I usually like The Guardian. It has become just about my only go-to newspaper, and their reportage usually leaves North American newspapers in the dust.
But Emma Brockes’s snooty profile on Susan Sarandon was just plain awful.
I do not know at what point political intolerance became seen as normal. Sarandon is not an idiot: she survived in Hollywood for decades, and for a woman in that business to maintain A-list status with a true enviable body of work, you have to have an actual thinking brain.
Looks come and go. Talent is a dime a dozen. Making it in that business without a rich and connected parent meddling requires a certain savvy.
But Brockes dismisses all that from the get-go. She is resentful that Sarandon first supported Bernie Sanders.
Yeah, lots of people loved Bernie. I know young people on this side of the border who go all happy at the mere mention of his name.
He understood the concept of political rejuvenation and reaching out to the next generation of voters. Clinton did not. She knocked free university tuition, even though New York state and the province of Ontario have moved to various levels of those models.
Bernie hit a chord and did something very few politicians truly know how to do: make people want to get involved in a political process.
When Bernie lost to Hillary, Sarandon had another very good political idea: moving support toward Jill Stein. For women, this was a prime opportunity to nurture a third party that had a woman at the helm. If she got more votes, there would have been a genuine breakthrough.
It would have given women more than one option at the polls.
But in this fragmented logic of Brockes, Sarandon was somehow allowing some evil force to win because she saw that a new path was required by women voters.
Really, Ms Brockes? Women should put all their eggs in one basket? What if the party implodes? Where would women go if the Democrats prove to be habitual sexual harassers who say one thing, but grope another?
That’s just plain flaky.
In Canada, there are multiple parties, and we are still standing. We have two (!) federal left-leaning parties, for instance. Why is America so hung up on binary systems?
Sarandon may not be right — or wrong, but she has a right not to trust an untrustworthy candidate, nor is she obliged to use the logical fallacy of sink or swim.
The Clintons are hawks. When they are in a position of power, they have signed off on bombing foreign nations, perhaps as a misdirection when people start asking them critical questions about their naughty behaviours.
The press needs to get over themselves. They have far bigger problems than a Hollywood actress who actually has her own ideas and is not a follower.
And the Guardian should remember it is still a cut above other media outlets, and shouldn’t be regressing when their profession has collapsed.
Because that thinking was one of the reasons it collapsed in the first place.
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