Golden Globes the latest battlefield in a world at war

THERE was a lot of talk last week about World War III, but in truth there’s a world war going on already, a culture war.

So when Ricky Gervais is presenting the Golden Globes and he does a few gags about the many moral weaknesses of the stars of the motion picture industry, it is reported as another outbreak of hostilities on the frontline.

No more is he doing stand-up, he is making us ask the big question: whose side is he on anyway?

He says he doesn’t give a damn, that he doesn’t care about what anybody thinks of him and his comedy performances, though of course he does. He has to, because he simply couldn’t function in anything but a ‘liberal’ environment — the only reason he can stand there mocking the hypocrisies of the liberal elite is because the liberal elite is open-minded enough to run the risk of allowing such a thing to happen.

You may be sure that if he was somehow hired to warm up the crowd at one of the Trump rallies, they would seek guarantees that not a word of his routine could be construed as being in any way critical of the main man. And if he strayed from that line, he would surely ‘die’.

Hollywood hates Trump of course, and he hates Hollywood. This is not a criticism of Hollywood, as some would have it — as a matter of fact, most creative people are liberal-minded, and if they can use their fame in order to resist in any way the march of the totalitarian right, I have no objection to that.

In fact I would be disappointed if they just sat there saying nothing while every day their country moves closer to dictatorship. But I would also be disappointed if a Ricky Gervais couldn’t do what he did at the Golden Globes.

This is the great strength and the great weakness of the liberal position. By definition, it allows itself to be satirised. Which is fine, except it gives the other side an advantage, because it tends to dilute the simplicity of the message.

With the other side there is no dilution of any kind. There is a brutishly simple slogan — Make America Great Again, or Get Brexit Done — while the more progressive types are arguing amongst themselves over the nuances of the latest Tarantino.

Which leads us to one of the great illusions of the age: this notion that Ricky Gervais was talking to a room full of the most powerful people in the world, when in truth the most powerful among them was not one of the Hollywood greats, but the guy from Apple.

Otherwise the industry of human happiness does have a certain amount of power and influence, but if you care to check the current occupants of the White House or Downing Street, you won’t find anyone there who is prostrate on the altar of political correctness.

No, you will find the opposite: you will find the kind of folk who are supposed to be losing this great culture war, though you could be forgiven for thinking that they’re actually doing quite well, all things considered.

Indeed you will see many columnists blathering about the supposed triumph of the liberal intelligentsia with their obsessions about climate change and #MeToo, yet the great democracies of the Western world are actually being run mostly by creatures who seem to be equally obsessed with returning to an imaginary version of the 1950s.

While Hollywood makes its movies, the supposedly oppressed armies of the right have been pumping all their horrible energies into winning elections by fair means or foul, mostly foul.

They have been losing all the culture battles, yet they are winning the war. Hollywood can make a thousand movies about a woman’s right to choose, but Trump has made it possible for the Supreme Court to reverse all that, in one move.

So next time Ricky Gervais feels like speaking truth to power, maybe he should go to where the real power lies.