Deja-Vu All Over Again

The A-Listers' Ball

Harvey Weinstein is Hollywood's newest blockbuster production.  It garners breathless shock and horror headlines every day.  The rating agencies are claiming that this particular soap opera has metrics which are off the scale. 

Forgive us if we stifle yawns.  This is a rerun of an old B-grade soapie we have seen countless times.  In one corner is a cluster of Hollywood A-listers surrounded by a gaggle of wannabes.  In the other corner are ordinary rubes.  The celebs, surrounded by their corner attendants who fawn, adulate, and hang on every word, proclaim the evils of every kind of pop cause: sexism, Trumpism, anti-abortionism, along with really serious, momentous evils like Global Warming.  They point the finger.  They hector.  They lecture.  They pontificate and declaim from the heights of Mount Sinai.  They are the high priests and priestesses of Baal worship.  The media ooh and aaah at every rehearsed word and gestured artifice.

The lesser mortals in the other corner weave with the jibes and duck with the haymakers.  The arrogant energy of the A-listers is relentless.  We start to feel our shame.  We hang our heads.  We are on the verge of capitulation, throwing in the towel.  Maybe we really are dumb rubes.  Maybe that dumb blond A-lister really is an authority on climate change and nuclear war. 

Well, yes she is.  But not as we were led to expect.
The plot has an unexpected twist. It turns out dumb blond A-lister was really an expert in climate change of a different kind.  She has been an expert in sensing the way the winds blow in Hollywood, and read the climatic conditions to a T.  She understood the essence and nature of global warming.  It really was, like, you know, nuclear war, but not as the rest of the world knew it.  Instead real climate change was Harvey Weinstein--ace A-lister, big time producer--coming on to her relentlessly.  How could she resist.  Her career was sinking.  The world was on the verge of missing out on all her talent which Harvey was veritably lusting to showcase to all and sundry.  Poor petal.  And even those who resisted the attentions of Hurricane Harvey said nothing.  It was fear of a nuclear-winter, of their career being vaporised at ground zero, that made them silent and quiet as church-mice.

And now, here she was being groped by a Jabba-the-Hutt-fatso whom wondrous Meryl Streep, that glorious Hollywood A-lister,  publicly called god.  You know, that great guy fawned over and praised by none other than Michelle Obama.  That one who is great pals with the Clintons.  And they all knew.  They all knew about the double standards, the hypocrisy, the complicit "see no evil, hear no evil".  Oh, it's just the way things work when you are in Hollywood, darling.

And, it turns out, everybody else in the A-lister corner--all the hangers-on, all the fawners--they also knew about the sexual exploitation.  They also knew about heaps of other predators.  It was Hollywood's power politics, its real live version of Game of Thrones.  They shut their mouths and covered it all over because their "oh so important careers" required their silence and their complicit enabling of perversion. 

How dare these folk presume--demand--the right to lecture the human race on anything.