![EL PASAJERO [The Passenger]](http://www.hipokrisy.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/death-Bergman-Maid-96x96.jpg)
Bob Smith, Hipographia
“I’m kind of sick of celebrities who go around hugging and entertaining the troops without realizing they’re also selling the wars.”
Sinise: He apparently never saw Born on the Fourth of July, Coming Home, or All Quiet on the Western Front. All Hollywood products, but masterful antiwar films. And if he did, he seemingly learned nothing from them.
GARY SINISE is one of those actors who seems to believe that actively “supporting the troops,” doing morale-boosting tours in the warzones where the Empire has deployed them, is the right and patriotic thing to do. Sinise of course hardly invented this kind of exhibition. Actors performing for the troops is an old tradition going back at least to the Spanish-American war. In the 1950s Bob Hope and his generation practically recreated the schtick, perfected it into a regular act, with theme and all. Now America is not alone in sending entertainers to war theaters, the Germans and Japanese did it too, among others, but as usual America does it with far more fanfare, its production values are way more elaborate. And, for a very long time, thanks to Hollywood and television it can tap on celebrities with global appeal.
In any case, Hope and other celebrities of the “old school” could be forgiven for their wish to entertain what soon became our imperial troopers fighting wars of “counterinsurgency” in remote places most Americans never heard of. (Please don’t call them “warriors”—an adulatory term favored by the system’s whores and those who still believe in fairytales.) Continue reading »