Send in the Activists

Julie Delpy ruined my Sunday morning paper. I’m sitting here on the couch, drinking my morning tea, and there on page one of the Arts and Entertainment section is Julie Delpy bitching about the delivery truck parked outside a Gold Coast eatery, chewing out the driver for letting his truck idle while he’s delivering chicken to the restaurant that’s she’s eating at, and she’s still teed off even after he tells her that’s he’s driving a refrigeration truck and that he can’t just shut the engine off. Delpy insists on being moved inside away from the offending truck and then notes that, while “she doesn’t like her meat rotten”, there’s got to be a better way to keep food cold.

Yeah, I guess they could fill the truck with ice, like they did 80 years ago, before the invention of modern refrigeration, but I doubt they’d shut the diesel engine off anyways. Maybe they could pull the ice truck with Clydesdales, that would certainly cut down on pollution, but I don’t know if Ms. Delpy would want to eat her savory French toast in an outdoor café next to the piles of horse apples that such a transportation solution would imply. Maybe the refrigeration truck could be powered by a giant battery strapped to its roof, retractable wings turning to absorb ultrasonic radiation from the sun, as the truck idled silently with its load of chicken, kept cold by the benign gifts of the solar wind. But until someone invents such a thing, celebrities are going to have to occasionally put up with delivery drivers parking diesel trucks in front of their favorite State Street cafe.

I turn the page to a review of Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest flick, a documentary that, from best I can tell, is some kind of environmental call to action. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for a serious discussion of what we are doing to the environment, I just prefer when the discussion is not being led by Hollywood movie stars.

Let’s strip off the varnish and tell it like it is. The worst thing about these celebrity activists is not that they simplify issues, or lack the nuanced understanding to engage in thoughtful debate, it’s that they are fucking clowns. And I mean every last one of them, even the cool guys I can’t help liking or the women I can’t help fantasizing will one day invite me up for a passionate weekend in their private compound in the Malibu hills.

For centuries, it was considered shameful to be an actor, and that’s because any respectable family would be ashamed to watch a son or a brother up there on stage, pimping himself like a circus animal for the cheap applause of strangers. Theatrical revisionists have tried exchanging this unpleasant historical fact with the Vaudeville myth, to make it seem like it was sexual and moral ambivalence that made proper society blanche at them, but so-called proper European society has always had its share of deviants and accepted them within its realm, and this Vaudeville myth is 20% wishful thinking and 70% outright lie.

Show business is a gussied up circus act designed for our entertainment. These clowns put on their make up and they play their parts, and because we now let them into our living rooms, we can’t help but think somewhat kindly of them. Actors and show people sense this when they go out into the real world, so this has given them the hubris to think that they can spout about real world things, and that we, their public, will look up from our grazing and moo our collective assent. And this is part of what is killing liberalism, because so much of our end of the political debate is being argued by clowns.

I grew up in L.A., and I miss it sometimes. I miss the surf and the desert; I miss hearing the Adolescents in the local shoe store; I miss eating good fruit in the winter; and I miss the madeleines, the touchstones that rekindle the memories of my past.

But there are good reasons why I left there, and there are good reasons why I probably won’t return. A lot of this is cultural, and I consider myself an expatriate of sorts, longing for the parts of California that will forever be my home but finding it increasingly hard to stomach what the state has become, namely a playground for the obscenely rich, an enclave for the culturally arrogant, a playing out of the most atomistic aspects of the American dream.