Debra Messing: Saving the world, one red carpet at a time

This year’s red carpet

It goes without saying that sexual abuse is a despicable crime. But how many of the men who walked the Golden Globes red carpet this year had their own dark secrets? How many of the women owed their success, at least in part, to decisions to yield to sexual aggression by powerful producers or directors or stars – and to keep quiet about it? As the scale of the sex abuse scandal ballooned over the last few months, many people wondered how Hollywood, once awards season came, would deal with its shame.

Debra Messing before the big show

After all, they’ve been posing for decades as pillars of virtue, lecturing to the American public in their projects and in their talk-show appearances. Surely the scandal would embarrass them, mortify them. How, under such circumstances, could they go through with their annual self-celebration? What’s clear now is that Hollywood doesn’t have any shame – these people’s egos are so massive, their sense of superiority to the hoi polloi so unshakable, that even now they still feel perfectly comfortable preaching into the cameras.

Which brings us back to Will and Grace star Debra Messing, whose recent turn to outspoken political activism we began discussing on Tuesday. Listening to her red-carpet rant, you’d have thought, for a second, that you were witnessing some revolutionary gathering of the downtrodden rather than a glamorous black-tie event for some of the most privileged people on earth. You’d have thought that Messing was standing not on a red carpet but on some barricade out of Les Miz. As we noted on Tuesday, she called for “intersectional gender parity.” How many viewers who’d tuned in seeking diversion from their real-life problems knew what on earth Messing was talking about? “Intersectional gender parity”? It was not only obnoxious and inappropriate, but also wildly pretentious.

Harvey Weinstein

Plainly, Messing, like so many of her showbiz colleagues, wants to be seen as a spokesperson for ordinary women and people of color and poor folks generally; she wants the world to see her as a great big heart overflowing with sensitivity and sympathy for those less fortunate than herself. But how many of the real-life people for whom she pretends to speak have any idea what “intersectional” means? Has the question ever crossed Messing’s mind? This, folks, is precisely the essence of Hollywood radicalism these days: it’s not remotely about the limousine set identifying with the rabble or wanting to help improve their lot; it’s about showbiz luminaries virtue signaling to one another.

Ronan Farrow

Naturally, the mainstream media loved it. For example, NBC News called Messing’s comments “fearless” and “powerful.” Now, NBC News, it will be remembered, is the news organization for which Ronan Farrow prepared his exposé on Harvey Weinstein – the sensational story that kicked off the whole Hollywood sex scandal. It will also be remembered that NBC News, which is now so eager to praise people like Messing as “fearless” and “powerful,” was itself too timid to run Farrow’s story itself – which was why it ended up being published in the New Yorker. Ah, the courage!

Sting’s Uzbekistan sellout

Our recent coverage of Nicki Minaj‘s nauseating performance for Angola’s thug-in-chief reminded us that there are other celebrities who belong to the same club but to whom we hadn’t yet accorded the attention we gave to Minaj.

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Sting

Take Sting, aka Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner CBE. The British musician and songwriter, formerly of The Police, has won 16 Grammys, a Golden Globe, an Emmy, three Oscar nominations for Best Song, and is said to be worth several hundred million dollars. For many years, moreover, he’s presented himself as a world-class champion of humanitarian causes, associated himself with groups like Amnesty International, and made himself the face of such high-profile environmental causes as saving the Brazilian rain forests.

Nonetheless, in October 2009 he decided he couldn’t do without an additional million or two dollars. That’s the sum he accepted to perform in a show arranged by Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Islam Karimov, the monster who runs Uzbekistan. If you don’t know about Karimov, here’s a fun fact, courtesy of Fox News: Karimov “burst upon the international scene in 2005 when his troops opened fire on protesters in the city of Andijan,” killing up to 5000 people, largely women and children.  

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Sting with Gulnara Karimova

Sting managed to keep his Uzbek deal from blowing up in the British media – but only for a few months. When Marina Hyde reported on it in the Guardian the following February – noting that Karimov had been accused of “boiling his enemies, slaughtering his poverty-stricken people when they protest, and conscripting armies of children for slave labour” – Sting felt obliged to issue a statement. Acknowledging that he’d given the concert, he added that “I believe [it was] sponsored by Unicef.” The Guardian checked out this claim; Unicef, it turned out, had had no connection whatsoever with the event.

Sting went on to say that, while “well aware of the Uzbek president’s appalling reputation in the field of human rights as well as the environment,” he’d chosen to accept Karimova’s invitation because “I have come to believe that cultural boycotts are not only pointless gestures, they are counter-productive, where proscribed states are further robbed of the open commerce of ideas and art and as a result become even more closed, paranoid and insular.” Ka-ching! 

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Islam Karimov

The Guardian had a good answer to Sting’s apologia: “Even if you accept Sting’s live performances as ‘ideas and art,’ you can’t really help but question this notion of ‘open commerce,’ considering the tickets for his concert cost more than 45 times the average monthly salary in Uzbekistan.” Craig Murray, former U.K. Ambassador to Uzbekistan, called Sting’s response “transparent bollocks,” adding:

He did not take a guitar and jam around the parks of Tashkent. He got paid over a million pounds to play an event specifically designed to glorify a barbarous regime. Is the man completely mad?…I agree with him that cultural isolation does not help. I am often asked about the morality of going to Uzbekistan, and I always answer – go, mix with ordinary people, tell them about other ways of life, avoid state owned establishments and official tours. What Sting did was the opposite. To invoke Unicef as a cover, s[i]t next to a woman who has made hundreds of millions from state forced child labour in the cotton fields, is pretty sick.

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Karimov with Putin

Writing in the New Yorker, Amy Davidson asked: “Does Sting really think that the President of Uzbekistan doesn’t care what or who his daughter spends two million dollars on?” Karimova, Davidson pointed out, is “not just some apolitical fashionista but is also a member of the government” and her father’s presumed successor, and thus “deeply, deeply implicated” in his evildoing. 

Musician Sting performs on the opening night of his Symphonicity Tour, which features the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra conducted by Steven Mercurio, in Vancouver, British Columbia June 2, 2010. REUTERS/Andy Clark (CANADA - Tags: ENTERTAINMENT) FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS

In Mother Jones, Adam Weinstein weighed in: “I’m not going to pretend pop-music fame is easy, but here’s a handy maxim for future crooners to keep in mind: Don’t do private concerts for tyrannical rulers who reportedly boil people alive. Just sayin’.” Weinstein also pointed out that, Karimov’s brutality aside, Gulnara Karimova is “a piece of work in her own right,” who “reportedly runs several state-owned business concerns cobbled together from Western assets seized in Uzbekistan, which are occasionally backed by shadowy military contractors who might be involved in assassinations. She’s also listed as one of the 10 richest women in Switzerland. Let that sink in for a minute.”

Does it even take a minute? Clearly, Sting knew exactly what he was getting into – and didn’t care, not for a second.  

Comptes de Minaj

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Beautiful downtown Luanda

Angola. It’s the country that, as we saw yesterday, made Trinidadian-turned-American hip-hop superstar and fragrance mogul Nicki Minaj $2 million richer, thanks to a single late December concert performed under the exceedingly shady auspices of Angolan strongman José Eduardo dos Santos.

What are some of the important things to know about Angola?

First of all, Freedom House considers it unfree. Dos Santos, who’s been the country’s head of state since 1979, has spent his three-plus decades in power denying his subjects basic rights – and looking with indifference upon their grinding poverty – while accumulating a staggering personal fortune at their expense.

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Another glimpse of lovely Luanda

Yes, in recent years the country has undergone an impressive oil boom, which, as Michael Specter explained in the New Yorker last June, “has transformed a failed state into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.” Most of Angola’s population, however, has yet to experience the slightest improvement in quality of life as a result of this metamorphosis. Half of the country’s people make less than two dollars a day; the life expectancy is 52; only four out of ten Angolans have reliable electricity; corruption is ubiquitous, infecting every aspect, large and small, of Angolan life; critics of the regime risk being thrown into one of dos Santos’s nightmarishly violent, unsanitary, and overcrowded prisons; and – most shameful of all – the mortality rate for children under five is the world’s highest. 

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Mariah Carey with the first family of Angola, 2013

All of which is why Minaj’s announcement of her Angola concert brought quick responses from human-rights organizations. They weren’t happy.

For example, Jeffrey Smith of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group accused Minaj of “callously taking money from a dictator who’s been in power for nearly four decades and who has effectively and ruthlessly choked free expression, setting a horrible precedent not only for Angola, but for the entire region.” Smith observed that Mariah Carey had accepted a million-dollar fee from the same tyrant in December 2013 – an act that also drew such harsh criticism that Carey fell all over herself apologizing.

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Minaj’s panties selfie

In the days leading up to Minaj’s Angolan concert, the human-rights activists urged her to cancel. In open letters to the star, they gave her a crash course in Angolan perfidy. In particular, they drew her attention to the arrest, last June, of Angolan hiphop star Luaty Beirão and 16 of his countrymen. Their crime? Attending a meeting at which they discussed From Dictatorship to Democracy, a book about nonviolent resistance. Beirão has yet to be set free. Did Minaj, the human-rights community wondered aloud, really want to perform for – and cash a check from – people who’d put a fellow rapper behind bars for reading a book?

The activists made a strong case. But was Minaj fazed? Not in the slightest, apparently. On Twitter, without mentioning any of her critics by name, she warned: “Every tongue that rises up against me in judgment shall be condemned.” On Instagram, dropping the Biblical tone, she posted a photo of herself in a pair of too-tight panties she’d been given by her boyfriend and fellow hip-hop artist Meek Mill, commenting that she obviously needed a bigger size.

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Minaj on Instagram, December 20: “Oh hai, Angola. Ready for the show?”

And so our heroine jetted off to Luanda, where, as the New York Post reported, she again took to Instagram, posting several provocative “photos of her bejeweled behind” – her point, in the Post‘s not unreasonable view, apparently being “to rub it in” to the human-rights busybodies who’d tried to talk her out of increasing her fortune by yet another $2 million. The pictures went online not long before her performance in Luanda. “Oh hai [sic], Angola,” she wrote. “Ready for the show?” 

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With Isabella dos Santos

There were other Instagram photos, including one of Minaj with Isabella dos Santos, the president’s daughter, which the clueless chanteuse captioned as follows: “Oh no big deal…she’s just the 8th richest woman in the world. (At least that’s what I was told by someone b4 we took this photo) Lol. Yikes!!!!! GIRL POWER!!!!! This motivates me soooooooooo much!!!! S/O [shout-out] to any woman on a paper chase. Get your own!!!! Success is yours for the taking!!!!!” In short, even after the nature of the Angolan kleptocracy had been patiently explained to Minaj by human-rights organizations desperate to keep her from implicitly endorsing the dos Santos regime (as the Buzzfeed website noted afterward, Isabella’s name appears on Transparency International’s list of 11 symbolic cases worldwide of what it calls “grand corruption”), the hip-hop queen seemed not to grasp that this isn’t about “GIRL POWER” but about a dictator whose family steals blindly from his exploited, destitute subjects. 

So much, apparently, as far as Nicki Minaj is concerned, for human rights in Angola.

Ted Turner: capitalism for him, Communism for the masses

In a 2001 interview with Ken Auletta of the New Yorker, Ted Turner articulated his principle of world diplomacy: “Just about everybody will be friendly toward us if we are friendly with them.” This is the kind of naivete with which Turner approaches the world.

Last week we looked at Turner’s career, with a special focus on his ardent defense of two of the world’s remaining Communist regimes, those of North Korea and Cuba. Today we’ll wrap up our report on Turner with a few additional observations and quotations.

turner13 (2)In July 2015, Cristiane Amanpour of CNN interviewed Turner on a range of subjects. It was clear that his naivete was still fully intact. On Castro: “He had a lot of courage to tackle the United States.” On his own first trip to Cuba: “I flew home with a whole new desire to understand more about other cultures and political systems and to increase communication and dialogue between nations.” Turner told Amanpour that he seeks to “build bridges between nations” – and, as an example of this bridge-building, cited the Goodwill Games, which he founded, and which took place five times between 1986 and 2001. Turner has actually asserted that it was the Goodwill Games, apparently in combination with CNN, that brought down the Iron Curtain: “I thought, between sports and news and television and friendship, that you could end the Cold War and, by God, we did.” In the Amanpour interview, he also called for “total nuclear disarmament,” saying of the world’s nuclear arsenals that “we’ve gotta get rid of them” – as if this were as easily done as said.

turner11 (2)The more Turner talked about “understanding” political systems and “building bridges,” the more obvious it was that he somehow just doesn’t grasp that some “systems” are cruel, oppressive, and bellicose and therefore need to be challenged and resisted, not “understood.” He plainly doesn’t understand that when dealing with aggressive ideological adversaries, being “friendly” is simply perceived as weakness and will be exploited. Nor does he recognize that nuclear weapons are more dangerous in some hands than in others. Back in 2001, Auletta summed up a few of what he called Turner’s “contradictions”:

Ted-Turner_1He successfully opposed unionization at his company, yet he rails against élites. He has called himself “a socialist at heart” and a fiscal “conservative.” Turner speaks out on behalf of the rights of women but refuses to denounce Islamic states that suppress women’s rights. He has compared Rupert Murdoch, who owns the Fox network, to Hitler, yet when he is asked if he thinks Saddam Hussein is evil he says, “I’m not sure that I know enough to be able to answer that question.” And though he preaches tolerance, he has uttered some intolerant words; for example, on Ash Wednesday, seeing the black smudge on the foreheads of some CNN staff members, he asked them whether they were “Jesus freaks.”

turner14 (2)And here are some more of Ted Turner’s opinions. 9/11? “The reason that the World Trade Center got hit,” said Turner a few months after the terror attack, “is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don’t have any hope for a better life.” Asked if he would let some of these desperately poor people live on his own land – which at the time was larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island put together – he answered: “Can I live in your home with you? We believe in private property in this country.” Or, to put it more correctly, Ted Turner believes in private property for himself, but not for the people of Cuba or North Korea. 

turner10Israel and the Palestinians? “The Israelis…they’ve got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists?”

Global warming? “There’s too many people. That’s why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff. If there were less people they’d be using less stuff.” If we don’t act now, the world will be “eight degrees hotter in 10, not 10, but in 30 or 40 years, and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.” Still, he has one of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world and spends much of his time burning jet fuel as he flies from one of his 28 homes to another.

Free speech? After John Hinckley tried to kill President Reagan to impress Jodie Foster, whom he’d just seen in Martin Scorsese’s movie Taxi Driver, Turner delivered an impassioned editorial on CNN. Scorsese and the others responsible for the making of Taxi Driver, he declared, were as much to blame for Hinckley’s assassination attempt as was Hinckley himself. Turner called for Congressional action to ban the production of such films.

Bottom line: the man doesn’t understand the first thing about freedom. Or the first thing about tyranny. Aside from that, he’s a genius.

 

Ted Turner, Castro’s comrade

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Ted Turner

We’ve been looking at Ted Turner, the billionaire founder of CNN, ex-husband of Jane Fonda, and ardent (if not terribly skillful) apologist for one totalitarian government after another. Last time around we pondered his 2005 comments on North Korea, which can be best summed up in his eloquent remark: “let’s give ’em a break.”

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May Day parade in Cuba

On to Castro. Castro has been a good friend of Turner’s, and a big part of his career. Back when Turner started CNN, it mostly restricted its coverage to U.S. news. But in 1981, as Ken Auletta noted in a 2001 New Yorker profile, CNN covered Cuba’s May Day parade and a Castro speech. Castro, a CNN viewer – he picked up the signal from a south Florida station – invited Turner to visit. In 1982, Turner went, and spent four days with the dictator, “smoking cigars, attending a baseball game, duck hunting, visiting schools, discussing politics, and night-clubbing.” Turner told an associate, “Fidel ain’t a Communist. He’s a dictator, just like me.” Castro told Turner that he found CNN “invaluable.” Turner actually persuaded him to tape a CNN promo (which Turner’s colleagues back home managed to talk him out of airing). Fidel “urged Turner to take his news service worldwide,” reported Auletta. The idea excited Turner: “I thought, if Fidel Castro can’t live without it, we ought to be able to sell CNN all over the world.” “Ted came back fired up,” a colleague told Auletta. Within a few months CNN had expanded to Asia; in 1985, it debuted in Europe. All thanks to Fidel Castro, whom Turner reportedly thanked for welcoming him to his “very progessive country.” 

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Turner with Fidel Castro

Turner later showed an interviewer pictures of his 1982 Cuba trip, while providing a running commentary:

I’m the only man on the planet ever to fly on Cuba’s Air Force One with their president and on America’s Air Force One with our president….People are not all that different – all thi killing and arms race is for nothing. Here’s the great commie dictator we’re so worried about – having a hot toddy….Here’s us hunting….I expected Castro to be a horrible person, but he was a great guy.

turner9In 1997, eager to set up a CNN bureau in Havana, Turner gave Fidel a big thumbs-up in a speech at Harvard. “Castro is one helluva guy!” he exclaimed. “You people would like him! Most people in Cuba like him.” As one reporter noted: “Within weeks CNN was granted its coveted Havana Bureau, the first ever granted by Castro to a foreign network.” In December of that year, Turner and Fonda went to Havana to open the bureau and met with Castro, a move that didn’t exactly please Frank Calzon, head of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, D.C. Calzon’s group, according to one report, had tried “to persuade Turner to donate satellite dishes to Cuba so that Cuban citizens can watch CNN.” Of course, the Castro regime forbade the Cuban people from watching international television.

 That wasn’t Turner’s last meeting with Fidel: in 2000, Castro went to New York for a U.N. meeting and spent an entire night with Turner. “The dinner stretched past midnight,” reported Auletta, “and Castro was in the middle of a long-winded story when Turner raised his hand and exclaimed, ‘Fidel, this story is never going to end, is it? I got to go!’ Castro laughed as Turner exited.”