Saturday, October 23, 2010
As God is my witness, I shall never watch 'When Harry Met Sally' again (except maybe the fake orgasm scene)
Some celebrity or other (Rob Reiner, if you must know, although that's not really important) said something nasty about Tea Partiers and there were the usual calls for boycotts from some of the commenters. That got me thinking about the nature of boycotts.
Dictionary.com says boycott means: "to combine in abstaining from, or preventing dealings with, as a means of intimidation or coercion".
So when you boycott, you are attempting to intimidate or coerce some other party to take some action. You boycott Cheerios (or maybe General Mills products) because they sponsor some program that you find objectionable. Or you boycott a particular program because General Mills is one of their sponsors and your beef is with General Mills.
The point is that there's something there initially that you would otherwise like to do, or buy, or watch, and you're not going to. If your boycott is successful then you go back to watching CSI or buying Cheerios or whatever.
But more and more, I realize I'm not 'boycotting' much of anything, at least not in the traditional sense. I'm just realizing that I don't want it to begin with. Last year when the summer blockbuster trailers started showing up, there were lots of trailers for Transformers 2. My friend and I would turn to each other and say "You wanna see that?" and then we'd say "Yeah, I guess so." We had every intention of seeing the movie. But when Megan Fox goes on her publicity press junket and mocks redneck Christian middle Americans, then screw her. I didn't not see the movie out of protest, or to get her to change her views, it was more like she had made my decision for me and my feelings about the movie changed just like that. She doesn't need any of my money.
Now granted, I wasn't that invested in the movie to begin with. If, say, Chris Pine had gone on some left-wing diatribe two weeks before Star Trek came out then I'd have a difficult choice to make.
The views that are almost universally presented by the entertainment industry are antithetical to my own. I'm used to that. But what is different (and I've said this before) is the blatant, above board, in-your-face, absolute disgust and hatred toward half the country. I don't expect Rob Reiner to agree with me on the issues. I don't expect him to tiptoe around those issues in his public pronouncements for fear of alienating a large portion of his potential audience. He and his kind have long since decided that they don't need to pander to anyone who doesn't already agree with them. But I'm just gobsmacked at how people will mock and ridicule and openly hate so many private citizens. So I'm supposed to... what? Not go see 'Flipped' to get him to... what? Not be a jackass? I'm sorry but the man hates me. He doesn't need any of my money.
There's very little for me to boycott because they have very little that I want. What they don't fully appreciate is that it's much worse than a boycott. It's indifference.
Dictionary.com says boycott means: "to combine in abstaining from, or preventing dealings with, as a means of intimidation or coercion".
So when you boycott, you are attempting to intimidate or coerce some other party to take some action. You boycott Cheerios (or maybe General Mills products) because they sponsor some program that you find objectionable. Or you boycott a particular program because General Mills is one of their sponsors and your beef is with General Mills.
The point is that there's something there initially that you would otherwise like to do, or buy, or watch, and you're not going to. If your boycott is successful then you go back to watching CSI or buying Cheerios or whatever.
But more and more, I realize I'm not 'boycotting' much of anything, at least not in the traditional sense. I'm just realizing that I don't want it to begin with. Last year when the summer blockbuster trailers started showing up, there were lots of trailers for Transformers 2. My friend and I would turn to each other and say "You wanna see that?" and then we'd say "Yeah, I guess so." We had every intention of seeing the movie. But when Megan Fox goes on her publicity press junket and mocks redneck Christian middle Americans, then screw her. I didn't not see the movie out of protest, or to get her to change her views, it was more like she had made my decision for me and my feelings about the movie changed just like that. She doesn't need any of my money.
Now granted, I wasn't that invested in the movie to begin with. If, say, Chris Pine had gone on some left-wing diatribe two weeks before Star Trek came out then I'd have a difficult choice to make.
The views that are almost universally presented by the entertainment industry are antithetical to my own. I'm used to that. But what is different (and I've said this before) is the blatant, above board, in-your-face, absolute disgust and hatred toward half the country. I don't expect Rob Reiner to agree with me on the issues. I don't expect him to tiptoe around those issues in his public pronouncements for fear of alienating a large portion of his potential audience. He and his kind have long since decided that they don't need to pander to anyone who doesn't already agree with them. But I'm just gobsmacked at how people will mock and ridicule and openly hate so many private citizens. So I'm supposed to... what? Not go see 'Flipped' to get him to... what? Not be a jackass? I'm sorry but the man hates me. He doesn't need any of my money.
There's very little for me to boycott because they have very little that I want. What they don't fully appreciate is that it's much worse than a boycott. It's indifference.
