Friday, September 1, 2006

On tonight's edition of The Insider: Brangelina visits (visit? — what are the grammar rules for pluralizing two individuals the media has scrunched together into a single unit?) New Orleans. According to an Associated Press article, Brangelina will be... well, here's the headline: "Pitt, Jolie to watch New Orleans rebuild." Typical Hollywood, and typical of the Pitt-Jolie Family of Superfortunate Third-World Orphans: they're too busy making crappy movies that exploit human misery to actually pick up a hammer and provide some tangible assistance to the poor people who lost everything when the levees broke, although Angelina and her glorious titties will be providing moral support. No, they're just "monitoring" the rebuilding process, and while I have little doubt they'll be more useful in the region than FEMA, I'd like to hold people whose very presence in a particular place rates a news story to a slightly higher standard.

Sure, Pitt donated $200,000 to the lower Ninth Ward, but I don't think the city needs the strings of sanctimony that come attached.

Pitt said Thursday he's still appalled — embarrassed even — that people in many New Orleans neighborhoods cannot return because of the lack of basic services like hospitals and schools.

"This is a social justice issue," he said. "In a catastrophe, you help the most vulnerable first, and we failed to do that."
Sure, Brad, that's exactly what you were doing in Namibia for half a year: helping the residents of New Orleans while having a baby in a country with one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world. That should be Namibia's new slogan — "Namibia: Celebrities prefer our maternity ward over the one in Rwanda."

Oh, and by the way, I'm sure that Pitt's magnanimity has nothing at all to do with the fact that he's shooting a movie in New Orleans next year. Nothing against him personally — he's probably a very nice guy, if not the luckiest bastard ever — but he really needs to stop diluting these humanitarian tragedies by pretending they mean something to him. Here's my challenge to Brad Pitt: Mr. Pitt, if you're genuinely serious about helping the people of New Orleans, why don't you donate all the money you make from your next movie to the redevelopment effort? I'm sure there'll still be enough left over from Angelina's salary to help the people of Darfur by buying Shiloh a tacky-ass pacifier studded with blood diamonds.

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