Air: A Review - Who Knew That Shameless Corporate Ass-Kissing Could Be So Entertaining?

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A rare treat of a well-made movie for grown-ups. Not life changing but undeniably entertaining.

Air, the new movie about Nike’s push to sign Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal in 1984, is, to quote Kris Kristofferson, “partly truth, partly fiction, a walking contradiction”.

The film, which is directed by Ben Affleck and stars Affleck as well as his old buddy Matt Damon, is the rarest of rare things in our current culture in that it’s a movie featuring movie stars, made for grown-ups in which everyone involved is exceedingly competent at what they do.

Ben Affleck’s direction, the cast’s performances, first-time screenwriter Alex Convery’s script and Robert Richardson’s cinematography are all, at a bare minimum, competent and often much more than that. For this reason alone, the film is undeniably entertaining.

It’s a testament to Damon and Affleck’s star power, and the professionalism and skill of everyone involved, that even though viewers know how the story ends, Air is still a compelling and captivating story that at times is remarkably exhilarating and even moving.

Matt Damon is terrific as Sonny Vaccaro, the guy leading the charge to get Michael Jordan to sign up with the then basement-dwelling, third ranked basketball sneaker company, Nike.

Damon has always been a top-notch movie star actor, and he brings all his skill to the fore as the lovable loser Vaccaro. Damon is a pleasant and oddly charming screen presence who effortlessly carries this story from start to finish.

Viola Davis, who plays Michael Jordan’s mom Deloris, is outstanding in her supporting role. With minimal screen time Davis imbues Deloris with a silent authority that dominates the drama. Every time she is on-screen, she is subtly the center of the universe. It would be difficult to imagine a scenario where Davis doesn’t get nominated for an Oscar for this performance.

Ben Affleck is very good too as Phil Knight, the very strange founder of Nike. Affleck is fantastic at being unintentionally funny and if Phil Knight is anything it is unintentionally funny.

Affleck’s direction is solid as well. His decision to not make Michael Jordan a major character in the film, and to not show Jordan’s face, were pretty brilliant as the movie could have easily spun out of control and turned into a rather cheap, made-for-tv type of project with a Jordan imitator joining the festivities.

All that said, there are some things about Air that leave a decidedly bad taste in my mouth.

The first of which is that this movie is undeniably a piece of corporate propaganda and hagiography. This isn’t just a film about American capitalism and corporatocracy, it is a celebration of American capitalism and corporatocracy.

The movie bends the truth to some extraordinary degrees in order to pretend it isn’t celebrating the rather deplorable parts of American capitalism and corporatism symbolized by Nike, and to act like it’s actually a tale about the working man fighting against corporate power.

Jordan is made out to be a pioneer who broke the mold regarding shoe contracts by demanding profit sharing and his mother Deloris makes the case that “young black boys will pay a lot for this sneaker and that money should go to my son!” She also says that workers like Vaccaro, and black athletes endorsing sneakers, are exploited by companies like Nike, and Converse and Adidas and they deserve more of the profits.

This is all well and good and is a nice bit of drama for the film, but the fact that Nike pays slave wages to third world workers in order to make their sneakers goes unsaid and unacknowledged. Also unsaid and unacknowledged is the fact that Nike sell their status symbol shoes at exorbitant prices that are so high that in the 80’s and 90’s they often caused crime and violence by young black men against other young black men in order to get them.

In addition, it is also a bit unnerving that Sonny Vaccaro, who is widely considered by many in the know to be one of the sleaziest people from the amateur basketball scene back in the 70’s and 80’s, is made out to be the good-hearted, kind, lovable hero of the movie.

Vaccaro was a shark who was deeply involved in all sorts of shady shit back in the day, and to see him in the film and in the film’s prologue, portrayed as the champion of the good, the noble and the right is a bit much.

There’s an interesting monologue in the film about the Bruce Springsteen song “Born in the USA”, which was enormously popular in 1984. The song, which was co-opted by Reagan as a flag-waving theme song, is actually a lament about the brutal decline of America, but because its morose lyrics are accompanied by the energized music of an uber-patriotic anthem, the song’s meaning gets lost and its artistic power usurped.

It could be that Affleck uses the “Born in the USA” monologue to let astute viewers know that he is trying to hide his critique of the insidious nature of American capitalism and corporatocracy in plain sight in this hagiography. I’d like to think so…but Air feels too weak in its criticisms and too vociferous in its praise of Nike (and all that it represents) to pass that test, and thus feels like just the anthem part of “Born in the USA” without the existential lament at its core.  

The reality is that Air is really a movie about marketing that is itself a piece of marketing. The film, with its fantastic soundtrack of 80’s music, looks and feels like a two-hour commercial for Nike. In this way it is almost an extension of The Last Dance, the ten-hour Michael Jordan docu-series that was so gloriously received by everyone but me back in 2020. That docu-series was shameless legend cultivation and brand buttressing of Michael Jordan and was produced by…you guessed it…Michael Jordan. But our culture is so enamored and addicted to narcissistic self-promotion and propaganda, that no one cared they were being fed a piece of self-serving bullshit.

Speaking of shameless marketing and self-promotion, it is strange that Damon and Affleck are out pounding the pavement selling this movie and pretending this is their first reunion film since their smash hit Good Will Hunting back in 1997, for which they won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

Damon and Affleck’s last actual on-screen and writing credit reunion was Ridley Scott’s underrated 2021 film The Last Duel. The Last Duel was overlooked by audiences and snickered at by critics, but I thought it was very good, so to see Damon and Affleck pretend like it doesn’t exist is somewhat bizarre…but makes sense in terms of marketing as the Damon-Affleck reunion card is being played again. As they say, everything old is new again…apparently even on-screen reunions that already happened two-years ago.  

Also a bit odd is the fact that this movie is the first from Damon and Affleck’s production company Artists Equity, which is all about paying workers above and below the line fairly and with equity in the film.

That the narrative of Air somewhat reflects the business model of Artists Equity is clever, as is Affleck talking up how he looked out for first time screenwriter Convery and promised him he’d get full credit despite some rewrites.

But that “looking out for the working man” narrative feels like window dressing when the movie it is placed in is an embarrassing ass-kissing of sweatshop masters Nike made by the deplorable demons at Amazon. I mean…yikes…you’d be hard pressed to find two companies as destructive to working people and our culture as Nike and Amazon. This insidious approach is somewhat reminiscent of the Best Picture winner Nomadland, which told a tale of the working poor on the fringes of society yet disgustingly managed to portray Amazon - which is well-known for its abuse of workers and labor practices, as a friend to the working man and wonderful worker’s paradise.

And yet, despite the rather repulsive pro-corporation politics and economics on display in the movie, Air is an irresistibly entertaining and unrelentingly enjoyable movie, which is a testament to Affleck and Damon’s talent and star power.

In conclusion, Air is in rarified air in that it’s a movie for grown-ups that features movie stars confidently filling up the big screen. I highly recommend it and can guarantee that while it won’t change your life, it will definitely leave you satisfied.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Matrix: Resurrections - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just a dreadful, awful movie that does nothing but undermine the brilliance of the original.

At the very end of Matrix: Resurrections, the movie perfectly sums up its sole reason for existing as well as what is so dreadfully wrong with it.

Back in 1999, when The Matrix came to its conclusion after its astonishing action sequences and mind-expanding/blowing storyline, the song “Wake Up” by Rage Against the Machine blasted out of studio speakers as an aggressive rallying cry and call to arms. It was a stunning moment that perfectly captured the volcanic frustration born out of the ennui and malaise of post-cold war and pre-9/11 America.

In contrast, after two and a half hours of impotent fight sequences and flaccid philosophical musings in Matrix: Resurrections, the fourth movie in the Matrix franchise - which is now in theatres and streaming on HBO Max, the same song, “Wake Up” by Rage Against the Machine, plays once again, but this time the ferocious and rebellious growl of Rage Against the Machine is replaced, and the song is played by a flaccid cover band, Brass Against, and the singer is a woman.

To give an even deeper context to that music cue, Brass Against is a watered-down, truly shitty cover band, and they’ve only ever made the news once, for an incident where their female lead singer literally urinated on a male fan on stage during a show.

Chef’s kiss.

It would seem, with all of the ridiculous, gender-based changes made to the Matrix in Matrix: Resurrections, the girl power revolution will most definitely be televised, but it will also be an abysmal, derivative and boring fucking show that’s only redeeming value is that it is almost instantaneously forgettable.

What grates about Matrix: Resurrections, is that it apparently only exists in order to undermine the story, meaning and power of the original film. In Matrix parlance, it’s like the filmmakers want their audience to vomit up the red pill and gobble up the blue pill.

This of course would seem to be an asinine course of action for the filmmakers, who have never made anything even remotely worthwhile since The Matrix. But when seen in context, it all makes perfect sense on a meta level, as the creators of the Matrix have literally castrated themselves and now have succeeded in castrating their greatest work, The Matrix, as well.

You see, the Wachowski brothers , who wrote and directed the ground-breaking The Matrix in 1999 and both of its dismal sequels in 2003, are now in 2021, the Wachowski sisters. Lana Wachowski, who was Larry Wachowski back in the day, directed this new Matrix movie solo as her former brother and current sister Lilly (formerly Andy), wasn’t involved in the production.

Obviously, a lot can change in the Matrix over twenty years. Besides brothers becoming sisters, action sequences that were once so revolutionary back in ‘99, are now just derivative and dull and the original mind-bending Matrix story is now reduced to a masturbatorial homage driven by limp cultural politics and painfully inert and cliched narratives.

Back for Resurrections are veterans of the original trilogy, Keanu Reeves and Carrie Ann-Moss, but gone for no discernible reason are fellow trilogy vets Laurence Fishburn and Hugo Weaving. But at least Matrix: Resurrections casts heavyweight Doogie Howser…oops…I mean, Neil Patrick Harris, in a critical role. Yikes. Was Urkel/Jaleel White not available?

Keanu, always an understated actor, seems to sleep walk through the film and Moss looks oddly detached from the foolish festivities into which she wanders. I understood their weariness, as I too fought to stave off slumber.

I’d recount the specifics of the plot of Matrix: Resurrections, but its just so supercilious and self-defeating as to be inane if not insane. The brilliance of The Matrix was that it was narratively complex without being complicated. This was why it was so effortless to fall under the spell of the film and go along for the ride. Matrix: Resurrections on the other hand, is needlessly labyrinthine but also remarkably stupid. It repels audience interest by building barriers of banality cloaked in contradictions and incoherence.

I remember when I first saw The Matrix in ‘99. I was going to London the next day and took my lady and a friend to the movie after we had dinner in Manhattan. I had extremely low expectations as I considered Keanu to be a bit of a joke at the time. I left the theatre a few hours later gobsmacked. The movie blew me away. And what made it all the more fascinating was that as the days, weeks, months and even years went by I thought more and more about the movie. Quite an accomplishment for what I assumed was just an action movie.

Unfortunately, the sequels to The Matrix, Matrix: Reloaded and Matrix: Revolutions, were abysmal disappointments, with Revolutions in particular being nearly unwatchable.

Besides the original Matrix movie, the Wachowski’s filmography reveals them to be quite dreadful filmmakers. Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending is a murderer’s row of cinematic dogshit, and Matrix: Resurrections is an equally odious addition to that line-up.

I’ve read that Lana Wachowski wanted to use Resurrections to take back The Matrix’s “red pill” symbology that had been pirated by right-wing radicals, most notably during the Trump years. This strikes me as a sort of “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face” type of situation.

The Matrix: Resurrections seems like an attempt to retroactively ruin a classic film, The Matrix, in order to piss off the original’s fans who found meaning within it, because the meaning they found wasn’t what the filmmakers intended.

I’ve heard this Matrix right-wing conundrum equated to when Ronald Reagan usurped Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” back in the 80’s. Springsteen wrote the song as a protest about the injustices against the working class in America. Reagan used it as a patriotic rallying cry.

The problem with “Born in the U.S.A.” is that while the lyrics astutely lament America’s treatment of the working class, the music accompanying them is written like an anthem. The music is a celebration, while the lyrics are a lamentation. (To see how the musical context changes the song, listen to Springsteen’s sterling acoustic version on the 1999 album 18 Tracks)

Music, like movies, makes people feel first, and think second. Audiences of both Born in the U.S.A. and The Matrix responded to the pride and anger respectively of those two works.

Trying to reverse the effects of that is near impossible, and no matter how much Springsteen corrects the record regarding his song, or the Wachowski’s try and go back and change the meaning of The Matrix, the cat is already out of the bag, the horse is out of the barn, and the genie is out of the bottle. Audience response is solidified and deeply held and there’s nothing that can change that.

Ultimately, Matrix: Resurrections is wrestling with a ghost, and while that may be interesting for the ghost and for the wrestler, to outside observers it just looks like an idiot having spasms during a psychosis-fueled conniption.

My advice is to skip Matrix: Resurrections. It is truly awful. Don’t see it. Don’t even acknowledge it exists. Stay stuck in the delusion that only The Matrix exists and all the other Wachowski films are just bad dreams to be brushed off and forever forgotten.

©2021

The Musical Performances at the Biden Inauguration Highlight America's Bankrupt Culture

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

Big music stars performed to ring in Joe Biden’s presidency, but they were just as unoriginal and underwhelming as he is.

In a grand ceremony worthy of a dementia-addled aristocrat, geriatric Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States yesterday.

America has had an inauguration for the president every four years since 1789, making yesterday’s event the 59th in U.S. history. I believe Joe Biden is the only man to have attended every single one of them.

Four years ago, Trump’s low rent inauguration celebration featured Toby Keith, Three Doors Down and Lee Greenwood, which wasn’t a murderer’s row of talent so much as a ‘makes-you-want-to-kill-yourself’ lack of it.

I think we can all agree the last thing this country ever needs to see again is Lee Greenwood serenading the masses with his flag fornicating hit from the Paleolithic era, “God Bless the U.S.A.”, a heinously malignant earworm that makes me not just ashamed to be an American, but a sentient human being.

Not surprisingly, the stars came out in full this year to salute Joe Biden, who had considerably more star power on-hand to ring him into office than Trump in 2017.

Case in point, Lady Gaga sang the national anthem at the swearing-in ceremony. The glorious Gaga, who has the voice of an angel and a face made for radio, arrived looking like she just came off The Hunger Games set. Her dress appeared to be a tribute to a venereal disease polyp designed by Oscar de la Herpes.

Gaga gave her all…but the problem was that it was just way too much. Her heartfelt performance quickly devolved into an overwrought vocal spectacle that looked and sounded like a drag queen Brunhilde wrestling an amusement park Bugs Bunny.

A short while later Jennifer Lopez strutted out to sing “This Land is Your Land” and “America the Beautiful”. If you needed any more proof that America was a vast cultural wasteland, just consider that Jennifer Lopez is now the Woody Guthrie of our era.

J-Lo also gave her all but unfortunately it wasn’t nearly enough. Unable to utilize her most valuable ‘asset’, Ms. Lopez’s lack of vocal prowess was left as exposed as her backside was covered.

Biden loved the performance though and as J-Lo walked past he quickly smelled her hair and declared, “I Love you, Charo!”

The final performer at the ceremony was Garth Brooks, who kept it country…Walmart country, by wearing jeans that were two sizes too small, a belt buckle the size of a Ford F-150 pick-up truck, a black blazer and a shirt with no tie.

Good old boy Garth sang “Amazing Grace” in his usual banal country twang and proceeded to remind viewers that only in America can a minimally gifted, chubby, cowboy poseur become a chart-topping music mega-star.

Biden was deeply moved by Garth’s song and proclaimed he was “so proud that Gene Autry could be here today at my First Communion.”

Later that night the heavy hitters came out for a made-for-tv inaugural celebration titled ”Celebrating America”.

The show opened with Bruce Springsteen doing an acoustic version of his song “Land of Hopes and Dreams” at the Lincoln Memorial. For nearly fifty years Springsteen has been the genuine voice of working class America and is such a national treasure he should be named poet laureate emeritus. His performance was solemn, soulful and stirring and perfectly encapsulated this dire yet determined moment in American history.

The show went precipitously downhill from there.

Tom Hanks, America’s everyman if everyman were a sanctimonious, self-satisfied, holier-than-thou billionaire, was the master of ceremonies.

Hanks was the perfect choice since his filmography looks like a greatest hits of Pentagon and Intelligence community propaganda, as his film’s routinely sell flag-waving revisionist history and muscular American militarism, imperialism and corporate colonialism all under the guise of honor and duty-bound niceness…just like Joe Biden.

Hanks turned the smug all the way up to 11, maybe in an attempt to stay warm, and did his best to reassure his “friends and neighbors” that all was well and life is now back to normal thanks to Biden.

The highlights of Celebrating America were easily the aforementioned Springsteen as well as the Foo Fighters – who played a striking rendition of “Times Like These”.

The lowest of lowlights was Jon Bon Jovi lip-syncing to his cover of The Beatles “Here Comes the Sun”. Bon Jovi’s performance was as odious as the rancid air in Elizabeth, NJ along the turnpike. Jovi’s nasally vocals were so abysmally, egregiously, hellaciously awful it was utterly astonishing. The fact that he was lip-syncing only made it all the more embarrassing.

Lip-syncing dominated the festivities, with Ant Clemons and Justin Timberlake, Tyler Hubbard and Tim McGraw, Demi Lovato, Katy Perry and maybe even John Legend, who Biden thought was his old friend Corn Pop from the mean streets of Wilmington, all lip-syncing or being greatly electronically aided in their vocal efforts.

Lip-syncing does make sense in this context though since the contrived performances perfectly encapsulate the charade that is our corporate-controlled democracy.

Speaking of charlatans, presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama appeared on the show, apparently from The Hall of War Criminals. They each said that despite their political differences that they were able to come together and kill people across the globe and crush the working class…and we should do the same now in the name of unity. Yay unity!!

If the inauguration ceremony and ‘Celebrating America’ - with all its insipid, manufactured performances and star-spangled sappiness honoring our elderly president who’s only capable of muttering or shouting incoherent inanities - are any indication, we are an artistically, intellectually and politically bankrupt nation…and we are truly doomed.

My solution….Springsteen/Grohl 2024!!

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Express Yourself? Madonna Don't Preach!

Estimated Reading Time : 4 minutes 11 seconds

At the Women’s March on Washington this past Saturday, Madonna tried to cut President Trump down to size with an impassioned speech, but she ended up helping her opponents and hurting her cause.  

Let me say right up front that I am not one of those people who thinks celebrities should never talk about politics. I feel that all Americans, celebrities included, should share their thoughts as they see fit. Of course, I also believe that people, celebrities most especially due to the size of their audience, should be held to account for what they say. Which brings us to Madonna and the Women’s March on Washington inauguration weekend.

 At the anti-Trump/pro-woman event this past weekend, Madonna gave a profanity-laced speech where she said, in part, “Yes, I am angry. Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I’ve thought about blowing up the White House”.  No doubt the Secret Service are drawing straws right now to see who gets stuck with the miserable assignment of interviewing the erstwhile Material Girl. While most people will chalk up Madonna’s statement as just a bit of emotionalist nonsense, the Secret Service, sadly for them, don’t have that luxury.

While the 58 year-old, former pop-princess isn’t entirely culturally irrelevant, she can certainly see irrelevance from her backyard. Madonna’s artistic insignificance aside, her diatribe at the rally this past weekend will no doubt bring her some much-desired attention, but it will also most certainly undermine the anti-Trump cause for which she alleges to be speaking.  

Problem number one with Madonna’s speech is that you cannot decry what you consider to be Donald Trump’s outrageous statements by making outrageous statements of your own. Doing so only serves to highlight your own hypocrisy and diminish and normalize what you believe to be Trump’s inappropriateness. In addition, violent speech, whether it comes from Madonna or Trump or anyone else, simply cannot be permitted to stand unchallenged in the public square. Violent speech eventually can lead to violent action. This was on display at a Trump rally in North Carolina during the campaign where a protestor was sucker-punched by a Trump supporter after candidate Trump had talked of getting tough with unwanted agitators. Conversely, this past weekend, alt-right leader Richard Spencer got punched in the face in broad daylight by a masked man while giving an interview on a street corner in Washington D.C. Regardless of what you may think of the protestor at the Trump rally or of Richard Spencer, there can be no tolerance for violence towards people because of their political beliefs. If you can’t convince people of your argument with your words, you certainly won’t convince them with your fists.

Speaking of failing to convince people of your arguments, who, exactly, was Madonna trying to sway with her diatribe? Like Meryl Streep’s recent speech at the Golden Globes, Madonna’s tirade was not meant to persuade anyone, only to preach to the already converted.  Madonna and Meryl both gave their immediate audiences what they wanted, and got the cheers they expected, the problem though is that while their speeches were directed towards those who agree with them inside the Hollywood bubble, ‘regular’ people in flyover country heard them as well.  Among those flyover folks are the swing voters democrats need to convince if they want to stop Trump and get back into power. I am willing to bet those 80,000 or so working class white voters, or as I call them “Springsteen voters”, who voted Obama twice and put Trump over the top in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin in 2016, were less enamored with Madonna’s screed than the true-blue liberals cheering her at the Women’s March.

 President Trump tweeted his response to the protests. “Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression we just had an election! Why didn’t these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.” I am not a Trump voter or supporter, truth is I dislike him “bigly”. That said, he is spot-on about that last part, “Celebs hurt cause badly”. Trump knows his target audience extremely well, and he is well aware that Americans in the Heartland, chief among them the “Springsteen Voters”, are tired of being preached to and looked down upon by liberal coastal elites, so anytime a celebrity or the media attacks him, Trump gets considerably stronger and his opposition gets weaker.

 While Madonna’s rant may have felt good to her personally and momentarily excited her cohorts in the democratic base, it was terribly counter-productive in terms of a strategic resistance to Trump. Madonna and Meryl Streep are both so deeply entrenched in their own epistemic echo chamber that they are unable to grasp how their harangues are heard by the great, unwashed masses in Middle America. To swing-voting ‘regular’ Americans, these anti-Trump speeches are not heard as heartfelt emotional rebuttals against President Trump, rather they are heard as the self-serving tantrums of spoiled entertainers.

 If celebrities want to truly help their cause and hurt Trump, they need to stop thinking and acting emotionally and start thinking and acting strategically. Instead of urgently reacting to everything Trump says, they should methodically and rationally respond to what Trump does. They should be all the things they claim Donald Trump is not, they should be measured, calm and thoughtful. Before they utter a single word, they should think about how those pivotal Springsteen voters in the Rust Belt will hear the message they are trying to convey. Those swing voters can be convinced, and democrats have swayed them before, so instead of calling them racists or idiots or misogynists because they voted Trump, liberals should lick their wounds and then set out to methodically persuade them back to their point of view using logic and reason and not emotion.

 One final point, here is a piece of anecdotal evidence I will share with you. On the day after the Women’s March, I had a discussion with my neighbor here in Los Angeles. She is a woman in her late thirties originally from Pennsylvania (everyone who lives here is from somewhere else). When the subject of the Woman’s March came up she told me that “all of her female friends” had gone to the march. I was really surprised and impressed to hear this and it made me think the rally and resistance to Trump had a deep base and were very wide spread. I then rattled off a list of names of her friends from Pennsylvania, asking if they went to the march.

“Did Lisa go?”

 “No.”

 “Did Jenny go?”

 “No.”

 “Did Karen go?”

 “No. None of my friends from Pennsylvania went, only my friends from LA.”

 “Oh,” I said, the bigger picture becoming more clear, “but what did your Pennsylvania friends say about the march on Facebook?”

 My friend paused a moment and then replied, “They didn’t really comment on it at all.”

 This conversation is one of the reasons why I believe that Madonna and other celebrities fail so miserably when they carelessly attack Trump. Madonna and Meryl Streep’s fellow travelers in the liberal big cities will cheer their every word, but the “Springsteen voters” who can make the electoral difference in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, will either tune out, be turned off to the liberal cause or be turned on to Trump at the sound of celebrity political pontification, even when it comes from their idol Bruce Springsteen.

 I am sure Madonna felt invigorated giving her speech surrounded by adoring fans this past Saturday, but she won’t feel so great when she has to give another speech to the same group of down-trodden liberals after Trump’s inauguration in January of 2021. If these celebrities really care about the anti-Trump cause, they would be most wise to think long and hard before assailing him so recklessly. Everyone has the right to speak, but strategically it is sometimes best to keep your mouth shut. As the old saying goes, “better to remain quiet and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt”.

Previously published on January 24, 2017 at RT.

©2017