Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Open question: does anyone—should anyone—care what celebrities have to say about anything at all? I suppose you could care if they were thespians, good at their work, true professionals, who you’ve asked for advice in regards to acting. Likewise painters, pool players, and other similar worthies. Don’t get me started on if athletes are worth listening to in any respect, given their already enlarged senses of worthiness and entitlement, all the while promoting gang mentality and violence for its own sake. But this misses the earlier question: should we care what they all think otherwise?

Politicians, whose opinions on politics are hardly worth mentioning as so many—the pessimist in me says most—care about nothing more than becoming a lifer, are paid with our tax dollars to talk about politics and (apparently) rip our Constitutional rights from us. Politics is their job, and I hardly care what they have to say about the color of grass. That being the case, how much more do I care about what Clooney, Sarandon, or any of that bitter lot feel, or think, at all? Heck, I’m not really concerned with what folks like Ted Nugent and Kurt Russell think, and I like them.

So, given that I—and no one is an audience of one so I have to assume that I’m far from alone in this—wish that they would just shut the hell up, why is it so hard for the Hollywood Left to keep their gobs closed? Are the Right wing celebrities as mouthy, and the news services just don’t report it because their too busy waiting for Saint Barry to walk on water? I find that hard to believe. Heck, every other thing a Right winger says is on the news right away, twisted into some kind of sexist, racist hate monologue, so why not their rationalized politics? I think I’ve got a theory.

See, when the Right come to a conclusion, they come to it through thought, process of elimination, and deep soul-searching. Their opinions aren’t grounded on wet newspaper, but on foundations of stone and brick. That being the case, given the hole-brained thugs that pass as investigative reporters nowadays, when they are confronted with the hows and whys of their beliefs, they can back them up.

It feels different with the Left. Listening to them, it is all a hodgepodge of anti-Trump, pro-free health care, pro-big brother, ant-Constitution nonsense that they might as well have read on the back of a box of cereal packaged by LBJ or Uncle Joe Stalin. They repeat by rote, with never an original thought in their heads, but with a fanaticism that would have made the Nazi youth proud.

And Lord are they getting desperate. And dumb. With no idea of how money works. They seem to have missed that bit about nothing being free. Everything is paid for somewhere. Free healthcare? Why not, we’ll just tax the middle and upper classes until we’re all destitute. But hallelujah, at least we’ll all have the same cut-rate, crap, government insurance! Victory!

Again: back to the question: why do we listen? Is it because we have nothing better to do? Waiting for the pizza to be delivered, we just need to watch the idiot box, putting up with whatever nonsense is on, rather than picking up a book? Better to be entertained than enlightened? Crap. I can’t believe that we’ve gone that far down the rabbit hole. We’re Americans, damn it! We fought the tide of Communist oppression for fifty years, and by God we won! Are we only going to let all of that go, now, electing them into office, without their having to even hide what they are? How in the name of God did Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez even get on the ballet? Our predecessors are rolling over in their graves today.

So how did we get here? Where did we go wrong? I suppose that so much of it comes down to that ol’ fallback, the Cult of Personality. Heinlein (at least I assume it was him; Lord knows I see his name attached to the meme enough) said “[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously-after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important ... so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth.” [Link to Source] So here we have a cluster of self-important less-worthy-than-thous who are so sure of their inherent greatness that they need to save us from ourselves, like the fascists always do. And they are met with pen arms and empty minds by that always present portion of the population that would rather follow the devil into hell than make up their own minds about anything at all.

Sickening tough this may be, it is hardly anything new. There have always been leaders, followers, and leave-me-aloners, for all of human history. Why should now be any different. What we have to do is what great individualists have always done: rise above. Inform ourselves. Recognize threats for what they are and act accordingly. Become the ideal human subject, the one who sees the world with open eyes, and bends knee to no one other than God and the woman we’re proposing to.

And don’t forget to put your money where your mouth is. If there is someone that you find to be politically or personally repugnant, don’t fork over the cash to embrace their product. Save it for some other, more worthy, purveyor of entertainments and insights. There are many. Walk past the endless barrage of Stephen King doorstops, and buy Heinlein, Koontz, Smith, or someone else whose work doesn’t make you feel greasy after you’re done with it. Ditch out on the Clooney flick, they’re always pretentious and lackluster anyway, and pick Alongside Night, The Thing from Another World, or The Wrath of Khan. You’ll feel better if you do.