I usually try to weigh in on concepts that come up in the news and to connect dots that I don’t see being connected elsewhere, but it’s sometimes good to digress just a little. This fits into the matrix of ‘famous people’ and their tribulations. The caveat here is that I tend to distain anyone for which fame is an end-product as opposed to accidental travelers that just happen to fall into the fame wagon. If fame finds you, great; if you go looking for it, beware; if you flog the public around you to take you there, double beware. There are always famous people in the news, and I mostly ignore them, but a few of them find themselves in predicaments that are cautionary tales relevant to know. Here’s a few notes on their fortunes and why they’re in the news.
Kanye West who has made up the pretentious title of Ye: I feel a little bit sorry for Kanye because he’s, in my opinion, mentally ill and is getting dragged through the streets of publicity right now over remarks about Jews and the backlash it has wrought. I don’t feel sorry for him because his whole career seems to have evolved to be centered on audacity for its own sake and expecting the public to worship him for it. I don’t care what his proclaimed propositions are because the man making them, in my opinion, never deserved that platform to begin with. Even if there were a kernel of truth to his latest dump, it’s irrelevant. The ‘left’ seems to be making him a boogie man, but it’s disturbing to see the ‘right’ try to either defend him or make him into a martyr, which makes them no better than the millions he’s used in pursuit of fame. Dear ‘right’, there are plenty of great minds to endorse and Kanye is not one of them, he’s not the suppressed hero you think he is. Kanye is an economy, apparently, and once the public decides to sell, well it’s a free market so you take what the market dictates. Hopefully he gets personal help. Hopefully, he’ll never be able to fleece the public again.
Jennifer Lawrence: This story is slightly dated but worth a mention here. Jennifer confided to Rolling Stone how difficult it is to deal with Republicans. Through it, she slips into all the common tropes as filtered through the progressive looking glass. Another story I read included further details of how it affected her relationship with her family of origin to the point that they were intolerable to her, solely based on their politics. As for her stands on women’s rights, I’ll just overlook the fact that she seems to be fully unaware that the ‘other side’ does indeed include many incredibly intelligent women – brighter than her in fact – and that they might have some illuminating wisdom for her. Her outlook is thus dauntingly blind to not even concede that tens and hundreds of millions of women have convictions different than her own. I became aware of Jennifer’s acting gift’s via ‘The Hunger Games’, the blockbuster that she was acting in at about the same time that she became disenfranchised from Republicans. [Note, I did too but only because they were abandoning conservatism at the time.] What seems absolutely amazing to me is how she could have missed the core meaning of her original signature work. In ‘The Hunger Games’, the ‘districts’, what was essentially the working class, the underlings, the commoners in the movie’s dystopian world for which she was their fictional hero, is now real-world conservatives. They are ruled and exploited by ‘Panem’, the educated urban elites clearly now represented by the constituencies of progressivism, the well-off college educated millennials like herself. How could she miss something so basic?
Taylor Swift: This week’s news featured what amounted to a traumatic attempted cancellation of Taylor Swift for perceived fat-shaming. In a music video, her skinny (to us) self, climbs on a scale and her mind reads it as FAT, spelled out. The FAT mob went wild. Swift caved and edited the video. So Taylor Swift is not up to jeopardizing her career for the ever-growing and wild-eyed woke mob. When you’re so deeply invested in your own fame as she is, I can understand the hesitancy. The hypothetical and increasingly probable problem with this is that the mob isn’t done yet. Step over the line and you’re dead. The problem is that the line is being dragged forward at alarming speed every day. A year or two ago, there would have been no backlash over the concept of FAT, but it and they got added to the woke agenda because so many of them are FAT and wanted no pressure to change. Tomorrow, another grievance will arrive until at last, Taylor and others who love their fame will have nowhere to go without jeopardizing their accumulated status. Checkmate. Models for those who’ve bucked the system are few but notable: JK Rowling, Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle comes to mind, but they had to wade through some serious hardship to overcome the stigma – and it’s not over. Taylor could do the same because she has the mega status to do so in my estimation, but why she really must do it is this: If the mob can bully her, just imagine what they can do to hundreds of millions of fans and people over the long haul. The signal she sends is this, ‘I caved, I’m afraid you’ll have to do so as well – sorry folks’. That’s really far worse than offending and standing up to a minority of FAT bullies.
Tom Brady: Tom Brady of NFL fame and Gisele Bündchen of super-model fame have divorced. Of primary concern to Gisele was Tom Brady’s return from faux ‘retirement’ to play another season as a record-setting old guy. He’s playing sub-standard football and likely won’t continue past this season or if he does, it’ll be even worse. If Gisele has contributed issues to the dissolved marriage, they are the private home matters that would be uncouth to write about publicly, so the dominate issue here is the very public behaviors of fame practiced by Brady. Super-model wife vs. at best some dubious, unattainable additional fame associated with what? Playing football until you have grey hair? I’ll be honest, I’ve never liked Tom Brady for the same reason that many people don’t. One, he’s conceited, always has been. Two, he’s a convicted cheater. Three, he is that nemesis of every man that we remember in high school, the privileged ass-hat who got away with too much and got handed undeserved favor, the ‘Chad’ or ‘Brad’ in the group. Nevertheless, I would have wished for him to retire into some happy home life and to have discovered the fruit of mellowing with age. Instead, he seems to be choosing ignoble-diminished-stayed- too-long-just-leave-please-retirement. This would seem to foreshadow further equally poor judgement in whatever his next gigs will be. Brady could have guaranteed himself a gold-plated image in a timely exit from NFL fame but instead, he’s choosing a different kind of fame, apparently.