Yeah, so it's pretty obvious that the author is a Republican, with Michael Moore, Jimmy Carter (founder of Habitat for Humanity), Al Sharpton, Al Gore, DNC chair Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, and John Edwards all in the top 20. Also making the list are Paris Hilton's parents, Barbra Streisand, Dan Rather, Eminem, Ludacris, and Latrell Sprewell.
I haven't read the book, so I don't know his arguments for each person, but here's the amazon.com blurb:
"Bernard Goldberg takes dead aim at the America Bashers (the cultural elites who look down their snobby noses at "ordinary" Americans) ... the Hollywood Blowhards (incredibly ditzy celebrities who think they're smart just because they're famous) ... the TV Schlockmeisters (including the one whose show has been compared to a churning mass of maggots devouring rotten meat) ... the Intellectual Thugs (bigwigs at some of our best colleges, whose views run the gamut from left wing to far left wing) ... and many more."
From watching the interview, it seems that his main point is that people in Hollywood (and the entertainment industry in general) have a far greater influence than politicians in Washington.
I caught the author on the Daily Show, and I agree with Jon Stewart, that we be more concerned with the politicians, who have the power to directly change our lives (through foreign policy, taxes, social security, the environment, etc.). Stewart made a good point that there was no correlation between the people the author named and the basic standard-of-living measurements (drug rates, crime rates, etc.), and noted that they have actually been decreasing.
What's with all the entertainers on the list? If you have a couple of platinum-selling CDs (Eminem won an Oscar!), or a hit TV show, you're "screwing up" America?? Latrell Sprewell may deserve to be on the list, though, due to his choking incident back in the day to more recently complaining about not making enough to "feed his family." Then again, I don't buy the argument that entertainers should display impeccable behavior all the time, since some entertainers are just good at what they're paid to do. Sprewell is a perfect example of this. He's pretty good at basketball, but he isn't a model citizen. Does that mean he's screwing up America? I don't think so, as long as people realize (as most do) that he gets paid to play basketball, not to be a role model.
2 comments:
I think that entertainers should be as good as they can. Because when you think about it they have a lot of fans that are young children. Children who probably don't understand that the entertainers are just paid for what they do. They look up to them and consider them role models in everyday life. Children think that whatever entertainers do is right. Yeah they don't paid to be a role models, but you can't tell a child that. So if entertainers don't behave morally, children may not understand whats right/wrong. Like they say, children are the future of tommorow.
~Brahama
While crime rates, drug rates, etc. are one part of the measure of how messed up a country is, I think there are other, possibly more important ones. There are a lot of unmeasured factors, like the people's attitudes toward other countries, their tendencies toward love verses their tendencies toward violence, the amount of respect they have for their parents, how much they care about people who are homeless and abandoned. Crime rates and drug rates are only a secondary reflection of the people's worldviews.
The heart of a country is in its people. The work that politicians do more or less reflects the type of people they represent (if they don't, they won't stay in service much longer). Entertainers play an important roll because they not only reflect, but also broadcast and communicate, certain attitudes of a subset of the population.
A major difference between politicians and entertainers is that, frankly, people are influenced by entertainers a lot more than they are by politicians. The airwaves and internet are saturated with the words and ideas of entertainers; hardly anyone knows what any politician is doing unless he checks the news regularly or hears some snippet of news from a friend. Consequently, entertainers, through the messages they choose to communicate, have significantly more power than politicians in swaying the heart of a country one way or another.
So while I agree that it's very important to watch what politicians are doing, I think it's also important to recognize that entertainers have a strong influence on how screwed up a country is.
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