My Rant About Seth Rogen

This week I step away from the usual and delve into a bit of spectacle. :)

First, an important statement:  From all appearances, Seth Rogen and his wife are nice and good people.  It’s his body of “work” that I have issue with.

Were it just the low-brow, inane, and repetitively predictable, I would have brushed it aside and moved on.  But since he torched a prized entertainment icon of mine, I am moved to respond:

Even though he’s from Canada, he’s done nothing to dilute the belief that Jewish people benefit from that connection and receive preferential treatment in Hollywood.  He has some talent (largely wasted, IMO), but this can’t be the true talent in the up and coming Hollywood generation.

His writing and acting take the same predictable it-was-barely-funny-the-first-time antics, and is lamentably one-dimensional.  That it also legitimizes a stoner modus operandus is further regrettable.  If that stoner “lifestyle” is taken as a role-model, that’s even more horrid.

My biggest beef, however, is how he eviscerated and made a comedic mockery of what could have been and should have been an equivalent to the Batman franchise.  I’m talking about The Green Hornet.  I won’t go into all the details of that mockery and evisceration, that travesty of a movie, but Rogen’s utter screwing up of that is a huge cultural-entertainment offense.  He has ruined, perhaps for good, what could have been something of tremendous entertainment value.

Or maybe I’m wrong, and the thing was so camp it never had legs (or, rather, wings) for the long haul.  We’ll probably never know now!

Frankly Speaking

Barney Frank, recently retired congressman, says that conservatives have belied their “conservatism” because they decry big government but want government to regulate what we read, what we smoke or ingest, who we have sex with, who we can marry.  

You know, big, intrusive government issues.

So much of the human condition is about this mad desire of humans to control the world, and by implication, the words and actions, of those around them.

Often by the very souls who spout (or shout) the words “freedom” and "independence."

Must mean the freedom and independence for everyone to do what those souls dictate. :)

Relation Ships Passing

All the words are said as they gather at the grave site: “Let’s make sure to get together some time where death is not involved.  Someone should not have to die to call us to the same spot.”  Everyone assures that they will, that they will make the time to get together sometime outside where a family member or friend has died.

And it is the way of this frenetic life that they won’t.  For many hundreds of years now, this Western culture, and in particular, this American one, has not valued relationships enough.  It even nearly stamped out the culture here that did.

And there is little that could make us poorer as a result.

High School Lows

The de-emphasizing (the mildest or most generous term I could think of) of the middle class in favor of the wealthy is in evidence at my high school’s alumni basketball tourney.  Once a crowded, boisterous, broadly supported fundraiser, it is now a ghost of its former self.  A wealthy alum, who gives to the school, has his wife (who didn’t even attend the school), run the tournament.  She banned all alcohol, including the beer garden, “for liability purposes,” and because “it shows a poor example to children.” She designs the brackets herself, but only releases them less than a week before the tourney, making impossible the return of those who must schedule flights.

The result?  It is minimally attended, gets few spectators or non-players, doesn’t even raise a tenth of the money it used to, the sense of community and camaraderie are hollowed out, and even general contributions to the school are down (forcing the school to rely more and more on a small number of wealthy donors).

Oh, the school now has a new gym and a new football field, compliments of this wealthy donor.  Yet has far less “glue” and community than when it had an old gym and no football field.  And far less enrollment.

I wonder how much people think about the second and third order effects of emphasizing one class and dismissing another.

I guess with the hollowing out of the middle class, and their resultant fewer and fewer “spare” resources, maybe there wasn’t much of a choice.

Tarred and Choked

The next time you hear the self-serving, letting-oneself-off-the-hook, powerless-fomenting, justifying assertion about highly polluting tar sands oil that “the oil will go someplace; it will get drilled regardless,” there is another statement you need to put with it:   “Pay, oil-slaves.  Choke on your planet.” 

Lazy Is Rarer Than You Think

Traveling across the country, what I find far more than not is how much people not only want to have a meaningful job at meaningful/livable pay, but WANT to work.

As Chris Rock says, something for ignorant haters to need to realize is that black people with 2 jobs hate lazy black people too.  It’s just that there are far fewer lazy ones than there are hard working people who want good work at good pay and can’t find any, especially where they live.

Something for all of us to think about the next time some simplistic demagogue tries to blame a group unfairly and manipulate us in the process.

The Richness of Our Knowledge and The Impoverishment Of Our Actions

It is hard to see how we could be more utter failures about poverty than we are.  We KNOW what to do about it, we HAVE the resources, we UNDERSTAND the second and third order effects of poverty, we COMPREHEND WELL that reducing poverty actually REDUCES overpopulation.

And yet we throw up our hands every year.

Or attach some ridiculous precondition on any real effort.

We could not be much farther away from Jesus’s words and actions.

The privileged should have to trade places for a week with the markedly unprivileged.  Much would change. MUCH.