Beautiful Blithering Idiots

And now, on a different tack, it seems famed thespian Miss Gwyneth Paltrow has caused a bit of a lather with a comment she made to a Portuguese newspaper where she explained why she preferred living in England to the United States:

I love the English lifestyle, it's not as capitalistic as America. People don't talk about work and money, they talk about interesting things at dinner.

Well isn't that ducky and while it is oh so tempting to speak to that little gem of a comment, I will instead address a far larger and weightier matter: The appalling attention given to the political opinions of movie stars (particularly if they lean to the left, of course). I am not much of a movie goer but my understanding of Miss Paltrow is she enjoys stupendous looks and is able to memorize sufficient lines to enable her to film scenes from a script in order to make a movie. These two assets have afforded Ms. Paltrow fabulous riches and she, like so many of her peers, feels that entitles her to have her political opinions taken seriously. It does not, of course.

Imagine, if you will, a fellow who achieves his life long dream of becoming an accountant (I said imagine). Not only does he achieve that dream, he is really, really good at accounting, people from around the world flock to his office daily for his famed accounting acumen. He becomes rich and successful. Now imagine this fellow starts feeling pretty gosh darned important and starts thinking people might be interested in his political opinions. In an interview with The Modern Accountant (or whatever their journal is called) instead of blathering away on accruals, tax shelters and the like, he instead attacks, say, the foreign policy of the United States. Would anybody, anybody, in this wonderful country give a rat's ass what this star accountant's political views were? No, you say? Then why the downright obsessive attention in this country to the political thought of Gwenyth Paltrow, Sean Penn, Ben Affleck, Barbra Streisand and the rest of the sorry cavalcade of overpaid movie stars, people who earn their huge pay envelopes for looking or sounding pretty and memorizing lines; people whose intellectual prowess is vastly inferior to that of our pal the accountant?

It is a mystery I have never been able to solve.