Shut Up and Get Back to Your Pilates, Angelina

In an article purportedly about the silliness of celebrities who act like politicians and vice versa, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg really just vents his spleen about cause-advocating celebrities. Ordinarily, I’m a big fan of Weisberg’s, but he’s gone off the deep end with this one.

Unfortunately, he picks the wrong celebrity poster-child as his representative for this alleged “phenomenon.” So the article comes off as a petulant whine that celebrities give a shit about something beyond their own dressing room.

You see, he picks on Angelina Jolie, perhaps the celebrity who has done the most to earn her stripes as a humanitarian advocate. Weisberg frames his article around an awards dinner held by the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS held on September 28, 2005. He listened to Jolie’s brief (and I do mean brief) speech at this dinner, and from this, has concluded she has little to say about AIDS generally:

First, there is the assumption—now almost automatic—that celebrities are public intellectuals on whatever issues they choose to take an interest in. I don't know whether Angelina Jolie is smart, smart for Hollywood, or not smart even by Hollywood standards. I do know, because I watched her speech, that she doesn't have much to say about AIDS. Her message to the assembled businesspeople and politicians was that we all must do more to fight this terrible disease. In particular, Jolie pressured the audience to pressure CEOs to pressure politicians to do more. When they have no idea what to do, celebs tell other people to tell other people what to do.

My impression when I read this article was that Weisberg was sitting around one night watching C-Span when this thing came on, and he was annoyed at seeing yet another celebrity blabbing about a “cause,” and decided to use his forum on Slate to bitch about it. Leaving aside for a moment whether Jolie’s charge at this dinner was to offer a comprehensive treatment of the AIDS issue, complete with solutions, I wonder whether Weisberg has ever considered that telling people what to tell people to do might be a useful act in and of itself. Guess not.

Weisberg also disclaims any real philanthropic intent on the part of celebrities, instead projecting his own cynicism onto them:

And just how saintly are these stars who give so freely of themselves? Cause-driven organizations like the Global Business
Council want celebrity endorsements for the same reason companies like Nike and Coca-Cola do. Beautiful and famous people get everyone else to look at them. They create positive associations for whatever you're selling. But our idols seldom act out of selfless motives. Whereas product endorsements pay cash, actors and musicians gain heft and respectability by supporting fashionable crusades. What fighting AIDS does for Jolie, freeing Tibet does for Richard Gere, relieving African debt does for Bono, and banning land mines does for Paul McCartney. From the cynical celebrity's point of view, the best causes involve the poor, the sick, children, and animals in faraway places, both because of the telegenic aspect and because they bring no objection from fans or employers. If there were endangered baby pandas on the moon, Brad Pitt would be racing Ashley Judd there right now.

And a damn good thing it would be for those pandas, too, if you ask me.

Then again, I suppose if the aforementioned celebs had an ounce of sincerity, they’d be out there stumping for more animal cruelty, more sweatshops and a little more tough love for AIDS orphans. Does Weisberg find the fur-draped, diamond-encrusted Jennifer Lopez less offensive than Angelina Jolie?

But never mind. I’ll give Weisberg the point that maybe all celebrities aren’t driven by the purest of altruistic motives. (I wonder who is.)

Taken at face value, this article is absurd. One wants to ask – what should celebrities do, then, just shut the hell up? It’s a high – and arrogant – standard Weisberg imposes on those who would dare advocate for humanitarian causes. The cause must be controversial, not something guaranteed to “bring no objection from fans or employers.” Additionally, the celebrity must provide substantive solutions instead of merely raising awareness or lending a high profile face.

I suspect that Weisberg really wants to say that celebrities need to know their shit if they’re going to advocate a cause, but he never gets there, instead merely assuming that 1) it’s not possible and 2) the celebrities are just doing it for self-promotion anyway. While he hints at a certain ineffectiveness in the last couple of paragraphs, he never quite hits the ball home.

I can sympathize with irritation at the self-importance of talking heads who strut and preen at a “benefit dinner” that in reality amounts only to a self-congratulatory circle jerk. Meanwhile, real people suffer and die halfway across the world. Ironically, the person who has made this point best is, well, Angelina Jolie:

“I think you can do damage… Celebrities have a responsibility to know absolutely what they’re talking about, and to be in it for the long run," said Jolie, 29, who has spent four years as goodwill ambassador to the U.N.’s refugee agency UNHCR.

But I think there’s something else at play here beyond mere dilletantish celebrity dabbling. Implicit in Weisberg's characterization of Hollywood as “Washington for the lazy” is the notion that these celebrities have never “earned” the right to be humanitarian advocates, because instead they’ve been playing Lara Croft or, like U2’s Bono, making music. These celebrities’ activities impinge on the rightful turf of “real” intellectuals…like Jacob Weisberg, perhaps?

But I have to ask: Has Weisberg done as much as Jolie to improve the human condition?

I admit, his collections of Bush malapropisms can brighten even the dreariest day, and he has written a book with Bob Rubin, but my money’s still on Jolie.

Or maybe Sharon Stone. Perhaps the biggest feat of celebrity cause-based “grandstanding” this year was at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, when Stone raised a million dollars in five minutes for malaria-preventing bed nets. Irritating in its showiness? Yeah. But at $7 a net, how many kids are now protected from malaria-carrying mosquitos?

What’s your tally, Mr. Weisberg?