“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners and if we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”
This is not satire. This is the insane, yet logical, conclusion of a culture where victimhood is currency and power. Step aside BLM. You’re so 2016. As Meryl Streep informed us in her Golden Globes speech, the new most persecuted and marginalised group for 2017 looks set to be the Hollywood elite.
Just when we thought that the staggering lack of self-awareness among Hollywood celebrities had reached peak stupid, Meryl Streep comes along and astounds us in her capacity to go ‘full retard’. Yes, one of the same class of people who are always chiding us over our original sin of being ‘all of the white people’ actually just suggested that she and her bourgeoise peers in attendance are more disadvantaged and more marginalised in Trump’s America than anyone else on the identity politics pyramid that they pretend to care about.
Meryl Streep is more persecuted and marginalised than the Guatemalan maid who cleans her house and has yet to see any results of ‘Fight for 15’. Meryl Streep is more persecuted and marginalised than the Mexican bus-boy who cleared her plate of half-eaten salad earlier that day. Meryl Streep is more marginalised than the African-American limo driver who chauffeured her there that evening.
Meryl Streep is more persecuted and marginalised than the serf army of white trash, Indians, Pakistanis, and other ethnicities just a notch below being indentured (being indentured at least guarantees food on the table, a casualised catering company does not) who thanklessly toil serving canapés, champagne, and absorbing demeaning attitudes and abuse to make for a fully realised narcissistic experience for these faux-commie genuine one percenters.
And it’s a beautiful thing. When they lost, we were concerned that Cultural Marxists, particularly these most elite of elite Champagne Socialists, might back off a little, dial it down just a bit, show contrition, be perceived as voices of reason by the masses when the President-Elect inevitably made the mistakes and missteps to be expected. They didn’t. They learned nothing. And this ill-conceived speech by Meryl Streep may well do more harm to the left than the libido of Anthony Wiener, Hillary’s lazy phoned-in campaigning, and the Podesta emails put together.
The best thing is how spectacularly the mask has slipped. When people are afraid of losing their power and influence, they make mistakes. And Streep’s was a doozy. Celebrities can fool most of the people most of the time with identity politics, provided the grievance is about someone else. Even Leo kind of gets away with running up a carbon footprint roughly the size of Albury because his tears are for the environment and future generations… not about how real or imagined climate change will effect Leo. If he were to do that, even the casual apolitical movie fan would be asking the Wolf of Wall Street about his own emissions.
Streep, on the other hand, didn’t do as good a job of not revealing her cards. I think that one thing the (less prosperous) Left and Right can agree on is that we are in a very turbulent touch-and-go period where Western society can just as easily veer toward socialism as it has nationalism. The actress considers herself to be ‘of the people’, but she has subconsciously yet clearly telegraphed herself as being aligned with the kind of ‘bourgeoise decadence’ that was and still is rejected by Bernie Sanders supporters. She may think that she’s speaking the language of the ‘oppressed’, but to them she is clearly and openly speaking the language of Zsar Nicholas or the French Aristocracy. If she sells the idea of revolution too convincingly, Meryl Streep may well be one of the first ones that the truly oppressed reactionaries of a socialist revolution come for.
Streep has disparagingly suggested that sports are little more than opiates for the mindless masses, as if her own extremely safe and commercial endeavours are somehow the artistic equivalent of the Sistine Chapel. Way to win hearts and minds, sweetheart. I live reasonably comfortably, but I’m always mindful of being extra nice to the people who serve me at restaurants, people who pack my bags at the supermarket, and the people who come to work today and don’t know if they’ll be asked back tomorrow. These are the people you want to keep on side if everything descends into anarchy.
It isn’t difficult to imagine an unemployed, previously misinformed BLM supporter (who has been lied to all these years about the enemy being some blue-collar white Trump voter living in a trailer in Omaha) watching the speech as it is gleefully replayed time and time again by a partisan (and similarly lacking in self-awareness) MSM, and saying to his or herself, “Oh… so that’s how it really is”. An angry mob can quickly be redirected, and if the status of piñata shifts from #allofthewhitepeople and #bluelives to #hollywoodlives, as it rightly should after these words from an actress who genuinely does enjoy white privilege, the ‘evils of nationalism’ and the building of walls may well be the only thing that saves these people from the same fate as the Russian and French aristocracies.
It’s your XYZ.
Photo by Vincent Luigi Molino 