"Dear Hollywood celebrities,
You exist for my entertainment. Some of you are great eye candy. Some of you can deliver a line with such conviction that you bring tears to my eyes. Some of you can scare the crap out of me. Others make me laugh. But you all have one thing in common, you only have a place in my world to entertain me. That’s it. You make your living pretending to be someone else. Playing dress up like a 6 year old. You live in a make believe world in front of a camera. Your entire existence depends on my patronage. I’ll crank the organ grinder; you dance. I don’t really care where you stand on issues. So, shut your pie hole and dance, monkey!"
Author shall remain nameless
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Response.
Dear Nameless,
Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, said it best: " If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" The answer to all these questions, of course, is a resounding yes.
Yet you argue that, because entertainers "pretend" for a living, our opinions are, prima facie, less valid than, say, those of a cook or waiter, a salesperson or beautician, a banker, doctor, plumber, or mechanic, each of whose existence equally depends upon the patronage of others. This is a dangerous denial of our humanity for, by a false though slippery logic, it leads to the conclusion that people possess but a single dimension. The experience of living teaches otherwise.
The experience of “pretending” teaches us to explore the complex array of dimensions that characterize any and every human life. As do you, we entertainers live simultaneously in multiple realities: as husbands, wives and partners, mothers, fathers and children, professionals and amateurs.
As does yours, our imaginations roam widely, sometimes within, at others beyond our control. To belittle these facts and, from such belittling, seek to restrict the rights of one group of professionals in deference to those of another; to deny us the God-given right to expression we share with every other citizen - every other human being – is not simply to argue nonsense, but to reveal a profound ignorance of both human nature and how discourse in a civilized society is meant to work.
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