Actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who has grown so emaciated that she’s begun naming her kids after fruit, joined the pantheon of ungrateful Tinseltown pinheads who reap a fortune from Americans and then go to a different country and call them stupid. As I wrote in last week’s column, maybe they’re right — after all, we’re the ones making these twits wealthy.
Here’s what Paltrow is alleged to have said in a magazine interview:
“I love the English lifestyle, it’s not as capitalistic as America. People don’t talk about work and money, they talk about interesting things at dinner. I like living here because I don’t fit into the bad side of American psychology. The British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans.”
An A-list actress deriding a capitalist culture? What’s next — Michael Moore bashing fat people?
I’m no psychologist, but since we humans have a natural tendency to gravitate toward our own, I’ll go out on a limb and assume that the people Paltrow hangs out with while in America are fellow elitist liberal entertainers and their agents. Paltrow’s statement, if anything, demonstrates nothing more than a classic case of agonizing self-loathing at a level not seen since the death of the lactose-intolerant dairy cow.
Besides, anybody who says the British are more civilized has never seen a good soccer riot.
Paltrow’s opinion is nothing new. At least she, Madonna, Johnny Depp and others stand behind their words and actually move out of the U.S., returning only to fetch a healthy paycheck or get face time on the awards show du jour. We’re not as fortunate with some of their colleagues.
“Leaving the country” is thrown around by the liberal glitterati as if it’s supposed to carry some sort of weight, especially in an election year. It’s as if they think we’ll stand in the polling booth and say to ourselves, “I was going to vote for the Republican, but I really don’t want Cher to move to Italy.” In the last two elections, threats by all sorts of whiffle-brained Left Coast actors to go into permanent exile have been answered by the public with a loud and clear: “Who cares?”
In 2000, Alec Baldwin allegedly said he’d leave the country if Bush were elected. Baldwin’s gone nowhere, except increasingly nuts. In 2004, Robert Redford said he’d consider moving permanently to his home in Ireland if Bush were elected. Redford’s still here as well.
A few years back, Tom Cruise cited the terrorism threat, crime, faltering financial status and corporate corruption as reasons he may move permanently to Australia. Cruise made over a hundred million bucks in a business that charges so much for admission that you have to sell a kidney in order to take your family to a flick and get popcorn, and the potentially Australia-bound Cruise had the brass dingos to talk about “corporate corruption”?
I’ll start respecting some of these hypocritical Hollywood elitists when they start refusing to take money from America, the dumb but greedy country that’s responsible for the world’s ills, or so they say.
The entertainment industry is about the only business I can think of that can call their customers insulting names, and the customers keep returning for more. If the owner of a grocery store called you “stupid and greedy” every time you handed him your hard earned money, would you go back?
It really is time to teach Hollywood and their phony celluloid-for-brains elitist erudite-wannabes a lesson in business and finance. Withholding our money from Hollywood wouldn’t be a boycott — it would be denying capitalistic behavior, which Gwyneth should be on board with it, at least until she loses her house (oops, I mean “flat” — bloody sorry, Gwyn ol’ dear).
Update: Paltrow says she was either misquoted or never said those things — it’s hard to tell which. Sounds like a bit of damage control.
“Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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