The time has come to admit it -- Jodie Foster is not all that. Foster, beloved child actress turned two-time Academy Award winner, Yale magna cum laude, respected director and person who has lived in the public eye for 40 years without a nip slip, bar brawl or nutty Twitter outburst, seems in many ways the epitome of graceful modern womanhood. She is serious about her work, she is devoted to her children and she was honored Monday as one of Elle magazine's top women in Hollywood. And it was there that she spoke of "an amazing actor, an incredible friend, a loyal friend of mine for 18 years." She described him as "incredibly loved by everyone who ever comes into contact with him or works with him ... truly the most loved man in the film business, so, hopefully that stands for something."
She was talking about Mel Gibson. Say what?
[. . .]
Yet Foster's suspect loyalty to internationally acclaimed, unrepentant creeps doesn't end with "the most loved man in show business." She'll soon be heading to Europe to costar in "The God of Carnage," directed by Oscar-winning child rapist Roman Polanski.
[. . .]
Perhaps the oddest thing about Foster, however, is how she continues to be lauded as an icon. Aside from publicly thanking "my beautiful Cydney who sticks with me through all the rotten and the bliss" three years ago, she's steadfastly never acknowledged her personal life or relationships, which, frankly, for somebody of her power and influence, is pretty cowardly. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, “Jodie Foster’s baffling Mel Gibson defense,” 21 October 2010)
Whittling with your whip
I guarantee it, at some point Salon will go after Paul Krugman. With liberals, at least, the point for Salon isn't that you too are crazy, but that you're showing you may not be one to dutifully follow along when liberalism becomes one long crazed sequence of whip-lashings against the misbehaving. Fight to keep your head, to think for yourself, to reach out and truly do good, and Salon will hope to hurt you bad for reminding "them" of a fairness they know at some level they were so eager-ready to leave behind.
At some point too, MEW will join an emerging chorus and go after Joan Walsh as well (remember her [Walsh's] fair and genuine concern for Rush Limbaugh? It was too deeply rooted to be just a "be-careful-with-that," once-only.). Since I suspect that right now they're (MEW and Walsh) friends, the dynamics involved in this will be fascinating to watch.
However, I don't care who his friends are (or are not) and certainly do not judge people for staying friends with someone I myself would personally not hang around with. If you do that, MEW, in very short order you will find yourself with few friends (or none at all) as human beings are naturally and perhaps tragically very imperfect beings. (Laure1962, response to post)
"Friends"
MEW is at no risk of losing friends with this, because she is showing here that she is intent to smear anyone out there who suggests some kind of troubling independence, someone who can't ultimately be counted on to just defer, who isn't yet defeated and might balk, is resisting, stalling, beginning to talk/snarl back, and most of her friends will increasingly be defined by their "subscription" to this life prescription. Well, not friends, maybe, but a whole host of people conjoined in servicing the current ethos -- "show you will be no different; show you will defer." There will soon be lots of them, but for awhile they'll feel themselves first-ascendants to an exclusive, exhilarating adventure -- maybe the only one actually available right now: they'll be smeared by those they cast off, will feel themselves brave and afflicted, loyal and (therefore) loved: they'll think themselves friends, and may never know different.
The point of these early depression years seems to be about "familiarizing" everyone with the new ethos -- true individualism, pokings-about in what may be genuinely new directions rather than whatever sanctioned ones, resistance to trends that just must take over -- is over. You will be cued as to what you are supposed to think/believe "now" -- likely, first hate the stupidity/spoiled indulgence of everyone everywhere, then, when the depression has fully kicked in years hence, count yourself once again amongst the "injustly suffering masses" (i.e., the mass you did everything you could to create by not too much focusing on the economic decisions which ensured their creation during the first years of the depression, and instead mostly on the particular variant of craziness in the unveiling list of never-ending crazies -- such a perfect counterpoint to the distanced-but-rational primary Depression executor, Obama) -- and you will be made to feel as if your very survival depends on your speed of adoption.
They're starting off easy, for an assured trial run. Past-date Jodie Foster and anti-Semitism. Repeat. But so you're properly on the watch, notice now the long, long stretch required to dethrone (or at least submerge) Krugman, which you feel they're already "considering," finding some way of floating into consciousness, seemingly just to show their frowning-upon-it but actually also to venture out for further straight, larger public consideration, and which looks like it will commence shortly. The frown-prone Brits are currently frowning upon Keynesian economics (Krugman is all Keynesian: spend! Goddamn it, spend! -- what are you waiting for?!?). Will this luring, brutal British “stoicness” prove means for some sanity-intent liberals to join Republicans in venturing him as possibly too hippie, too permissive, for our current, deadly serious, economic conundrums?
. . .
Why Salon? Because it feels like where the fight for the soul of all liberals will be staged; lost or won. It looks like where we will determine whether hope, true straight-talk, is something that can sustain through the heat of battle, survive the light of day, or compelled to lurk in shadows, find friendship with the oblique, deform into it, to be less visible, more overlookable, but less penetrable/vulnerable. Right now, it's certainly "be alert to and fear the whip," but the fight hasn't fully settled yet.
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