Friday, June 4, 2010

The Fool on the Hill

Paul McCartney has disappointed me. “Sir” Paul was at the white House this past week to entertain and receive the Gershwin award from President Obama. Paul tastefully sang his Beatles hit, Michelle, to the first lady, but then un-tastefully took the opportunity to throw a cheap shot at President George W. Bush, suggesting that the ex-president did not know what a library was. What possible reason could Paul McCartney have had to say such a stupid, inappropriate and awkward thing about Mr. Bush? As far as I know, Bush has never insulted Paul McCartney. Frankly, I’m pretty tired of the “Bush is a Dummy” nonsense from critics on the left. Do we know how many books Paul McCartney has read? Did he get an MBA from Harvard? Has he ever been entrusted to fly a fighter jet by the US government? Fighter pilots are not normally nitwits, but it seems to me that most of the people in the entertainment industry are. Don’t get me wrong. I think that Bush was less than brilliant in respect to spending and schemes to get a long with liberal democrats on a number of issues, but there is nothing he has done or said that has demonstrated less intelligence than Al Gore, John Kerry or Barack Obama.

I suspect that Paul McCartney was only trying to ingratiate himself to Obama and other the other entertainers at the awards affair, but his clumsy attempt to be cute—he obviously had been thinking long and hard, maybe days and weeks, on how he might work the library comment in there—did not cut Bush as much as it hurt his own image. You expect such ignorant behavior from the likes of Kanye West and Bill Mahr, but not so much—at lest I would not have—from Paul McCartney. Obviously, I attributed more class to him then he deserved. I guess my musical hero, Paul McCartney, is just one more self-important entertainment knucklehead.

Seriously though, why do these people think they know anything or have special insight into politics? And why do they always have to deride the intelligence of those they disagree with? Granted, I just referred to nitwits and knuckleheads, but let me clearly state that it is their ungracious and hateful language that supports my opinions. As far as I know, most of these folks are high school graduates at best. I have suspected for a long time that people in the art and entertainment industries are afflicted with several self-image problems which compel them to act as they do. I think that many are driven to their field of employment because they want people to love them and they want to feel accepted. Occasionally, you see people turn away from the spotlight because they determine that there are other things more important than self-aggrandizement and being in the public eye, but more often it seems that entertainment folks feel a need to be accepted by their peers and keep crawling to the top. Since the movers and shakers in the industry are mainly radically left in their politics, it stands to reason that the up-and-comers are going to want to join in the fun with the “me too” mentality. Even if they are not all that secure in their own political beliefs, they will go along to get along—this is clearly the same case with the news media and the education systems. They might actually believe the tripe, but it is clearly to their benefit, career wise, to believe it. Along with that, you have a group of people who have seemingly fallen into financial success with obvious feelings of inadequacy, who deep down do not believe they deserve it. The natural response to such feelings, as I see it, is to try to be especially liberal in your social and political beliefs. They often live immoral lives, from a traditional perspective, but they crave morality on some acceptable level. They think, I must be a good and deserving person because I am concerned about “AIDS”, or ”The Planet” or “The Oceans” or “I’m a Liberal!” Logic never enters into it, so ad hominem attacks from the left, like McCartney’s, are the norm.

So, I am disappointed in Paul McCartney. I have always liked his music. The Beatles were my heroes when I was a youngster. Clearly, John Lennon was the better lyricist of the two songwriting partners and probably the greater intellect in my opinion, but I always thought that McCartney was probably a good and decent person as well as a talented musician. I still feel the same way about his musical talents, but I guess I have to rethink the “good and decent” part. He behaved like an ass and I calls them as I sees them. In fact Paul acted the Fool on the (Capital) Hill.