WASHINGTON -- Darn, I missed the Oscars again. I adore gory spectacles. If cockfights were legal I would be there. Even bear-baiting would not be too gruesome for me. Yet somehow I always miss Oscar night.
The evening sounds fascinating. Primitive forms of life are gathered under one roof to strut and to preen. They whoop. They giggle. They sob. Occasionally one of the more cerebral intones a metaphysical ponderosity -- generally lifted from a bumper sticker. America's Hollywood animals may be vulgar, but they are humanitarians too. During Oscar night they espouse more humanitarian blah than can be heard at the U.N. General Assembly in a month. Then the assembled Hollywoodians shove off into the night for "party time" and the next day's glad and glorious morn: the rehab session, consultations with a local swami, a court-ordered anger management session, a liver transplant or perhaps just a tummy tuck. The Hollywood community has about as high an incidence of social pathologies as any slum, albeit higher self-esteem.
If I missed Oscar night, my colleague Ben Stein did not. Stein, an occasional frequenter of the Hollywood scene, reviewed the evening's glamorous proceedings for The American Spectator online: "[T]here was not one word of tribute, not one breath, to our fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan or to their families or their widows or orphans."
And Stein went on: "No doubt the men and women who came to the Oscars in gowns that cost more than an Army Sergeant makes in a year, in limousines with champagne in the back seat, think they are working-class heroes … They would be heroes if they said that Moslem extremists are the worst threat to human decency since Hitler and Stalin." Now wait a minute, Stein, mixing Stalin in with Hitler is not going to play with the Hollywoodians. By their lights Stalin was a progressive. Hitler was a brute racist. Hollywood has always been conflicted about Stalin. About Hitler there is no ambivalence. He was a very bad fellow, notwithstanding his abhorrence of tobacco and his vegetarianism.
Perhaps we could get Hollywood on our side in this war against Islamofascism if the Hollywoodians could be apprised of the Islamofascists' enthusiasm for Hitler. A week or so ago I sat in on a screening of a new documentary that is pretty convincing on the matter, "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West." Information on it can be found at www.obsessionthemovie.com.