Clooney Tunes
I'm a red-blooded American chick. Let's face it. George Clooney is drop dead gorgeous. At least he would be if he would just keep his mouth shut. Sigh.
Guardian reporter Sally Vincent has penned an ode to Clooney entitled "Pretty boys can think." I'm not sure how she ascertained that Clooney can think; she really didn't ask him any meaningful questions. She let him do some kind of stream of consciousness thing about his politics all the while playing the role of the fawning, giggling simp. And Clooney did come out with a few winners.
"The question is," he goes on, "do we go on murdering each other, or are we going to take time out to ask ourselves why we're so angry in the first place? I get mad at someone, then I find out more about why they did what they did to make me mad, and the anger disperses. We get angry because we don't have enough information."
Now perhaps had she decided to act like a journalist rather than a drooling school girl, she might have pressed him a little on this. Because that statement is one hell of an oversimplification. That kind of philosophy works well when the person you are dealing with is also acting in good faith. How George managed to become a Hollywood star without realizing that sometimes people don't act in good faith is beyond me.
Think about it. That's pretty much what Neville Chamberlain did with Hitler. "Gee, Adolf, I'm kind of mad at you for massing your troops along the Czech border so you can annex the Sudetenland. Why did you do something like that?" "Shucks, Neville, it's just that it used to be part of Germany and there are some German speakers there." "Oh, gosh, why didn't you say so! Go on, take it. I'm not mad at you any more." Little did Chamberlain know that Hitler had planned on retreating were he challenged, but on pressing forward with further invasions were he not challenged. In other words, he was not acting in good faith. Churchill, on the other hand, was more of a realist. He understood the game and uttered his famous words after Chamberlain's infamous "peace in our time" speech - "You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war." Churchill understood, as did Hitler, that sometimes you have to stop the action first and understand later. Maybe Clooney understands that too and would have acknowledged that if challenged. But given some of his further remarks, I'm not sanguine.
"I'll tell you what'll happen some day," he says. "Some day, some point when we've had enough of the idea that we're going to win any fight by killing people, when we're willing to ask ourselves why we hate and why we're hated, we're going to get us a president who comes out on the Yes I Did It campaign. He's going to look back at where he's been and admit it. 'Yes, I slept with her.' And he's going to look where he's going. And one day he's going to say, listen, in 10 years' time cars won't work on the internal combustion engine. We'll all have electric cars. If their usefulness to us doesn't exist any more, we won't have to blow up Sudan or Iraq or Saudi Arabia or Libya. Take away the want. Go back to our proper position in the world, which ain't running it. Yup. That's it. Don't kill people. Drive electric cars."
It's a little hard to work out precisely what he means by this mish-mosh. If I had been the reporter, I might have managed to do something more useful than bleat out "O Captain! My Captain!" like some poor man's Walt Whitman. Ms. Vincent, however, proves incapable of doing more than that. Unless he really is stupid enough to mean that if we all drove electric cars there wouldn't be terrorism. That's just downright amazingly dumb, though. If we didn't need oil, the Middle Eastern countries would be more poverty-stricken than they are now. Not surprisingly to some of us, terrorism is linked to poverty. Therefore eliminating our need for oil, while it is a fine idea and will allow us to act more independently from the Middle Eastern countries, will not necessarily endear us to them.
You run into a nice little Catch-22 under that scenario, which the pretty boy didn't think about. Right now many Muslims feel as if we use our influence to control their countries because of their oil. This pisses them off. However if we didn't need their oil, we wouldn't be giving them money. Then they would feel as if we weren't using our vast wealth to assist them with their poverty. Which would piss them off. If we did use our vast wealth to assist them with their poverty, they'd feel as if we were using our assistance to control them. Which would piss them off. You see where I'm going? Until those countries are self-sustaining or until we no longer control vast monetary resources, they're going to be pissed off at us. Are there things we can do to mitigate that? Of course. Is driving electric cars one of them? No, don't think so.
I have some hope, though, that he found Ms. Vincent as annoying as I did. He played a rather juvenile practical joke on her.
I forgot, too, that while we set the world to rights, I'd taken what Americans call a bathroom break. I ran both ways. He couldn't have been alone for more than two minutes. When I got back, he was chuckling to himself. He said he'd been playing with my tape-recorder and had left me a special message on it, hee-hee-hee. Next day, odd things started to happen. I found a teaspoon in the rubbish at the bottom of the receptacle I am pleased to call my handbag. Then another spoon. Then a pair of sugar tongs. God knows how they got there. And then I came upon my special message: "I'll be warning the maitre d' that a woman has been stealing the silverware."
Serves the silly cow right. Too bad the maitre d' didn't try to stop her.