That’s Entertainment? #EmmyAwards #Hollywood #Politics #Activism #Soapbox

I loved to go to the movies when I was a kid, especially on Saturday mornings. Our parents drove my Baby Sister and me to the old Lefferts Movie Theater at Lefferts Boulevard and Liberty Avenue in Queens and dropped us off for the Saturday Kiddie Matinee. The folks gave us our ticket money and money for popcorn, candy, and drinks, none of which cost anywhere near what they cost today. We saw about a dozen Warner Brothers cartoons and then an age appropriate movie. They were often comedies starring the legendary comedy team of Abbott and Costello (e.g. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein) or The Three Stooges (e.g. Have Rocket Will Travel), or westerns starring Roy Rogers or Gene Autry. All the kids cheered and went wild when each cartoon appeared on screen and went totally nuts when the featured film began. We had fun because we were being entertained.

When we grew up, there were the double features we went to with friends or with a date. The A movie plus a B movie equaled a full night’s entertainment for a fraction of the cost of one movie today. If we went to the movies, we knew we’d leave the theater glad that we went. Film actors back in the day were larger than life Movie Stars. Those Movie Stars of the past entertained us without cussing and without removing their clothes. They had charisma and they had class. It was a time in the history of Hollywood when entertainment was its primary export, not political activism.

In public, the stars of yesterday kept their politics to themselves. When they received awards, they said thank you to everyone who helped them along the way. When they presented awards, they did so graciously. In neither instance did they say nasty things about government officials and others who did not agree with their politics.

Somewhere along the way, many Hollywood celebs took a hard turn to the left. They then decided they were so cool they knew better than the country’s clueless capitalist population (that made them millionaires and celebrities in the first place) what to believe, what to think, what to say, how to behave, whom to respect, whom to call a racist bigot, what laws to obey or disobey, how to practice or not practice one’s religion, how the country should be run, and how we all should vote–and they became extremely vocal about it. Yes, these same born-again socialist hypocrites who own huge energy-sucking mansions, and fly all over the world in private energy-sucking air-polluting jets, now lecture the unworldly, uninformed little people on green energy, conservation, small footprints, and the global warming (now they’re calling climate change) to which they themselves are surely contributing in large amounts. It’s a case of do as I say and not as I do. Bunch of phonies, the lot of them.

I don’t know about you, but I hear enough of that sort of thing on the nightly news. I need a respite from unpleasant news. I don’t want to hear it from the people whose careers are supposed to involve entertaining me and my fellow citizens. If today’s performers were as classy and professional as the entertainers of the past, they would go on stage and use their talent to lift our spirits and take our minds off the dangerous times in which we live. Instead of doing that, many of today’s performers have chosen to climb upon a soapbox and in some cases display an appalling ignorance of the issues on which they speak. It’s not even entertaining to watch them make utter fools of themselves. Pity.