Hollywood, Nashville, The Gulf & Stereotypes

I was reading Pam Meister’s excellent piece here on Big Hollywood about Hollywood’s lack of attention to the continuing ecological disaster in the Gulf. In it she echoed my sentiments from a month ago when I wrote about the lack of Hollywood’s attention to the floods in the home of country music.

This would seem a disaster custom made for Hollywood liberal involvement. Look at the elements: A Big Ugly Corporation, the environment, animals suffering, and a chance to jump up and down and say we were right about off-shore drilling.

However speaking out on this disaster would perhaps mean taking a position where one might have to criticize the President. I have also noticed that most of Hollywood’s liberal elite’s never seem to take a position in opposition to the current administration. For example, how much outrage have we heard about Guantanamo lately? Answer: none. How many anti-war demonstrations have we seen since President Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan? Answer: very few. Now that I’m thinking about it, how much media coverage do we see about far left true believers like Cindy Sheehan who are still protesting since the new administration took over? Answer: darn little.

Since drawing attention to the situation in the Gulf of Mexico would also draw attention to the lack of leadership by the President, Hollywood has been laying low. However, I believe there’s another reason: Hollywood hates the South!

Why, would liberal Hollywood types hate the South? Because they are indulging in an out of date stereotype about the people who choose to live there. You see, Hollywood liberals get most of their information about life from the movies they make. They think of the South as the South from 1956. In their world anyone who is white, conservative and from the South is obviously a Bible-thumping, uneducated, red neck, racist with a white robe and hood stashed away somewhere nearby. When it comes to politics Southern States are deep red except for New Orleans, an area worthy of their charity. Think I’m wrong? Look at the imbalance between Hollywood’s help to The Big Easy and the rest of the area affected by Katrina.

In the Hollywood stereotype, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi are the center of the GOP stronghold called “the solid South” and that area deserves whatever karmic destruction is sent their way. Maybe when the oil starts hitting Florida in mass quantities they will begin to show up to clean some pelicans. Then again, that is the state that cheated Al Gore out of the White House.

Hey, speaking of Vice President Green Jeans, where has he been through all this. Isn’t he the Nobel Prize winning expert on the environment?