Actress Meryl Streep’s withering attack on US President-elect Donald Trump in her speech at Golden Globes 2017 Awards function in California on Sunday has made the “perfumed elites” tizzy for its unyielding spirit.
In her 6-minute acceptance speech for Cecil B. DeMille Award, Streep held Trump guilty for “imitating a disabled reporter…someone he outflanked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back…it made it’s intended audience (Trump’s supporters) laugh and show their teeth.”
These lines—of course rehearsed like all actors do—portrayed Trump and his supporters as “privileged” and “elite” which the actors like her and media are not. The reality is the other way around: A majority of 62 per cent of Americans who have voted for Trump belong to regions where rates of death by suicide, drugs and alcohol are abnormally high. These lives are being lost out of despair. They are the deprived lot and not the “perfumed” actors and media, completely out of sync with reality. It’s the rich and the beautiful which indeed are out of touch with blue-collar Middle America.
Streep made things worse by naming a whole lot of actors who came from unknown parts of the world and made it big in Hollywood. Her ivory tower didn’t allow her to question herself as to why those deprived and despaired in present-day America must not be afforded similar roulettes of destiny.
She exhorted everyone to protect the “freedom of the press” for it alone can “safeguard the truth.” Really? Either she doesn’t read her national dailies or she sides with them: For who can deny the role of US national dailies in perpetuating the myth of Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) which led to Iraq invasion and continues to take millions of lives. That the mainstream press continues to cover up the role of US in promoting ISIS which has made the world terribly unsafe and unleashed millions of refugees at Europe’s door, which in turn, has ripped apart the continent’s social fabric. That Hillary Clinton’s nefarious designs destroyed Libya and empowered terrorists of all kinds. That the trouble in Ukraine has come about at the active behest of US and NATO.
Yet, Streep wants everyone to protect such press. Her heart is pained by Trump’s “instinct to humiliate”–but untouched by millions of lives lost by the presstitues’ active participation. Streep obviously knew her audience: For the Golden Globes are awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Actors earn their penny—pun intended—by pretending to be people they’re not. Their neurosis-ism rests on uneven stools of fragile persona and kingsize ego. When you break them down, they ain’t pretty. Streep can’t understand that it’s the privileged who train the deprived for violence by offering demeaning jobs, low-pays, stripping off their dignity and injecting hostility.
And she forgets that the man she abhors is going to be in charge of the free world in less than a dozen days. It’s time she interacts real with ordinary characters and not just portray it on reel.
