You Cough, You Die

In Hollywood, where nothing is real, there are rules that cannot be broken. Don't have sex in a horror film, that kind of thing. Retired cops only come back to be exposed as baddies. Regular but not star characters beg for loyalty only when they are about to betray the heroes. The ability to identify a Shakespeare character or a quote from Pope is a sign of great intelligence. And one cough means you are dying.
But why is an industry whose aim is to use money to create a market, to sell an intrinsically worthless product to those sections of the public which have least money to spare, and which depends for its wealth on societies which protect the ideas they disagree with, so quick to denounce, not only in its product but also in the mouths of the people who work in it, both capitalism and freedom of expression? Bloggers are always nutters or weirdos. And they’re always rightwing. Journalists are always good, and are always left wing. Companies are always bad, and invariably pollute the environment causing the deaths of polar beds, Chinese children, hope, civilisation etc. Money grows on trees and only government employees are doing any good for the country and the economy.
So we have established that Hollywood is, for some reason, filled with people who live like capitalists and preach like socialists. Perhaps successful film actors really do feel bad about having ‘obscene’ amounts of money and so they want to stop other people from having it. But footballers and other groups of wealthy, working-class people with access to the public’s ear don’t regularly pour into it the tedious results of undigested political musings quite at odds with their own actions and lifestyle.
But are all bloggers rightwing nutters? Surely not. It’s true that I eat babies (though not during Lent), vote UKIP and think I’m a hedgehog, so it’s just possible that the description might apply to me. And I have come across blogs written by illiterates of unstable character and low forehead, obsessed with any or every aspect of how ‘them’ are secretly conspiring with other ‘them’ to destroy the blogger and people like him who are the only ones who know the truth, even though the evidence is all around us and can be plainly seen. Some of them were rightwing, some were leftwing and in other cases it was impossible to tell whether they had any fixed or even coherent ideas about politics or anything else. A lot of bloggers seem to like young women with no clothes on, but I can understand that (I like them too, I just don’t blog about them). But many bloggers seem fairly normal people, you can imagine them interacting with the rest of human society with such competence that no one would know they blogged unless they brought the subject up. Some of these are clearly leftwing, if they are anything at all.
On the other hand, even if I fit the Hollywood sense of ‘rightwing nutter’, I’m not scheming to bring down civilization as we know it, assassinate Obama, expose the Bilderbergers, or whatever it is they think mad rightwing bloggers do.  So there are nutters, there are non-nutters, there are leftwingers, rightwingers and people who don’t even know what colour their government is. There are weirdos, normal people, clever people, stupid people, people with every interest, skill, information and obsession you can imagine, and quite a lot more that you really wouldn’t want to imagine. There are dull people banging on about the exact texture of the soil required for potting dahlias in early spring, and angry people shouting at the world because they don’t think it’s listening.

In other words, there is a bit of everything. The blogosphere is the world on a data stream. We’re all there. But in Hollywood, only deranged rightwingers who want to destroy the free world blog. Very odd. If I was a nutter who wanted to destroy the free world I wouldn’t publish it on the blog, I’d just write random stuff about hedgehogs and lakes and keep the details of the conspiracy in little black notebooks like the ones I’ve got hidden over there in my desk…