Just when the super-culture thought it had found another cancelling to prance around, and all the celebrities could call forth their noble selves on daytime TV, and affirm their solidarity to an oppressed people – this time the Jews in Hollywood – and failing corporations could attempt to declare significance, and they could all cancel a black man and dance on his grave for daring to say what no one must ever ever say. Which he proved by saying it…... except… turns out no one cares.
Of course some do. The self-selected Guardians of the Culture, the elderly, the Karens, the hall monitors. But no one cares what they think anymore, in fact, they anti-care. If the Karens care, everyone elects to love what they hate.
No one cares about ghoulish celebrities like Jamie Lee Curtis and what she thinks (Ye’s children should be taken away), no one cares about Adidas which lost 69% of its stock price this year, no one has cared about Gap for almost two decades, and the fashion girlies are saying Balenciaga has gone off the boil, and no true fashion mom should buy it.
No one cares what Netflix thinks, or the record companies, or any of the arenas. They are just warehouses for official culture and official culture is dying. Fast. Very very fast.
On TikTok over the last couple of weeks, a quasi-celebrity, a loud mouth Housewife and Skinny Girl called Bethany Frankel —who reviews skin care products and issues her proclamations in a loud, raw voice from her rich girl house —decided to send a cease and desist to a nobody called Meredith with a fraction of Bethany’s audience. Meredith, who lives alone and friendless in LA - she moved just before the pandemic – posts, unadorned, two or three times a day and has settled on mocking the endless “products” of celebrities who seem to all of a sudden have profound feelings about skin care. Why, she asks, must these people constantly shove themselves into our faces? Don’t they have enough money? Why is Brad Pitt selling face creams he “invented”? Wtf is Kim Kardashian doing selling concrete bathroom products? Doesn’t she have enough stuff? How environmental are CONCRETE BATHROOM ACCESSORIES? And so on. At one point, she tweaked the nose of said Bethany Frankel who then sent her the cease and desist letter, demanding that Meredith remove all TikTok videos that criticize Frankel.
All hell broke loose. EVERYONE and we are talking millions of people - sided with Meredith. Meredith became so insta-famous, she made it onto Page Six. She gained many more tens of thousands of followers. People declared themselves, Team Meredith, Black and white, old and young, male, female and indeterminate. Bethany’s million subscriber engagement dropped to 3%, which means she can flail around for a while, but she’s basically done.
Meredith the Bethany-killer
And then the movement morphed into “No more celebrities on TikTok”. All the creators decided that celebrities were just coming around to get more attention and sell more crap.
“TikTok is OURS” they declared. “Bugger off.”
And finally…
“Celebrities are trash. We are sick of them. Don’t go showing your face around here. This is our neighborhood, and you all don’t need any more money.”
Then, all of a sudden, Kanye was being dumped by the evil and poisonous corporations that have destroyed the world. Everyone declared themselves to be on Team Ye. Even if they never bought anything from Ye before, they sure as hell would now. And then, analysis cropped up that Ye had brilliantly separated himself from these rapacious mega-corporations without two decades of lawsuits, meaning he could now make clothes and shoes and records and take all the money himself.
Which, according to TikTok (which has its own collective intelligence) was the point he was trying to make. Blacks on TikTok explained that of course the monster fleecers in Hollywood (who are not all Jewish) have been especially vile to Blacks because they were the most vulnerable, and comic after rapper after actor has been used, raped of their money and discarded. Dave Chappelle walking away from $50 million dollars is cited. Prince changing his name so he could get out from under his contract. The tragedy that was Michael Jackson, condemned to dance until he burned from the inside out, consuming himself.
And then people started posting lists of celebrities and CEOs that had visited Epstein’s island, many of whom had condemned Ye.
This happened very very fast. And it was riveting. Much better than anything else on any streaming service. Which I, a TV addict, can’t watch for more than 3 minutes.
Let’s all admit the product out of Hollywood is utter crap. Premium TV was good ten or fifteen years ago, but now it’s all woke, fake-diverse, super-violent and disconnected from any recognizable reality. When 400,000 subscribers dumped Netflix last year, they said they thought woke entertainment was annoying af and they weren’t going to pay for it. Plus it was all too violent, and vulgar.
Frankly if I never see another “famous” actor writhing and gape-mouthed sucking face with another “famous” gape-mouthed actor it will be too soon. Gahh, it’s disgusting. Where is the shudder emoji when you need it?
The two biggest products of this splendid year we are all having, are spin offs. One from LOTR (Lord of the Rings) and another from Game of Thrones, or GOT. You have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find words sufficient to describe the acute terribleness of these shows.
They have all the flaws of excessive violence and repulsive sexual writhing. And they are woke, so the Hobbits are now Black hippies, and GOT — which is based on medieval English history, specifically Foundation, by Peter Ackryod —is now set in some nether pre-history bearing no resemblance to any place or time. If you read Ackryod, you’ll understand where the ideas, characters, geography and violence in GOT originated. But House of the Dragon has Black kings, where no Blacks were seen much less elevated to Kingship in Britain in 500 AD or 500 BC or wherever this is supposed to be set. The story is not “placed”. It has no geography, no language, no cultural resonance, it’s just bodies and blood. What this alteration does is trivialize the depths, the deep and profound resonance of GOT, because all the events in Foundation were very very very specific to British culture and the further away you get from the … foundation, the more meaningless the new story becomes. GOT, the original, was drawn from a novel series labored over for more than a decade, carefully constructed and fully imagined. House of the Dragon is Hollywood garbage written by catastrophically under-educated greed heads.
So we are sticking around for the violence and writhing. And the wokery and the diversity.
Except no one is sticking around.
Even possibly worse, the heroines of each abomination are skinny blond Karens who judge everything and who are always always whining. As one reviewer said of Amazon’s LOTR spin off, all the dialogue, all the dialogue, is bickering and quarrelling.
Our new cultural heroine is an over-privileged, skinny blond always taking everyone’s inventory and getting up in their grill.
It is insupportable. Especially when it comes to LOTR, which is a beloved classic and one of the crowning achievements of British literature. It is profoundly embedded in specificity, in the pre-Christian religions of Briton, the waves of migration, the battles between sharply delineated tribes, and fundamentally embedded in the growth of early Christianity, its coming to dominance and its defeat of the paganism of the old world.
That’s gone.
I won’t even go into the abomination that is the Netflix version of Jane Austen’s classic, Persuasion. It has a 1.9 audience rating it’s so woke and diverse and absolutely terrible.
There is another giant shark lurking under the surface that explicates a great deal more of this. So, more later.
Thanks to all the new subscribers. And if you have been here a while, why not become an annual subscriber? I charge the minimum Substack allows, on the grounds that you are probably reading a lot and therefore I’m trying to save you money. I’m probably one of the broadest analysts out there, in terms of what I can cover and not necessarily shallow, I do know two subjects in considerable depth, the environmental catastrophe being one of them. I was trained at the old Time Magazine before it went sideways, and have written for Harper’s Magazine, Time, Life, the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent, the Globe and Mail, Vogue, Tatler, the National Post, Bloomsbury, Knopf Canada and Harper Collins US.
There has been back and forth nastiness between Blacks and Jews in Hollywood for decades. Of course all the people that run that asylum are not Jewish, they are ethnically diverse. BUT, if one were to use Ibram X Kendi’s twisted and racist counting method, the Jewish people would be found to be substantially over-represented. It is my belief that Ye was attacking the cabal of thugs that historically have preyed on Black artists, not necessarily Jewish people as a people. If you hate “Jews”, you are a primitive, and Kanye West is not that.
