[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2013/05/insideMONKEY_Lizz-Winstead.jpg)The folks at Comedy Central like to maintain that they are in the business of being clowns. They’re right, except that clowns typically make jokes at the expense of both sides of the political aisle. If Lizz Winstead is any evidence, the clowns at Comedy Central are unfair and unbalanced.
Winstead, the co-creator of the Daily Show on Comedy Central, took the opportunity on Monday to tweet about the tornadoes ravaging Oklahoma. First: “How long as Obama known about this Tornado?” Then she followed up with a doozy: “This tornado,” she tweeted, “is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives.”
Outrage quickly ensued on Twitter, and Winstead pulled back from this offensive contention. But this wasn’t the first time she had used tornadoes in Oklahoma tastelessly for a cheap, pro-Obama shot. Back in April 2012, after the Oklahoma Senate killed a bill that would have allowed for alternatives to teaching of climate change, she tweeted, “GOPklahoma geniuses finally realized those tornadoes didn’t just show up onna count they were bored.” In other words, tornadoes happen because conservatives don’t wholeheartedly believe in anthropogenic climate change.
People who tweet about certain areas getting the natural disasters they deserve areas generally have a label: jerks. But for Hollywood, the real jerkiness is denying climate change. If you deny that driving an SUV somehow kills polar bears, you are not only uncouth, you are immoral. You can participate in rape of an underage child (Roman Polanski), murder (O.J), driving under the influence (everyone), and get away with it. But if you’re driving a Hummer while doing any of those things, you’re evil.
Climate change belief has become a substitute for moral belief in Hollywood. That’s why so many Hollywoodites spend their time pushing the green agenda. Only worship of Mother Earth could lead investors to sink $15 million into the waste of time and effort Promised Land. Only belief in Gaia could lead to an investment of $175 million in Waterworld (which grossed $88 million domestically). Environmentalist movies in Hollywood are far more common than movies about the dangers of terrorism.
The Hollywood set sees itself as the standard-bearer for the “civilization has ruined nature” clique. Of course, they bear that standard from high atop their energy-consuming mansions in the Hollywood Hills, while being chauffeured aboard their private jets. And they never seem to realize that while Americans have the luxury of worrying about gas guzzlers, the poor folks in the rest of the world don’t. The only way to raise those countries up financially is to produce goods and products that make lives easier. And the only way to do that is to embrace capitalism.
But Hollywood won’t do that. So Tinseltown is stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to claim that the same capitalism that could end pollution is the cause of pollution (even as non-capitalist China leads global pollutant countries, and plutocratic Russia comes in third).
So instead, Hollywood will rail at all those rubes in Oklahoma. They’ll pretend that they’re doing something righteous and good by railing at the dupes who vote Republican in the sticks.
Then they’ll take the bucks they earn from mocking middle America, buy fuel efficient vehicles, and – in the imagery of South Park — create a cloud of smug over cities like Los Angeles. It’s even uglier than smog, and twice as irritating.
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