Actor Matt Damon, whose fee the last time I checked is $10
million a movie, has his finger on the pulse of the American common folk, and
he wants you to know he feels your anger about economic inequality.
The American public is angry about financial unfairness, Damon
said recently, but neither political party is addressing that in its
presidential campaign. “I don't think the Republicans or the Democrats really
understand the level of anger at the sense of unfairness that the majority of
people in the country feel,” he commented.
Damon, 41, was speaking at Comic-Con in San Diego, where he
was promoting his upcoming (March 2013) movie Elysium,
a $100 million sci-fi epic with a class warfare message as subtle as an
Occupier’s Molotov cocktail. Here’s part of the synopsis:
In the year 2159, two classes of people exist: the very wealthy who
live on a pristine manmade space station called Elysium, and the rest, who live
on an overpopulated, ruined Earth… A hardline government official will stop at
nothing to enforce anti-immigration laws and preserve the luxurious lifestyle
of the citizens of Elysium.
Anti-immigration
politicians, environmental devastation, One Percenters… all this movie needs is
a futuristic racist Tea Party congregating in a homophobic chicken restaurant
and it will have addressed all the left’s current favorite targets.
The movie star’s revelation about the anger of the common
man came at a Bruce Springsteen concert he attended several months ago at New
York's Madison Square Garden. In a song entitled Jack of All Trades, about Wall Street greed and the gap between the
Haves and Have-nots, Springsteen sang: “The banker man grows fatter/The working
man grows thin.” The lyrics make no mention of the fact that the working men
and women in his audience grew quite a bit thinner just paying for the concert
tickets, which began at $115+ each
for general seating. Springsteen nevertheless dresses like a working man
himself onstage, in solidarity with them.
“Now sometimes tomorrow comes/soaked in treasure and blood,”
the Boss went on. “There’s a new world coming/I can see the light.” And then
comes the provocative line: “If I had me a gun, I'd find the bastards and shoot
them on sight.” Damon said, “Now when he says that, when he's saying that, the
place roared. I mean roared. Like
30,000 people involuntarily screamed their approval. And it was so alarming.”
One-Percenter Damon hurried backstage afterward to hobnob
with One-Percenter Springsteen and discuss how in touch they are with all the hoi polloi outside. “I went backstage
after and saw him and it was the first thing he said to me. He's singing to
firemen and cops and real people. And the fury that's there is very, very
real.”
Curiously, the left’s populist ire never gets directed against
the rich on their own side of the
political fence, like Springsteen or Damon himself or, for example, his
colleague, Titanic and Avatar director James Cameron. Cameron
said recently that “we’re going to have to live with less,” which is
jaw-dropping hypocrisy coming from a guy who owns, among other homes, a $25
million, 730-acre stretch of Malibu
ranchland. The entire Occupy movement could bivouac there when they aren’t
out aimlessly vandalizing businesses and
defecating on police cars. Why aren’t they protesting that Cameron “didn’t
build that”?
Damon is one of Hollywood’s most politically vocal actors.
He shoots from the hip often about political matters in interviews and reveals
himself to be passionately opinionated, albeit misguided and hypocritical. I’ve
written about him before, about his very active promotion of the
subversive work of radical
historian Howard Zinn; his shout-outs to the treacherously influential
academic Noam
Chomsky in Good Will Hunting, the
movie that made Damon a star; his
demonization of Tea Partiers as being willing to drive the American
economy “off a cliff”; and his apparent affinity for the Occupiers’ social
revolution. He has even expressed
frustration with President Obama in the past and at Comic-Con for not
living up to his more progressive promises and not providing more leadership
for the Occupy movement:
I'd be shocked if Romney won [the
presidential election]. You know, I think Obama is the clear choice. But I've
said before I'm really disappointed in him, and I am, particularly because of
the banking stuff. He so misread that.
Actually, it is Damon who is misreading things. Sure, no one
is happy about bank bailouts or insider trading or Bernie Madoff, and the
Occupy types are angry because they don’t want to have to work for anything. But
the anger most Americans feel about the economy is not because they want
government to enforce financial equality,
but because they want government to quit interfering
with their ability to determine their own economic destiny. The majority of
people in this country want equality of opportunity, not equality of results, and
it is the latter that Obama and Damon and their ilk really mean when they talk
about “fairness”:
That sense of unfair – the sense
that we don't have a country anymore when people don't feel like they have a
chance, like it's going to be fair... If people feel like the deck is stacked
against them, then they stop playing by the rules. Because why play by the
rules? The game is fixed, right?
Damon is suggesting that, under capitalism, the deck is
stacked against the little guy, and so government must intervene to make things
“fair.” What is necessary is for government
to fix the game – by punishing success, squelching the entrepreneurial spirit, and
encouraging government dependency.
Capitalism is imperfect; it offers liberty, not promises.
But what Damon and his ideological cohorts don’t or won’t understand is that capitalism,
not socialism, is precisely what gives the little guy a chance to be as
successful as he wants – maybe even as successful as Matt Damon.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 8/3/12)
