The Night the Resistance Began…

“So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”

I have struggled to write about the the pitiful and tragic 2016 election. I have yet to find any writings that about the result that are satisfactory. What happened was nothing short of repulsive, and if you can not see that – you are either ignorant or an ignorant pig. I have taken a mental break,  allowing an organic reasoned response to explain the big picture of what has happened. I plan to post this response soon -but not now. Because tonight I saw the beginnings of the resistance to the evil empire, the death star, that will be imminently consuming the White House -turning America into force for bad – a force that must be resisted then destroyed. America’s classiest, sassiest first family – replaced by it’s sickest. 

At the Golden Globes awards – we found our interim leader. This leader was accidentally perfectly tee’d up by British Actor Hugh Laurie, whilst accepting his award for his performance in the great TV drama –The Night Manager. Hugh Laurie, who played a charming yet evil psychopathic billionaire,  did not give a dam about his award, and how it was achieved—rather, he actually had something really important to say:

“I’ll be able to say I won this at the last-ever Golden Globes,” Laurie said. “I don’t mean to be gloomy, it’s just that it has the words ‘Hollywood,’ ‘Foreign,’ and ‘Press’ in the title.”

“I also think to some Republicans even the word ‘association’ is slightly sketchy,” Laurie added.

Before exiting stage left, Laurie took one last swipe at the soon-to-be 45th president of the United States.

“I accept this award on behalf of psychopathic billionaires everywhere,” he said.

Yes welcome to America 2017, a nascent fascist dystiopian state (Sorry Trumpeteers – three words in a row flying over your collective heads, but you can Google my meaning -it is called “research” a concept which is also above your heads. Thinking -that is for other people), devoid of any integrity. But of course a foreigner cannot he be allowed the final word, cannot possibly encapsulate the full extent of the fall of the admittedly simplistic American notion of itself. Goodbye -America the good guy. No, we will need an American for that. Meryl Streep accepts her lifetime achievement award, what a life, what achievements. But Meryl Streep did not give a dam about his award -she actually had something really important to say:

Please sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read.

Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxyGmyEby40

But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids in Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London — no, in Ireland I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a girl in small-town Virginia.

Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.

But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it.

O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.

One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.

As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.