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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Friday, January 12, 2018

Why We've Let Actors Become Our Moral Guides

Jonah Goldberg  Posted: Jan 12, 2018

There's a great scene in the wonderful 1982 movie "My Favorite Year," which is set in 1954. Peter O'Toole plays a semi-washed-up actor named Alan Swann, famous for swashbuckling roles. For reasons too complicated to explain here, Swann tries to shimmy down the side of a building using a fire hose. He ends up dangling just below a cocktail party on a balcony.

Two stockbrokers are chatting when one of them notices Swann swinging below them. "I think Alan Swann is beneath us!" he exclaims. 

The second stockbroker replies: "Of course he's beneath us. He's an actor."

It may be hard for some people to get the joke these days, but for most of human history, actors were considered low-class. They were akin to carnies, grifters, hookers and other riffraff.......

Watch the TV series "Inside the Actors Studio" sometime. It's an almost religious spectacle of ecstatic obsequiousness and shameless sycophancy. Host James Lipton acts like some ancient Greek priest given an audience with Zeus, coming up just shy of washing the feet of actors with tears of orgiastic joy. I mean, I like Tom Hanks, too. But I'm not sure starring in "Turner & Hooch" (one of my favorite movies) bestows oracular moral authority...............

The most recent Golden Globes ceremony has already been excoriated for being a veritable geyser of hypocritical effluvia, as the same crowd that not long ago bowed and scraped to serial harasser and accused rapist Harvey Weinstein, admitted child rapist Roman Polanski and that modern Caligula, Bill Clinton, congratulated itself for its own moral superiority.......To Read More....

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