Interesting — wasn’t it? — that Michael Moore’s Oscar-night
outburst purported to speak for the other nominees in the category
of Best Documentary Feature because “we like nonfiction and we live
in fictitious times — a time when we have fictitious election
results that elect a fictitious president — a time when a man is
sending us to war for fictitious reasons.” A less self-righteous
and self-absorbed person than Mr. Moore might have had the thought
that the night of Hollywood’s annual festival of
self-congratulation was not the best occasion to be found standing
four-square against the “fictitious.”
At any rate, he was roundly booed for his remarks, though not
because the vast majority of Hollywood people were not anti-war. It
was not just Moore who claimed that “we are against this
war, Mr. Bush.” The Mexican actor Gael García Bernal also
insisted that his countrywoman and the subject of a recent biopic
starring Salma Hayek, Frida Kahlo, would have been on “our” side.
She would have been too — assuming that Trotsky, or Diego Rivera,
had told her it was OK. But even many of those who were lining up
with Saddam and Frida and friends were hostile, I think, because
the decorum and solemnity of the occasion was thought to be too
great for such crass political self-advertisement.
“Anytime you’ve got the pope and the Dixie Chicks against you,
your time is up!” said Mr. Moore as, his own time being up, he was
being gently led offstage. Maybe so, but it seemed at least equally
obvious that anytime you find such bumptious celebrity politicos as
Barbra Streisand and Susan Sarandon practicing some measure of
self-restraint on a public occasion — a mention of protest songs
and a peace sign between them — a loud-mouthed buffoon like Mr.
Boor will appear an embarrassment even among the seemingly
unembarrassable of Tinseltown.
All the same, it’s a little late in the day, one might have
thought, for Hollywood to be getting all tasteful on us. I myself
am always in favor of movie stars and other celebrities going
public with their political opinions on the basis of the converse
of the principle stated by Mark Twain when he said that “it is
better to keep your mouth closed and appear a fool than to open it
and remove all doubt.” To me it is always better for fools to look
like fools than to skulk around, like journalists, under a pretense
of “objectivity.”
For the same reason, I am always in favor of teachers’ and
academics’ being up-front about their political views. It is better
for impressionable young people to be indoctrinated when they know
they are being indoctrinated than when they don’t know it, or only
suspect it. In the case of the celebrities, however, there is also
the entertainment value of listening to, say, Janeane Garofalo
complain that her political views are not being treated with
sufficient seriousness or Martin Sheen solemnly opining that
President Bush is “out of his depth.”
What I don’t understand is why more people aren’t taking the
opportunity to laugh at them. Too many of those who are not fools
themselves seem incapable of recognizing folly when it issues from
the expensively capped teeth of celebrities. Howard Kurtz of the
Washington Post, for example, took the bizarre view that
the celebrity war protesters were ahead of the curve, leading the
press into what he described as a much needed “full-throated
debate” on the war.
Debate? What has Howie been smoking? These guys wouldn’t know a
debate if Cecil B. DeMille caught it in close-up. Maybe Moore had a
point, after all, about the fictitious times. Though the president
and the election results and the reasons for the war were all real
enough — trust a fool like Moore not to see that — the illusion
that the views of someone like him matter a hoot is a fiction too
many of us seem determined to uphold.
Mind you, we are loath to confess it. A CNN/USAToday
Gallup Poll asked in February: “Are there any entertainment
celebrities who, if they spoke out in favor of a position, would
make you more likely to favor that position” and, as a
separate question, Are there any ditto who would make you more
likely to oppose it. The answers: 11 percent yes to favor,
13 percent yes to oppose, and 87 and 85 percent no.
Now this is, like most polling results, less interesting as an
indicator of people’s real opinions than it is as a sign of the
things that matter to their sense of self. In other words, I would
be far from certain that the disinclination to be influenced by
celebrities is really as overwhelming as these figures suggest, but
it seems indisputable that huge majorities are unwilling to have
others think that they might be so influenced.
Yet they are not so sure about thee and me. When asked for their
“best guess” as to “how effective” the celebrities are “in
influencing the views of the president and other government
officials,” 34 per cent said very effective or somewhat effective,
while 64 percent said not too effective or not effective at all.
But at least the sense of shame that people seem to have about
paying any attention to celebrities’ views on political subjects is
something we ought to be able build on.
