HORRYWOOD

In Spielberg’s film, 1941, it’s what a sailor on a Japanese sub gasps when he glimpses our Glitter Capital’s famous sign. I thought it sounded funny and shall use it here.

Everyone knows that nowadays not all our movies, television programs, music, and diversity of audio/visual amusements are created in that section of Los Angeles, but I’d like to use “Horrywood” to designate that empire irrespective of geography. Similarly, “Wall Street” encompasses more than those few blocks.

I also need to introduce a medical definition of the term “epidemic:” a cluster in time and space, meaning a significant number of events at about the same time and in the same place. For example, whole countries of Africa are said to be experiencing epidemics of AIDS; there are numerous cases in a single area. There were virulent epidemics of plague at various times and places in Europe and a devastating one of influenza following World War I.

What I’d like to claim, then, is that Horrywood has for some years been experiencing an epidemic of cesspool sleaze. Too much of what is produced there is downright pornography - redeeming social value, my *** - bloody violence exceeding that of a battlefield; destruction; scatology; maculation of the values of decent people; exaltation of the worst the world has to offer; militant derogation of Christianity, especially Catholicism; and corruption from a broadband spectrum of types. If you don’t need examples, please skip the next four paragraphs.

Lately I paid an afternoon visit to a home, where, as often and detrimentally in this country, the television set is allowed to burn electricity, hence probably oil, day and night. I’d heard of The Sopranos but was dumbfounded to observe part of an hour’s devoted to the graphic abuse of women, one eventually beaten to death by a man’s fists. This was neutralized, I suppose they thought, by his later murder by a another faction of savages. Many of the less exciting scenes appeared to take place in a whorehouse. Good grief, do people in your household watch this educational medium? Looking at statistics of rape and abuse of females, I guess it IS educational.

I was anxious to watch a movie, starring Juliette Binoche and Richard Gere, called Bee Season , purporting to deal with spelling bees, when, in fact, it was it was nothing more than Jewish propaganda that escalated rapidly into a blatant attack on Catholicism. I sailed the dvd into the backyard darkness, its proper domain.

For another instance from a virtually, not virtuously, endless list, consider the day-time spectacles often blaring, unwanted by the ill, in physicians’ waiting rooms. Purported husbands and wives, shack-up pairs, any admixtures admissible, the more grotesque the better, show up and, after several minutes of gruesome, screaming diatribes, provide, to the utter delight of a cheering mob of degenerate spectators, an epitome of Saturday Night Wrestling.

Have you watched music vids? Listened carefully to the scurrilous chants known as rap? Noticed the private lives and exploits of these and other “artists?”

Apparently being intended for adults equates to being sleazy, so the purveyors of the entertainment arts intentionally sully what is not utter gutter bait to win the coveted “R = Watch this one, folks; this is really disgusting.” If all else fails, they can take something of quality and perforate it with obscene language so as to descend to R status. I noticed a wonderful example of this form of marketing in a recent People (Peep Hole?) Magazine, the cover of which celebrated Ellen Degenerate’s sham union. It was an ad for a television program called Gossip Girl. The lead marketing feature was a purported quote from the Parents Television Council, “Mind-blowingly inappropriate,” quite a selling point, indeed. “Come and get it, kids! This is naughty and bad, and don’t take our words for it, just see what the P.T.C. said.”

I could go on and on, but I feel it’s trivial to demonstrate that much of what percolates up from Horrywood should have stayed down in the septic tank.

Next, consider how many of the Horrywood citizens lead the sorts of lives their products highlight. If one believes half the grocery store and physician office literature, it’s QUITE a few. Even our supposedly unbiased, unbigoted news sources suggest there are MANY Horrywood denizens living what they portray and peddle.

You’ll understand, then, that when large numbers of Horrywoodians rally about a person or a concept, I write off him or it as something defective and undesirable – Birds of a Feather and all that. If a person is sleazy himself and worships someone or something, then I infer that someone or something is also sleazy, or at least compatible with the objectives of the sleazy.

Thus, when Horrywood adores Barack Obama = B.O., I know that B.O. = B.N. = Bad News. Is that logical or what?
Y.C.