Out Of Touch

I don't think I've ever watched an Academy Awards show (or as I likes to call it, the gay Super Bowl) all the way through. I came close with Chris Rock, and even closer the other night with Jon Stewart. Naturally, political humor was expected, and the pleasant surprise was that Stewart expended more energy skewering the self-satisfactions of limo libs than the mendacity of the Bushies. For one, just scratching the surface of the latter would take all night; for another, it is the former that needs to be poked into action.

But my favorite single moment of the show (besides the spectacle of the Three-Six Mafia making the vaunted heartland run for their remotes as they remonstrated volubly on the inherent difficulties of pimpology) came pretty early on -- the first award, in fact. I have not yet seen either of George Clooney's entrants, and I imagine the Netflix wait upon their releases just got considerably longer. In fact, I have seen very little of Clooney's work, but the wife seems to think he's all that plus the proverbial bag o' chips.

No, it was Clooney's speech that really hit home. I am not a big believer in the much-ballyhooed transformative power of the cinema, but I suppose many people are, and that's a distinction with some effect. But he is correct -- it was "out of touch" Hollywood that grew the fuck up before Bobo's World, it was Hollywood that has at least tried at times, rather than just giving up altogether.

I have no fucking clue what world these crazy biddies are living in, with their pinched faces, pursed lips, and endlessly clutched pearls. It seems that Walmart has become the paradigm of the heartland value. This is emblematic of their cognitive dissonance; even as they grow more and more xenophobic, more insular, more paranoid, they embrace and hump the leg of a corporate behemoth that could not exist without global interdependence, without trade deals with faraway lands. The sweet deals they get depend entirely on those awful brown furriners they'd never live next to. There is more to engagement than perfunctory nukes-for-mangoes visits to India, in a ham-fisted effort to encircle China.

Places where the demographics skew to old people and young children are, quite frankly, doomed, at least in terms of sustainability. The only way a place like Lebanon, Kansas, continues to exist is at the mercy of predominant land-owning families who run herd over the rest of the inhabitants. Everyone else with any sense has moved at least to Omaha. There's not even a fuckin' movie theater; how many other jobs you think that place has? Twenty bucks says that Walmart is the largest local employer by far for these folks, and again, that just underscores their ignorance as far as Hollywood is concerned.

And that brings me back to Clooney's real, unstated point -- gays, in terms of social opprobrium and legal recourse, are the blacks of the 21st century. They are treated like third-class citizens merely because of who they are, by people who not only don't know any better, but don't even know that they don't know any better. And if the red-staters can't even admit that simple fact to themselves, how do you think they're doing with the idea that information and oil are scarce commodities that are always being actively leveraged against them to get them to vote against their own self-interest?

It ain't George Clooney that's out of touch; he's right on the damned money. It's these shriveled culture vultures that need to grow the hell up and understand that the world changes, whether they want it to or not. The old makes way for the new, constantly, endlessly. Some people choose to chronicle the changes, present them to the public at large for informed discussion; some choose to bitch and moan about movies they never intend to see in the first place.