In last week's new episode, Smug Alert!,\ ""South Park"" ridiculed Hybrid car owners, San Francisco and George Clooney. Clooney's Academy Awards acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor created a deadly smug cloud. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of ""South Park,"" often bash Hollywood celebrities who comment on domestic or foreign affairs—witness their last movie, 2004's ""Team America: World Police."" Parker and Stone's view resonates with many.
But while skewering activist actors is entertaining, there is something odd about the assumption that actors or artists should not comment on politics. If artists should not express their beliefs, what right do we lowly mortals have to do so?
Before we turn to Clooney—or Sean Penn and the Gipper (Ronald Reagan)—let's discuss Natalie Portman. While attending Harvard, the Jerusalem-born Portman responded to the author of an April 11, 2002, Harvard Crimson article, ""An Ideology of Oppression,"" who argued that ""White Israeli soldiers"" waged racist war against ""brown [Palestinians].""
In a letter to the editor response, Portman countered that ""most Israelis and Palestinians are indistinguishable physically"" and, as Semites, ""are historically cousins."" This actress made a worthy contribution to a debate.
Sean Penn is more controversial. In ""Team America: World Police,"" Parker and Stone paint Penn as an airhead who believes that pre-Shock-and-Awe Iraq was a land of smiles and ""rivers made of chocolate."" Penn, partly because he's an angry guy and partly because when he visited Iraq he never mentioned smiles or chocolate, sent the creators of South Park an angry letter with a few choice words.
Perhaps more famously, soon after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Penn flew in, commissioned a boat and ventured into the muck to lift survivors to safety. The media made fun of him, but he actually rescued dozens of people.
Regarding images of Penn boating around New Orleans, it can seem, according to one media blog, ""as if Ernest Hemingway made sweet, sweet love to Jeff Spicoli [Penn's stoned surfer from 1982s ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High'] before our very eyes.""
Yet Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Hunter S. Thompson, William T. Vollmann and numerous other writers with egos as big as Penn's ventured into dangerous situations to comment on politics and war.
On a broader level, why should the White House and Fox's Bill O'Reilly monopolize our national debate? They are wrong as much as anyone. For instance, Spike Lee is probably a better guide to racial issues than Vice President Cheney (who, while a member of Congress, voted pro-apartheid, anti-Nelson Mandela).
A friend of Spike Lee, George Clooney, directed and acted in the 2005 movie about McCarthyism, titled ""Good Night, and Good Luck."" Though Clooney's Oscar speech was smug in its assertions of Hollywood being politically progressive (Spike Lee himself said as much), Hollywood has historically been engaged in politics.
In 1948, after FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI to secretly cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee of J. Parnell Thomas and a freshman congressman named Richard Nixon, bureau executive Richard Hood wrote up the outline of the Hollywood blacklist in the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
Among other things, the FBI told HUAC to consult Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actor's Guild. Reagan testified in public about communists in Hollywood, and as ""Confidential Informant T-10"" privately ""named names"" for the FBI. The people Reagan named paid a price: jail time or crippling ostracism. In fact, Sean Penn's father, Leo Penn, a veteran of World War II and a Hollywood actor, was put out of work thanks to the Hollywood blacklist.
Reagan, of course, went on to become president of the United States. Maybe what this shows is that Portman, Penn and Clooney have just as much right to engage in politics as a B-movie actor. That they might have more productive things to say is another matter.
Artists often engage moral and political issues in their work. How can we pretend such people are somehow out of bounds when they speak outside their work? Let Trey Parker and Matt Stone skewer the smug. But we should not forget that artists are first and foremost our fellow citizens.
Teddy O'Reilly is a senior majoring in international studies. His column runs every Wednesday in The Daily Cardinal. Please send responses to opinion@dailycardinal.com.\
