Blessed Are the Pure in Heart

Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God.

Having just written of how tone-deaf the Oscars were, I feel I need to add an immediate caveat. Actors are not the problem here.

They are the ones most visible, in their suits and sequins and on the stage. But they are not the establishment.

Invariably, someone who has become an artist has emerged from a difficult background, an experience of oppression. A small number may end up rich and successful. But they are still members of an oppressed group.

Such an experience instills pureness of heart; because it crushes the ego. As I have noted before, an actor needs a very small ego in order to inhabit the mind of another for a role. So does a writer, writing the role. So does a director, trying to see things from the viewpoint of the audience.

And a pure heart, a heart not adulterated by ego, is a heart open to the spirit, to inspiration. Only they "see God."

Accordingly, talent comes from being abused. You need to have suffered to sing the blues.

Unfortunately, without ego, chameleon-like, as Keats had it, the artist is also open to being easily influenced by others. Being themselves guileless, they will not suspect guile in another. And so they can be weaponized by others or a more cynical frame of mind.

They are child-like in this way. They do not question or hold back; they see what they think is right, and they will invest in it totally. They are pure in heart.

Joaquin Phoenix’s speech at the Oscars was politically berserk, with its objection to putting milk on cereal, but Joaquin Phoenix’s heart was clearly in the right place.

Tuning the Fiddle While Hollywood Burns

New evidence comes daily now that we are undergoing a paradigm shift.

Sinn Fein has taken the first round of the Irish elections.

At first glance, this looks like a movement ideologically opposite to Boris Johnson’s win in Britain, or Trump’s in the US. But in Ireland, Sinn Fein was the available vehicle to register opposition to the establishment.

And not just establishment Dublin. Sinn Fein does share with Brexit and Trump a nationalistic emphasis. The name “Sinn Fein” translates “Ourselves Alone.” It looks like a vote against Brussels too. Sinn Fein means closer ties to Northern Ireland—outside the UE.

And yet the people in social power seem oblivious, still holding their bejeweled Versailles promenades. Birds of Prey, apparently, is bombing at the box, after being almost universally praised by the critics. Cats bombed. Doolittle, another big Hollywood FX extravaganza, just bombed. Audiences are no longer impressed. They are no longer drinking the soma. Few go out to theatres any more; a fact for the moment masked by large new audiences in China. There is more cash transacted in video gaming, or internet-streamed TV series, or YouTube.

Yet, as if oblivious, the Oscars ceremony was a Jacuzzi soak in political correctness. Joaqin Phoenix used his acceptance speech to protest against the human enslavement of cows.

And nobody was watching.

Berating your audience is not likely to bring them back. Scolding them for drinking milk, or for clinging to their guns and religion, or as “racists,” or “deplorables,” or “dog-faced pony soldiers.”

Or pretending to the moral high ground over the corpse of Jeffrey Epstein.

The very tone-deafness of the crusty uppers whispers of desperation. Expecting to be obeyed, they are getting agitated at the rabble’s growing refusal to curtsey nicely, and so making more elaborate, even outrageous demands.

Forcing the issue.

Breathing While Male

Seen in better days.

The awkward mixup at the Oscars a few nights ago is another example of female privilege. 

Who read out the name of the wrong movie as Best Picture winner? Faye Dunaway.

Who immediately gets blamed? Warren Beatty. He was immediately blamed in public, on stage, by Jimmy Kimmel: "Warren, what have you done?"

Why him and not her? Only because he was the nearest male. Whenever a woman does something wrong, instead of being blamed, blame is automatically deflected to the nearest available male.

And it is so automatic that nobody even seems to notice.

For the record, of course, neither Dunaway nor Beatty was really to blame.

But it was Beatty who was put through the wringer.