Hollywood's Holiday Fireworks: All Duds
by L. Brent Bozell III
June 30, 1998

I submit respectfully that the Left needs to stop worrying about how global warming is affecting the rest of us and start pondering how mental meltdown is afflicting its ranks.

Headline: Once Again, Jane Looks East for Wisdom. You've probably heard that on June 24, Jane Fonda accused the leaders of the Christian Coalition of indifference to children who "don't look like them... [who aren't] white, middle-class Christians."

That was Fonda's most newsworthy utterance that day, but it may not have been the most outrageous. Asked about China's notorious forced-abortion policy, she defended it: "We've got to remember something. China has experienced a famine in which fifty million people died. We don't even know what that... feels like... It's a survival thing... Could they do their family planning better? Of course. Should we force them to by pulling down a curtain and punishing them? I don't think so. I mean, I've spent time in China."

Yes, and in North Vietnam as well.

China has experienced more than famine. It's experienced decades of political, religious, and (until recently) economic oppression. It has experienced killings and imprisonments galore. It has experienced young dissidents trampled to death by Red Army tanks. It has experienced the horror of state-sponsored forced abortions. Memo to Jane: You call it "a survival thing"; in the real world it's known as genocide.

Headline: Stallone Shoots... Off His Mouth. Sylvester Stallone, whose movies not featuring some form of ultraviolence have grossed a total of about $20, is now on an anti-gun tear. On May 28, the day actor Phil Hartman was murdered, Stallone told reporters in London that "until America, door to door, takes every handgun, this is what you're gonna have... It really is pathetic... We're livin' in the Dark Ages over there."

He elaborated in a June 8 interview with the syndicated show "Access Hollywood": "I know we use guns in films, but we... now have to be a little bit more accountable and realize that this is an escalating problem that's eventually going to lead to, I think, urban warfare... It has to be stopped, and someone has to really go on the line, a certain dauntless political figure, and say, 'It's ending, it's over, all bets are off. It's not 200 years ago, we don't need this anymore, and the rest of the world doesn't have it. Why should we?'"

A week after this interview aired, Daily Variety reported that Stallone may star in a fourth Rambo movie. Need we say more? Well, yes, because we can't help ourselves. Memo to Sly: Unless you want to emerge as perhaps the leading hypocrite in Hollywood, you'd better just say no to Rambo.  Otherwise, leave the Second Amendment, which was devised by a handful of other dauntless political figures to ensure your most basic freedoms, alone.

Headline: Losing His Religion, and Perhaps His Mind. It's true that when it comes to Tibet, the rock musicians who played at mid-June's Tibetan Freedom Concert in Washington are correct on this issue, but that doesn't guarantee they'll make sense when they explain  themselves.

Take Ed Kowalczyk, the frontman for the band Live, who mused in the Washington Post that his participation in the Freedom Concert had to do with "making a psychic connection to all the spiritual juice that comes out of [Tibet]... Among artists, there's a lot of Buddhists, people who want an alternative to basic Christianity, which doesn't offer much."

You may wonder which faith Kowalczyk prefers. Thanks to the Post's Marc Fisher, we have the answer: The singer "follows a guru named Adi Da who lives... in Fiji and espouses a 'Crazy Wisdom' involving drug and sex sprees." Memo to Kowalczyk: I'm trying to make a psychic connection with you. Hit the G7 chord on your guitar. I've stored my spiritual juice there.

Headline: Christ No Christian, Says Auteur. Writer/director Hal Hartley ("Henry Fool") has made a European TV movie called "The Book of Life," in which, according to Pulse! magazine, "Jesus Christ com[es] to New York to initiate the Last Judgment and then decid[es] not to go forth with it." Hartley explains that his Jesus character "discovers that he has major, fundamental problems with Christianity and has to stage a revolution. It's like an espionage thriller."

That must have been some pitch meeting: "What's the concept?" "OK, work with me. It goes, like, liberation theology meets James Bond." "I like it, babe! I like it!"

Global warming, El Nino, La Nina - something is turning these people's minds into mush. Memo to Al Gore: Recommend you stay off the speaking circuit until the problem's resolved.