Roman Stoad’s Rules for the Road: Part 3

Fawning Before the Red Carpet

Recently, you have read in these pages Mr. Stoad’s mad ramblings on the decadence of Big Sports. Now I would like to attack an even graver problem in the American/World psyche—the Awards Show—the Red Carpet event, in which we witness our secular deities parade themselves to the score of the cashbox. These disgusting spectacles have somehow managed to brainwash the population into the idea that they matter. They only really matter to the people who profit from them.

As is well known there is zero relationship between the “quality” or even the “message” of a particular entertainment production and the award it might receive. It is all advertising and industry self-congratulation. We know this to be true because these shows seem to breed themselves: there’s the Brits, and the Obies, and the Jeffs and the Bobbies and the MTV awards and the Golden Globes and the People’s Choice Awards, and the Porn Awards, the Fuck You Awards. Recently we had to suffer through the Grammys with its parade of already rich self-serving music industry people patting themselves on the back and thumping their chests with gold ringed fists, their ropes of bling and thousand dollar outfits. Let us not forget that it is basically the same people at all these clown shows of wealth, putting on extravagant song and dance routines that are barely tolerable for any right-thinking or semi-intelligent person who cares about the state of this planet. How can we sit though this drivel without feeling sick in one’s soul. (Note: Roman Stoad does not believe in the soul). Are these “industry players” any less the rapists of our world than the Wall Street Bankers who took the country for a ride in the name of Capitalism and Morality. In fact, what is the G20 or Davos but a Red Carpet ceremony for the plutocrats (note that Hollywood celebrities are now appearing at Davos) who run our world and to whom “we the people” are merely resources to be exploited and then cast off like the victims of Country Wide, Bhopal or Katrina. In fact why not do a “caring” documentary about those catastrophes and make a profit off of it. Oh wait, it’s already been done. I think somebody probably even won or will win an award for it at some upcoming Red Carpet ceremony for Caring Citizens and Entrepreneurs with a Conscience.

Let us briefly imagine the “pan”o’ rama of these “takers.” Picture the typical Red Carpet event: the ever-present camera pans over the smug, botoxed, well-pleased, over-fed, please-look-at-me faces of the made-classes, seated in their scarlet seats, seats that mock the public wounds that paid for them, be they in Hollywood or Bollywood, Albert Hall or Lincoln Center. The sycophantic crowd and parasitic media alike can be seen sucking as hard as they can on the images, drooling for a quote, wetting themselves when the “wealth” chooses to look their way or deign to speak a few prescient remarks. To such childish fandom, Roman and his broken cohorts cry—please, take it to your dreams and keep it there, keep it in the backrooms and dungeons of your imagination hidden away along with your sad sexual fantasies. Why does the rest of the world have to suffer through it? Think of the adverse affect it has on our children who are made to believe that celebrity is a legitimate goal in life, or that celebrity equals wisdom or legitimates their right to a Voice in the world as it is. Think of the horror of inbreeding and the genetic decay of the species caused by the desire to imitate these people. (Roman will write more on this aspect in a future issue.)

Ah, but Roman does hear your desperate excuses: you say that camera panning across these faces is in fact a generator of capital, and that is why we ought not stop it. Such faces of the stars are actually the flowers of capital. The ego flowers most fully as the sign of capital.  This is the freedom of our species, this is our highest achievement.  Therefore such flowers need to multiply, just as the money supply needs to multiply, just the presentation of class difference and privilege needs to ramify. Red Carpet events need to self-generate endlessly, it seems, to little real effect. In the case of the Oscars we are subject to an entire industry based on telling the same stories over and over again with slightly different combinations of name-brand stars—a kind of closed narrative circle facilitating incest.   And let’s face it, each Red Carpet event is the product of an economic incest that is Victorian if not downright Roman in its perversity, in which self-important people have glorious intercourse with their own kind: star copulates with star, daughter fucks father, mother blows son, siblings mate and produce mirror children. But there is a point to this inbreeding you say; more of these people are needed to populate events to propagate currency, to celebrate this beneficial perversity.  In the end we must keep dreaming up more and more Award Shows until we have Award Shows for the Best Award Shows, as the Red Carpets are stitched one to another by profit taking producers and their spawn, binding the globe in blood red ribbons of oppression and class slavery.

It’s the-too-big-to-fail scenario writ in the tongue of economic DNA. Indeed, if one of these spectacles is threatened or cancelled by a strike or some such nonsense, the delicate financial universe is threatened too—the stock market could collapse, city and state budgets could suffer as panic attacks the spread sheets of the master class and, in the end, in order to salvage or maintain their holdings, the masses, as they always are, will be blamed for not watching enough Award Shows, not giving in enough to the Desires of the Wealthy, not worshipping enough at the Red Carpet of Celebrity, and thus causing our own financial problems. (Yes, you and I are the cause of our low status.) Back in 2008 it was figured the city of LA would lose 400 million in revenue if the Oscar show was cancelled due to labor disputes.  My god, think of the weaponry that would buy for the revolutionaries in Libya, think of the meals for the starving Bangaladesh children, think of the water purification systems that could be funded in Africa. And then there is the money generated by all the subsidiary excess. People have to fly from all around the world to come to these things in their chartered jets filling the skies with their pollution and their garbage, while the mobs of photographers waste endless amounts of film (which incidentally requires the rape of vast rainforest acreage) and the endless bloggers (like Roman himself) with their multiplying text generation devices each requiring rare earth metals that must be mined from indigenous perhaps even virgin lands. And all of this blabber producing over and over again the ridiculous photos and the empty text that fill the papers and the net, posing as “content” for the next few weeks or months, the fodder farm for a vast system of media regurgitations so that all the other clowns in the broadcast industry have something to talk about. It’s sad that our economy is so dependant on these hoaxes, empty as they are of any real “content.” And then of course there is all the incidental profiteering that parasitically feeds off this display (immoral I might add in all the world’s religions). All the bottles of cheap wine drunk in apartments of the impoverished across the globe, while people lick their TV screens trying to get a taste of the glamour and sexual funk of a lifestyle that will never be theirs. And thank god for that, for what if the world were populated by nothing but such “takers.”    Humankind would surely perish. (Yes the battle for resources really is a zero sum game when it is accelerated to the level at which Capitalism demands.)

So stop drinking at the Red River my friends! Stop bowing to the likes of the Brad Pitts and the Julia Roberts of the world who have little more than utter disdain for anyone outside of their social class. People! Pull your face out of the Id-Mirror of Greed and Self-Hypnosis. Get over the George Cluny’s and the Angelica Jolies and their “Acts of Activism.” Stop sucking off the Kanyes and the Leos and Gagas. Stop sending your money to the Speilbergs and the Camerons. Best screen play my ass. Best supporting actress—who cares. Best Country Music Album—shove it where the sun don’t shine. Go home and read a book. I have a few suggestions for you: The Communist Manifesto is one written by a guy named Karl Marx. They haven’t made a movie out of that one yet. Resist commodification. Resist the system that rewards it. Resist the Red Carpet that repairs and maintains and multiplies itself at your expense.
Roman Stoad says: Ban the Red Carpet. It is a Carpet of Human Blood!

I am Roman Stoad who sees deeply into the void of starlight and endless night.

Beyond this material sadness there is a bright existence.

Free your mind. Join me there.

Vote for Roman Stoad.