Too Much To Dream

Power to the Sheeple

Meryl Yourish has a perfect reply to Yet Another Hollywood Imbecile. Now it's Roy Scheider doing the sneering. His target? The herd-like, easily-brainwashed American public. His take on the war is basically that we -- or rather, the non-antiwar-protesting portion of the American public -- have been hypnotized by all those waving flags, that we're basically just troop groupies. Yeah, whatever, lousy-sequel-to-2001 star. Anyway, Meryl bags these folks. When I was a certain age, I thought I and my peers were sooo much smarter than those dimbulbs in the Reagan administration, with their simplistic cowboy ways that only brought down the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War. The thing is, these celebs think that because they are rich and their faces are known by millions, and because in their professions they get to pretend to be all sorts of different characters, that they have special insights into What's Really Going On in the cosmos. But they don't -- they actually live in a bell jar surrounded by yes-men and sycophants whose job it is to constantly puff up their egos and the fragile self-esteem that most entertainers seem to have, and to shield their charges from as much of unpleasant real life as possible. Even the lesser Hollywood lights get this sort of treatment, as much as their place on the Hollywood food chain will get them. But strip away all of this and you have a collection of people who are usually no more well-informed (and in many cases, are not capable of being any more well-informed) on politics and other matters outside their sphere than the average cashier at a suburban grocery store. Rather less so.