Thoughts Aloud

Bill Whittle, the best contemporary essayist in America, happens to work in Hollywood; and Andrew Breitbart has recruited him to contribute at the new Big Hollywood blog. His first piece there, “The Workshops Of Identity” takes Hollywood to task:

One thing in common these patterns bear: the rise slow, the fall seemingly precipitous, and in every case we find the loss of nerve and strength and will comes not from the bottom, not from the common people at all, but from the rulers, the philosophers, the most affluent and educated who, in their comfort and Narcissism, abandon duty for self-absorption and self-gratification and who in boredom or self-loathing decide to fling open the gates of the city to the barbarians beyond, while the common man still stands at the walls prepared to die for the people in his charge.

And now here stands America, inheritor of that great tradition, astride that same cycle in its most dangerous and dire moment. And by any measure America is by far the most brilliant light the world has ever seen. And I can prove it, too.

Sean Penn recently wrote a piece for the Huffington Post in which he described America as a country much like any other, without any special claim to glory and indeed with an overabundance of sin to repent. Having visited Cuba and Venezuela, and having been enlightened by deep-thinking humanitarians such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, he implores his countrymen to give socialism a try and take its rightful place as simply one of the 200 or so other members of the great family of nations. “Viva USA!” writes Penn. Ironically, he says this unironically.

Reading his remarkable and lengthy article I was, at the close of it, reminded instantly of Lincoln, who once wrote, “He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.” But Sean Penn is not only perhaps the most gifted actor of my generation… he also has the courage to come out and openly say what so many in Hollywood really and truly do believe.

And there’s the problem. Because like Sean Penn, almost all of this industry is composed of people whose intellectual, reasoning and analytical skills are fifty miles wide and a quarter-inch deep. Hollywood’s Chattering Classes despise their Uncle Sam, but they are deeply, deeply in love with Auntie America.

But Hollywood’s Chattering Classes are thoroughly, completely and spectacularly wrong. And therein lies the source of a looming tragedy so great it would take a thousand movies to simply sketch it out… were it not for the fact that if Hollywood as it now exists continues to do what it is doing unopposed, there will be no more movies because there will be no more electricity.

Like anything Bill writes, you owe it to yourself the treat of reading the whole thing. â—„Daveâ–º

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