All the Whos down in Whoville, the tall and the small (and the I think I remember hims and the No, seriously, who are they?s), are speaking at political conventions…and we don’t want them there at all.
At least that’s what you’d think based on the internet’s collective groan over the D-listers who were among the featured speakers at this week’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
Among the luminaries speaking at the convocation of conservative crazy was the fourth-most famous person to come from Happy Days, that Calvin Klein underwear model you used to jack off to but then got a distaste for when he was all gross on that VH1 dating show, and a guy from that reality TV show that everyone likes to point to when they decry the fall of civilized culture as we know it: Duck Dynasty.
Clint Eastwood’s chair was a more prestigious booking.
Scott Baio, Antonio Sabato Jr., and Willie Robertson were, perhaps deservedly, mocked mercilessly by cool media types who couldn’t believe that anyone would give credence to what this conclave of has-beens, washed-ups, and who?s had to say about politics.
But it turns out they’re just the first room of the celebrity convention funhouse. And, folks, because of the way we’ve been covering celebrities and politics this past year, we’re the ones to blame. Our Siren song: “Send in the Clowns.”
Celebrities speaking at conventions is hardly a new practice. Eastwood is an easy example to point to because, so effortlessly derided, it’s a prime case of star power exploding on the convention stage, showering its sparkles of ridiculous nothingness on us at all.
Sometimes it’s fun, like when Tommy Lee Jones, Al Gore’s college roommate, officially nominated his old pal for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2000. Other times it actually makes sense, like when Eva Longoria spoke at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. An Obama campaign co-chair, Longoria is a proven, respected, and very useful liberal political force.
But this year the convention celebrity orgy is larger and weirder ever before. Next week’s Democratic National Convention is going to be like the goddamn Grammys.
The speakers already announced for the #ImWithHer bonanza in Philadelphia include Lena Dunham, America Ferrera, and Demi Lovato, who have all very publicly campaigned for Clinton. Clinton is cool for the summer!
While certainly not the trash heap of desperation sweat and human manifestations of your dad’s cousin’s Facebook feed that spoke on behalf of Trump at the RNC, Clinton’s celebrity Avengers is a little stranger and much more random.
There’s Tony Goldwyn, who plays a president on a TV show that Hillary Clinton has been told to say she watches—the DNC equivalent of asking Ellen Pompeo to perform CPR on an ailing person on an airplane. My new favorite celebrity on Twitter, Debra Messing, will also parlay her Sarandon-slaying abilities to the convention podium.
Two men whom Google has alerted me are famous basketball players, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jason Collins, will speak because I think the planners feared that the other guests were, on average, far too short. And Star Jones will also be there because…well, I just don’t have a second half to that sentence.
But the headline-making celebrity announced this week as a DNC speaker is Chloe Grace Moretz.
Nineteen-year-old Moretz is also a native to Whoville, though she recently left her village of anonymity and made a name for herself in films like Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising and in entertainment blog recaps of her Twitter feud with one of the Kardashians, who drew great attention to Moretz’s apparent “booty hole.”
Both Moretz and her booty hole will be in Philadelphia next week, because they are millennials and they are #WithHer.
The response to the DNC lineup is a shade of the outrage that followed the RNC one.
Sure, this is a classier, more respected, and certainly more famous crop of public figures. But why in the hell are they all speaking at, ostensibly, one of the most important political events of the decade? It’s a variation of the scoff that comes when celebrities talk about, well, anything: Who cares?
For the last year, though, we all did. At least we pretended to.
Every single day we asked every single celeb what they thought about Donald Trump. All of ‘em! Each and every one! The Whos down in Whoville and the A-listers at the Oscars. Didn’t matter who or how famous, we wanted to know what they thought about Donald Trump and if they were Feeling the Bern or, if they were #WithHer, what about those emails!?
We at The Daily Beast did this, sure. It was traffic gold! Get a celeb to call Donald Trump a terrorist and you could pack up for the week.
At best, it seemed like a good cause. More than ever before, celebrities are influencers with greater, more direct access to the people who love them. As the barrier is broken down between us normals and them rich-and-famouses, it resonates more than perhaps ever before that, yes, they are citizens of this country and the politics of our nation affects them, too.
Also, a lot of celebrities truly are smart and have a lot of interesting things to say on a variety of issues affecting marginalized communities they have become visible ambassadors for.
That is great.
Art reflects and feeds culture, and many performers are starkly attuned to the issues that matter to us because of this. When they say Trump is dangerous, they have the evidence to back it up. When they implore a candidate to consider points on their platform concerning LGBT rights, immigration, women’s rights, civil rights, police reform, and more, they are speaking from a place of expertise.
Except when they’re not. It’s at its worse when they’re the Hollywood crazies being exploited for clickbait incendiary comments. It’s almost irresponsible when it’s a celebrity figure caught off-guard, who is just talking about politics for no other reason than because we have asked them to. Because we have asked everyone.
Should we be surprised, then, that our fascination with the intersection of celebrity and politics—which is far different from the intersection of culture and politics—has yielded a DNC that requires a red carpet to accommodate all of its stars, or a RNC that requires a reality TV production company to film all the crazy?
This is a bed of our own making and now we are being forced to lie in it, even though the mattress has been peed on and it most definitely is infested by bed bugs.
How in the hell did Scott Baio get invited to the RNC?
Because we resurrected him from the dead and, not only that, gave him a megaphone and our ears because we thought it would be oh-so fun to draw attention to the fact that this guy who was at one point famous was supporting Trump. His opinions were suddenly legitimate because he is somewhat recognizable—but more than that because his opinions produced great traffic for the websites who wrote about him and Facebook likes for those who posted about him.
We did this.
We did this to Tamron Hall, who was forced to parse out all the dangerous and hypocritical insanity Baio purportedly stands for in an admirably tough interview, for Hall probably feared that some viewers may not actually know and did her public service as a journalist to spotlight it for us.
We did it to the organizers of the DNC, who felt that the only way to pique our interests was to populate the speaking lineup with the entirety of Us Weekly’s front-of-book section.
We did this to ourselves.
And next week, as Chloe Grace Moretz educates us on politics, we will be doing our penance.
