Andrea Widburg of the American Thinker probes beyond the headlines of a high-profile celebrity defamation trial.
[W]hen you start reading about so many of the actors, you discover that they’re exactly like the people who drifted into Hollywood in the early years of the industry: horrible childhoods, broken homes, failed educations, failed work histories, distasteful habits (sexual perversions and substance abuse), and problems with the law. If they were your next-door neighbors, you’d do your best to keep your children far away from them. But because they’re “stars,” they’re admired. Worse, impressionable children fail to understand that their lifestyle choices are awful.
And that gets me to Johnny Depp. Over the years, he’s been politically innocuous. He’s also shown himself to be a talented actor. He gets points for both those things.
However, poor Depp is also the perfect star stereotype: Horrible childhood, limited education, substance abuse, and sexually perverse relationships. On-screen, he’s in control, even if his character is not; off-screen, he married a woman who was famously crazy and vicious and then suffered horribly at her hands because he’s weak and lacks internal resources.
The headlines tell the story: drunken binges, screaming fights, physical violence, severed fingers, drugs, fecal matter, and an atmosphere of paranoia and hatred. It made me think that, back in the old days, when ordinary people viewed actors with deep suspicion as immoral, they may have been on to something.
One day, we’ll look back on the second and third decades of the 21st century as the “great revealing” because we’re finally seeing past the shiny surfaces our institutions presented. We’ve learned that our American government bears little relationship to its constitutional guidelines and is scarily close to a third-world dictatorship. We’ve learned that our federal law enforcement agencies are dangerously corrupt. We’ve learned that those institutions to which we’ve entrusted our children, whether schools or corporate entertainment (Disney, Nickelodeon, etc.), aggressively indoctrinate our children into leftist politics and dangerous gender lunacy.
