown’s political career because it let’s them piss on the little people, who they detest so much.
¹The term “Moral Hazard” has become a safe word for innumerate fetishists, who will be tempted to sperg on it. Save it. I’m not interested.
A bit late, but check out the link to Ammar Campa-Najjar’s one publication on Linked-In. It’s someone else’s Master’s thesis. It doesn’t even contain Ammar Campa-Najjar’s name.
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Contempt of the lower classes is not just based on the lack of want, it’s also based on repulsion. I know Williamson can be a snob but Dalrymple writes about this stuff all the time. A lot of the Westernised lower classes are simply degenerate. (That’s not to say that the upper classes are some paragon of virtue, they just have more money to cover their mistakes.)
There seems to be this attitude among a lot of the Dissident Right that while its fine for the upper classes to be called out on their degeneracy it’s taboo to do that same for the proletarian class. I grew up among the poor and I can tell you that the Victorians were onto something when they made the distinction between the “virtuous” and “dissolute” poor.
One of the great benefits of moving into a nice neighbourhood is that it is nicer. There is less violence, obesity and squalor and more beauty, manners and security. Do you blame people for wanting nicer lives? It isn’t all about elitism. It’s the avoidance of overt savagery which drives their contempt.
God knows the elites deserve to burn but what needs to be remembered is that Detroit is what happens when the people that Williamson chides take control.
It is the upper class that insists the lower class degenerates are fed, housed, and entertained. So we get more of them.
Detroit was wrecked by the Blacks and Democrats who drove out the whites. Every major city that went into the crapper was because of blacks tand upper class whites who promoted and protected them.
In fact almost every bit of injury inflicted on the country and people over the last 50 years came from those nice people.
Prior to NAFTA and globalization, there weren’t many poor whites, decent paying jobs were plentiful,public schools were hell holes and people did okay. Did you know that violent crime in white towns and neighborhoods was just as low as it was in Europe? What changed that was desegregation, importing 3rd worlders by the millions.
But your precious elites who live in very nice neighborhoods in multi-million dollar homes – decided to re institute slavery by off-shoring industry and jobs to get a fatter bonus check at the end of the year. That wrecked entire communities and regions not to mention families. We never recovered from that.
Then to rub salt into to our already dying white blue collars and middle-class your elites forced homosexuality, torture porn, movies that are one giant snuff video, make our little girls tolerate freakish men in their bathrooms, rap music, attacked Christianity, Western culture and values. Opened the flood gates to 3rd world serfs and criminals. Oh yeah and heavily promote white girls shacking up with black men.
Your nice and clean people are anything but that. They just offload all the ugly stuff to others while they keep their hands clean. They are monsters and deserved every bit of hell they’re going to get.
I read this when you wrote it and have been thinking about the term “carny people” ever since. That is how the entire entertainment industry should be referred to and will be by me at least. It makes the fact that the entire culture is in the toilet make complete sense. How could it possibly be anywhere else with carny people as out moral arbiters.
One of the main factors that result in the “Peter Principle” of people being promoted above their ability into positions of power is that all organizations today are focused on “Management” of the company’s status quo instead of creative and risk taking yet responsible leadership. Nobody in management positions is empowered to make any decisions outside the established company procedure, except organize office parties like Michael Scott in the TV series “The Office”.
I’ve seen good friends change into either cold -hearted company drones or nervous wrecks trying to implement top down directives from above and try to cheerfully attempt to get their employees to buy into it, even though its transparently obvious even to a child the directive is impractical and not going to work. One loses their soul for a name on the office door like the toady Williamson portrayed by Kevin Spacy in the movie “Glengarry Glen Ross”
So people with no sense of shame, no moral scruples, and mediocre skills only need to play Machiavelli office politics by being either the drinking, golfing, or fishing buddies with their superiors to get promoted. In the military, getting all the boxes checked off on college degrees acquired, staff positions held, and giving PowerPoint briefings (Read “About Face” by Colonel David Hackett) is valued more than combat experience.
Hence a lot of grunts are going to die under the inept command of some colonel or general giving orders from the safety of his air conditioned office.
Which is why Apple will not buy Tesla. “Managers” like Tim Cook are scared to death of Elon Musk, who would run rings around them and seize the company, given half a chance. Steve Jobs was much closer to a Musk than a Cook.
Musk is a parasite. Without taxpayer dollars he’d be a pauper.
Not so Jobs.
completely off topic..
has anyone here read this article?
“ISIS using ads on CRAIGSLIST to lure hostage and murder victims..” on PJmedia?
https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/2017/05/04/isis-to-jihadists-use-fake-apartment-job-craigslist-ads-to-lure-hostage-murder-victims/
There is a photo accompanying the article which purports to be a photo from ISIS’s Rumiyah magazine (i assume that Rumiyah is not published here in Brooklyn); yet i immediately recognized the street scene as being form my nieghborhood.
When you look at this article at pjmedia.com, do you see a photo of this building:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.6345517,-74.0256678,3a,75y,165.45h,89.71t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1srRNmWGvXh7Q9PpAL3wpw5Q!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
Is Pjmedia, or the NSA, or Verizon, changing the photo for this article, depending on where (which IP address) it’s being viewed from?
Can you describe the photo you see please.
This is too skeevy for me, it’s creepier than just targeted adverts.
I would almost go to the ISIS magazine to confirm they actually use a photo from my neighborhood, but i’m already paranoid enough.
Thanks in advance
It’s just the war-mongering Neo-Cohens doing what they do: Lie.
“… struggled in bit parts for a long time.” Example would be the late Gregory Peck, whom I never liked. He would not make a movie unless he was the leading man.
I wanted to link to it, but could not find it, but someone studied the path from start to stardom of modern actors. I think Sailer talked about it. What was remarkable is that stars hit it big early in their career and they tended to make it in the 20’s. There’s also a heavy bias toward those whose family is in the business.
The fact is, we have few older leading men these days. Most are cartoons or kids. The female leads are always 20-something powerskirts. There’s simply not much time to apprentice.
I love the Gatsby analogy for the Trump family. The East Egg people utterly despise Donald, not just because he’s a West Egger, but because he doesn’t give a shit about them. He holds them in about the same contempt they hold him. How out of his place.
Contrast this to Kushner and Ivanka Trump. They’re good little Gatsby’s. They desperately want to be accepted by East Egg like they’re supposed to.
As it has always been. What really bother me is why. What twisted natural selection unique to humans seems to routinely allow these types to float to the top? It seems for every Washington we get a thousand grifters. That does not seem like a good long term strategy for species survival.
“A republic, if we can keep it”…out of the hands of the people you are talking about. The Founding Fathers did a good job of setting up a political structure that diffused power and gave the “little guy” a variety of opportunities to exercise the “checks and balances” of the system.
But like bunnies attacking a fenced garden, the people you are talking about probe every inch of the system to find the weak points, the points of entry. They use elements of the media and the broader culture to atomize our culture, and to break down the cultural affinities and the ties that give the little people the capability to exercise their political power and fight this trend.
We are in uncharted cultural territory now. A Petri dish of sorts.
“As it has always been. What really bother me is why. What twisted natural selection unique to humans seems to routinely allow these types to float to the top? It seems for every Washington we get a thousand grifters. That does not seem like a good long term strategy for species survival.”
All you have to do is corrupt the economy by introducing interest into it. Once you do that and introduce fiat currency, you have a money printing machine in place to manipulate the economy. It has been this way since Babylon (that we know of). When the “banks” realized that everyone did not ask for their gold and silver back at the same time, they realized they could lend their clients wealth out. After accumulating an unstoppable amount of wealth, they could then begin to take the levers of government, religion, education, and information in hand. Now, control of the masses is reduced to mathematical patterns and equations have been worked out to determine how to respond and how to manipulate.
Think about the Federal Reserve System. This is a private banking corporation that has usurped the currency system in the US. When the government, acting for the taxpayer, needs a trillion dollars of currency to run the economy, they borrow it. At interest. The cost to the Federal Reserve is only the price of printing the currency, which the Treasury Department does. The United States then sells bonds to repay the loan. The only thing is, the Federal Reserve does not print the interest on the principal, say 5% That would be 50 billion dollars. Where does the interest come from? More borrowing by the government. That 50 billion is then just principle. Where does the interest come from to pay for that? More borrowing. You can see why we have a total debt now approaching 100 trillion dollars (No one knows the exact amount, since it includes Federal, State, Corporate, and personal debt). Now, it is becoming even easier, since most transactions are just electronic pluses and minuses, not currency related.
We’re screwed.
Unreal money funds an unreal culture.
Ain’t nothing in the Cloud that’s supply-and-demand inventory.
The first banks were temples, run by preists to support an army. Loot isn’t ‘free trade’ either.
As of 1971, the gold and silver have been dropped out of the system entirely, other than as some sort of symbolic notation attached to the currency. “Full faith and credit” indeed!
Massive credit defaults will be paid for by money printing, and 2008 is a taste of what is to come. It is called “debausching the currency”.
Spelling Nazi reporting for duty:
Debauching.
We’ve got to get back to the old Texas Republican absolute defense of:
“He needed Killin.”
Whatever is to come, I have given up on believing the White race will ever do anything…..until they are forced to. Right now, most middle class Whites actually believe they are well-off. And yet, they are all slaves. Debt slaves. The only difference between them and real slaves is that their ears aren’t pierced with an awl and they have “hope” for their children. Well, maybe they have had an awl bored through their ear. Piercings are fashionable for some fools. But, Whites will not resist until they have no other choice because they believe they have too much to lose.
In the American Revolution, it was never more than a minority of the people that supported overthrowing British rule. Society carried on throughout the war and there was a structure in place when it was over. Whites are inherently uneasy about change. They will accept the devil they know rather than the angel they don’t. Plus, they are presented with too many choices. The choices aren’t really that different from each other but the perception has crippled the ability to make a decision. When you have that combined with mindless entertainment, unrestricted sex, an educational system that encourages degeneracy (albeit, conformist degeneracy), an unchangeable government controlled by those behind the curtain, and the introduction of different peoples into a relatively homogenous White citizenry, Whites are paralyzed and waiting for the “great Men” to rise up. Since the great Men don’t even know who they are yet, inertia will ensure that nothing happens. Until the apocalypse.
The hilarious thing is, some people are actually preparing for the eventual collapse. They are acquiring arms, food stores, gold and silver, arable land away from urban areas. I wonder how long those things will last? We accumulate them because we believe that we can ride out the storm. Without some kind of social structure in place, the preppers will eventually run out. Fragmenting our race into thousands of tiny enclaves due to mistrust of each other will result in a very slow recovery, one that can be co-opted easily. Trust is one of the things we need. And since people can’t even be civil to others online, it is going to take a catastrophe to force people to work together, trade together, and love and trust each other again. To the apocalypse!
Not on topic exactly but I thought I’d share this message from my corporate overlords. Just came through on email. Fun eh?
“birthday and try out the Virtual Reality (VR) experience for yourself. Do you want to know what a misogynistic micro-aggression looks and feels like? Do you want to see other applications of VR in HR? Come and try the technology and meet us over drinks and snacks”
Sorry got to go, can’t miss my re-education and self-criticism session in the staff canteen.
It might not be so bad to meet cute HR girls over drinks and snacks. Do they giggle when you micro-aggress them? Seeing it through their eyes would be too weird, though — like that guy in Strange Days who wants to experience a 17-year-old girl’s shower from her point of view.
A sign: “Sexual harrassment will not be prosecuted, but it WILL be graded”
There are a lot of bad politicians on both sides of the isle (a clear majority in fact), and voters put them there. At some point you have to address the fact that bad voters are part of the problem. Ditto for those spending hard-earned dollars on Hollywood’s propaganda output.
The disease is not confined solely to the cloud inhabitants. Society is getting sicker with each passing year. If we follow in the footsteps of the Romans, we will have earned our demise.
you know, everyone is bandying about the term “civil war” these days, to describe the mood of the US populace. But I wonder if a better word would be “revolution”? my anger is directed at an entire class of people, and their enablers. plus Trump is pulling a lot of dem voters, more every day (and this is what has all the uniparty scurrying) so ideology isn’t the driving factor of politics, at this time.
i guess my point is, just who is still being fooled by actors, and whom is not responding to them any longer?
It’s increasingly likely the Left is going to reap what they’ve spent the last century sowing. Marxist “praxis” requires setting classes against each other. Since most classes in America got along pretty well until recently (and, indeed, part of the American Myth was that we were a “classless society”), they had to invent some classes to fight each other and thus hasten the Revolution. Well, it worked — women hate men, gays hate straights, everyone hates whites, and now, finally, whites are starting to hate everyone right back. It may well lead to Revolution, all right, but not the way Onkel Karl said it would (it never does, as should be obvious from the fact that the “bourgeois intellectuals” preaching Revolution are invariably the first guys in front of the firing squad).
At some levels, I am a happy proponent of “lets you and him fight”. Let all these people with conjured-up grievances start things up by taking it it out on each other. I will likely keep the “Korean South Side Los Angeles shopkeeper” model in mind for me and my own.
One of the features of the up-and-comers for a while has been their disconnection from the world of sh%twork during their teenage years. Lots of us who value what we and and have made of ourselves, did a lot of crappy jobs, some not so bad, others terrible, because that was the way things were.
One of the attributes that made us different from, and better than the European contemporaries of the baby boomers was our connection to the world of real work. Europeans beat us to the game by importing Turks and North Africans to do these jobs in the 1960s onward. I know no Western European contemporaries who worked the kinds of jobs I did. Now, doing such work, unless one is in a favored ethnic slot, is a mark against advancement. Young people, even in high school flit from one meaningful internship to another. They think and believe, that this makes them superior to elders who, scratch the skin a bit, might have some dirt in their pasts. In fact, major sorting institutions, universities, professional schools, and employers (some not all) actively discriminate against those with a tinge of dirt.
These obtaining days such work experience is almost impossible. Who wants an entitled teen, when there is an illegal who really needs the job. In many ways we are erasing our own futures – lazy, arrogant, and ignorant, a terrible way to go through life.
I love telling the story of when some careless clerk (or deep cover shitlord) in my college town rezoned half the grade schools in the faculty ghetto into the actual ghetto. The white flight clocked about Mach 4, but none of them learned a damn thing. I used to think this was because they’re nonpareil hypocrites, with some advanced cognitive dissonance-suppression technique unknown to us normies. But now I realize it’s that they just don’t care. Nobody they know is going to call them on it, and while we might, we’re just flyover country clodhoppers; who cares what the likes of us think? They’re in for some rough times, but they’ve earned every moment of it.
If I were Trump I’d be compulsory purchasing land in Malibu and Chappaqua for section eight housing and moving the Somali’s from Minnesota there.
From what I’ve heard and read, guilt — or maybe guilt transference — is a part of it. You’re living in an apartment with four other wannabes when suddenly you’re plucked from obscurity and thrust into the center ring of the virtual tent. Meanwhile, your buddies are still back in the apartment working crappy jobs and trying to get the big break. Sure you try to stay in touch, but after a while, the demands of fame (if I were speaking, the sarcasm would be larded on the previous three words so heavily, you’d roll your eyes) pull you away. Every time you drive past the little people in your limo, you are reminded of your betrayals, small and large. For a weak mind (and remember, we’re talking about entertainers, here), your ever-growing guilt is very easily heaped on the heads of the people you left behind. The oppressed lambs become the scapegoats. Which is a theme in literature going back to classical times. Maybe its even in the Gilgamesh epic somewhere. I dunno.
I think most normies who do well in life knows luck plays a big role. It’s why we have expressions like “I’ve been blessed” and “I’ve been fortunate.” But, normies also can connect the dots between talent, effort and the results. So yeah, you caught a break when you decided to join that startup that hit it big, but you also busted your ass and made sensible decisions too. Even extreme examples like Zuckerburglar get a pass to some degree, because he did come up with a way to steal the idea and he did bring it to market.
Performers have never been able to connect those dots. Brad Pitt was born with a look that was in demand at the time. Hard work played no role in his rise to mega star over some other waiter who worked as hard or harder and is probably a better actor. He can be forgiven for thinking he is going more than he deserves. Shallowness and vanity prevent the healthy expression of gratitude so you get the weird proselytizing.
I’m not sure that is what’s happening with the managerial class. I sense they resent not having even more. They look at their billionaire masters and think they are undeserving, but they are impotent to do anything about it. So, the rage is directed down. It’s why we have the sin of punching down, which they always accuse critics of doing. It’s projection.
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=6731
Thanks, Z. That was the post that turned me on to Ben Sassy.
I can’t remember if Orwell lifted it from Burnham or some other thinker, but there is a theory out there that the true nexus of societal conflict is always between the top one or two percent and the up and comers in the next 10-15% (A. F. K. Organsky incorporates this into his geopolitical theories, too). In olden times, the one percent kept the middle down with religion and tradition, plus the occasional application of violence (if you’re a Marxist, I suppose you would argue that they retained power by controlling capital or food or literacy… I can buy that, too). The totalitarians used a secret police apparatus that made for good fiction as well as being scary and promiscuous in its use of violence. But it didn’t work out too well, lasting only a handful of generations.
The cloud and their managers are desperately casting about for a new means of social control. They have developed some pretty good ones (social media as a means of mass social shaming and targeted ostracism), but these have the unfortunate side effect of causing unprecedented political/ethnic/sectarian polarization since they give just about everyone an opportunity to connect with an affinity group — a group that they maybe didn’t even know existed before the innertunnel (witness the rise of Furries). They are in a bad spot. If they give up control, they lose. If they continue on using the new tools of control, they may get the entho-sectarian-civil war to end all ethno-sectarian-civil wars, and they lose.
So I do think that the managers punch down because of projection. But I also think that there are some historically new forces that they are dealing with that are scaring the bejesus out of them. Casting aside the fake proletarian literature of the vanguard Marxists, for the first time they can hear the unfiltered voices of the dirt people. Who by the way, control a lot of their food supply, build and maintain a lot of their crap, raise their brats, etc. The dirt people can organize and exercise power through the very same social media tools the cloud and managers seek to control them with. And there are a lot of us here at the edges of the managerial class who are sympathetic to the dirt people… who maintain an affinity with them for a variety of reasons… and who get that the cloud and managers have no special reason (other than the ones you outlined) for their privileged position. The managers and cloud are scared and unlike previous revolutions (I get tired of phrases like “social restructurings” and am using revolution in its Enlightenment sense), the smarter ones can see the storm clouds on the horizon very clearly (I’m looking at you, Paul Krugman).
Thanks as always for letting me blather on your blog, Z and for all you do.
My Broad Brush version is to think of Politicians as evolved Actors that have tired of just stealing money but now desire power as well.. There may be a few that don’t fit the mold but my bet is you wouldn’t run out of fingers and toes for the count
I’ve always found that the more work I do when analyzing a stock to buy, the luckier I get..
“Struggle, fear and the sleepless nights are the crucible of resourcefulness and creativity. The result is not just resourcefulness, but caution and prudence.”
Also humility, which is the one thing that all Cult people lack. Dirt People do not defy God. Cult people laugh at Him.
Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. C.S. Lewis
Clearly he and his bundlers/handlers hopes to repeat the Obama bio, which is just now beginning to unravel, displaying all its sordid splendor of soulless calculation. Anybody with the least familiarity with Chicago politics knew instinctively from day 1 that the JEF was a media manufactured creature of the local cloud hoping to take his/its act on the road.
But I think that the days of exotic ethnic immunity from scrutiny are, hopefully, over now. So, yah, he’s dumb. The question is how dumb are the voters in Cali. Sad to say, it *could* work again.
Keep in mind how many Californians vote the party ticket, most of them Dems, and that’s how this stuff gets done. It matters not who the candidate is, it is simply the “D” next to it that wins the votes.
I’m having a lot of trouble buying that all of a sudden Obama is a big ladies man. It sounds manufactured to me and you know they are not above fudging the historical record so that Obama doesn’t go down in the history books as gay.
Extremes meet, as they say, and this post reminds me of why the “high-low coalition” (popularized by Steve Sailer, but coined, I think, by Fred Siegel) worked so naturally. The people at the top and the people at the bottom of society both have contempt for the workers in-between. Black Ebonics vernacular is shot through with old carny terms like “mark” and “square,” words meant to denigrate people who play by the rules for being suckers. The Left loves to invert the old idiom “reap what you sow,” and reward people for behaving poorly (lobbying for cheaper tuition for illegals is only one egregious example).
Anmar must feel so conflicted, poor thing, with his troubled racial inheritance. Being Mexican and Arab he probably doesn’t know whether to use Green Thumb to fertilize his lawn or make a car bomb.
It’s why grandparents get on so well with their grandchildren: they both have a common enemy.uXSzt
But aside from the cloud-gods and their clown-puppets there are 50 million or so Progressive professionals and middle-to-upper-middle-level corporate employees who spent a lot of years doing a lot of schoolwork and are working hard and anxiously at their jobs every day. These are people from the same social class as Scott Adams’ (the Dilbert guy’s) commenters; their kids and the Scott-Adams’-commenters’ kids will marry and have babies, and those babies’ babies probably won’t think Progressively when they grow up — they will be the gentry of a new feudal order.
Somewhere along the line it occurred to me that the seeming unfairness of life, where the Streeps have no name until they hit the acting lottery, is just the organizational behavior of the solution that members of society bob around in.
Hating on the fact that a few twits precipitate out from the societal solution and find their fortune on the bottom of the market flask seems like missing the point.
The capitalist answer would seem to be to shake the market flask a little bit more, and let some actual talent fall out.
Buckley’s prescription for choosing politicians … just pick random names from the telephone directory… could be equally applied to choosing our actors. Any random fool would be as good an actor as the carefully chosen fools we have now.
In acting, like in anything, there’s a range of ability. There are really hopeless duds (MST3K was good at finding them) and I suppose there are a few Mozart-level geniuses. Are today’s stars those Mozarts of the acting world? They want you to think so, but no one really knows. They’re stars because they hit the lucky combination of ability, opportunity, patronage, and who knows what other levers that tossed them to the top.
Between those 2 extremes are lots and lots of very competent actors. I think that today’s stars are really not remarkable in their acting ability, and could easily be replaced by an unknown working in a provincial Little Theater without any quality loss at all. Acting is work, sure, but it’s not genius-level work. If it were, there wouldn’t be so many people doing it.
The funny thing about acting today is the talented people who can play multiple characters in multiple situations are not well paid. They make a nice living as character guys and supporting actors, but they are never stars. The stars have a narrow look and even more narrow range. They play one character really well, but only in a narrow set of situations. Sam Jackson is the most obvious example. He’s angry, shouting, bug-eyed black guy. If you need an angry middle-aged black guy, he’s great. Otherwise, he is not much value, other than name recognition.
That’s the other thing with the stars. The people who make movies invested in them. The people who discovered Brad Pitt and made him a star will get some of that back by putting him in films that need some juice.
I passed through Oklahoma and visited the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Very interesting – beautiful artwork and excellent displays. There was an entire section dedicated to the Hollywood cowboy; John Wayne, Henry Fonda,and many who were well before my time. It struck me the dignity these actors had in their real lives. Perhaps I’m wrong since I didn’t grow up hearing about then, plus no one was Twittering back then so we don’t really know what they were thinking about every 15-minutes. But I suspect they were real, genuine people who knew they were actors and didn’t pretend to be something they weren’t off camera.
I always get a kick out of reading the biographies of the old actors. The males almost always served in the military with many having served in combat. In most cases, acting was just something they sort of fell into, rather than pursued as a career. There’s also the fact that most came from humble beginnings. The stratification of American society has reduced the chances for someone to rise from the lower classes into the upper classes. Modern actors are more often than not the children of middle and upper middle class families.
And then you have the Fatty Arbuckle crowd and the whole “showgirl” culture. For every Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne, you can also find, back in the day, variants of the Hollywood lifestyle that put most of the current debauchery to shame.
That’s a good point. Carny culture has always been degenerate.
read Kenneth Anger’s book “Hollywood Babylon” for all kinds of behind the scenes hijinks in Hollywood (from the 1920’s up through the 1960’s is covered in the book).
I own both of the Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon books in hardback. Worth owning for the pics alone, but filled to the brim with degeneracy & sadness as well.
Robert Downey Jr seems to be versatile but he is something of an anomaly.
Cary Grant only ever played Cary Grant
Tom Hanks has been playing Tom Hanks for 30 years.
I have always liked Johnny Depp as an actor – as a person, not so much. He always seems to play odd-ball characters, but I do admit there is a sameness about them.
My immediate reaction on reading this was, “Yeah, and this can’t go on. How is this going to end?” So, how does the bust-up come?
My own bet is financial crack-up, followed by inflation…an after my vision gets real cloudy. Tim
Here’s an interesting piece on the number one grifter worldwide:
The Gravedigger of the Left
http://gatesofvienna.net/2017/05/the-gravedigger-of-the-left/
Now how did I know it was about him even before I clicked the link?
Sure enough what happened in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Other states should take heed & learn from our mistakes. Been here 5 generations; they keep coming & own it all; politically, culturally & economically.