STAR HAZING
Any celebrity who promotes healing or unity in this age of Trump is now publicly flogged. How insane is that?
If any celebrity is a profile in political courage these days, it sure isn’t Lena Dunham, Alec Baldwin or Lady Gaga. It’s Nicole Kidman.
Kidman, who allows that she isn’t particularly politics-minded (how refreshing), said matter-of-factly, “[Trump is] now elected and we, as a country, need to support whoever is the president,” in a BBC2 interview posted Jan. 10. “That is what the country is based on. And however that happened, it happened, and let’s go.”
The timing of this remark was brazen: Jan. 13 was the deadline for Oscar voters to submit their picks for this year’s crop of Academy Award nominees. Kidman has been nominated three times and would very much like to be nominated again, this time for her adoption drama “Lion.” My guess is her Trump remark will cost her a nomination she otherwise probably would have gotten. (We’ll find out Tuesday if she is among the nominees.) Perhaps it will cost her future film roles as well.
These days in Hollywood, revealing anything resembling a pro-Trump sentiment is probably worse than being a rapist. (Indeed, someone who pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year old girl he had drugged, Roman Polanski, received a standing ovation from, among others, Trump basher Meryl Streep as he was given the Best Director Oscar in 2003.)
While I’d dispute the tenor of Kidman’s remarks — the US is not a monarchy and we don’t have to be loyal subjects — a generation ago “Let’s support our president” would have been considered such a blandly patriotic comment it would hardly have been worth reporting. In Kidman’s case, she was lambasted by ordinary citizens as well as major Hollywood director Joss Whedon, who called her a “blunderturd” in a nasty tweet.
Like Kidman, who later hastened to add that she wasn’t endorsing Trump, “Avatar” star Zoe Saldana found herself getting bludgeoned on social media for her Trump-centric remarks, although her comments didn’t come close to defending Trump. She simply echoed what many analysts, such as non-Trump supporter Ross Douthat of The New York Times, have been saying for months. Celebrities, Saldana said, “got cocky and became arrogant and we also became bullies. Wewere trying to single out a man for all these things he was doing wrong . . . and that created empathy in a big group of people in America that felt bad for him and that are believing in his promises.” Saldana herself apparently dislikes Trump, judging by the praise she sent out in a tweet for Streep’s Golden Globes speech (which consisted entirely of Trump-bashing).
What underlies Kidman’s comment is a welcome call for everyone to calm down and get over the elec- tion. After nearly two years of relentless anger and hyperbole and politicization of everything, the country needs a break, at least until the next presidential campaign starts in two years. Time to get back to normal life. Remember when liberals made fun of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 Homeland Security Advisory System that registered a threat level of “elevated” (or higher) at all times? You can’t be on super-high alert at all times. It’s exhausting. You also can’t spend your life in political combat mode, not if you want to maintain something like a normal existence.
Does Trump deserve some of the blame for keeping the political temperature as hot as Brooklyn is during “Do the Right Thing”? Of course he does. There have been many occasions when he would have done himself (and all of us) a favor by saying nothing, like when he lashed out at Congressman John Lewis instead of letting stand the silliness of Lewis’ claim that Trump is not “legitimate,” a view pointedly not shared by ex-President Barack Obama.
But let’s not mistake the new president for our guiding light and spiritual leader. The president is not, as Chris Rock said of the previous chief executive, “our boss” or the “dad of the country.” We don’t need North Korean-style displays of adoration. But if you think (correctly!) that Trump is needlessly provocative, why take the bait? Trump or no Trump, we have much more in common than not. It’s a shame that “Little Miss Sunshine” Abigail Breslin found herself getting a social-media flogging after posting an Instagram picture of herself with her longtime friend, Trump’s younger daughter, Tiffany. Even worse, the singer Jennifer Holliday was intimidated into not performing at the inauguration because, as she put it on “The View,” “I woke up, and there was, like, this whole thing of terrible tweets and things on my Instagram, and I was like, ‘Oh, Lord, what did I do? . . . One morning you wake up, and everybody hates you.”
Holliday previously performed for Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush without incident and said she thought it would be cool to perform Friday because “I’m an artist and I love America” and it would signify “healing” and “unity.”
How crazy have things gotten when wanting healing and unity makes you a public enemy?