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Monday, February 20, 2006
Celebrities and PoliticsGood point made here: Smart critics should find instances of overly pat, polemical, misinformed morality masquerading as art — especially when it has influenced wide audiences — and expose it as fraudulent, dishonest and trite. That was certainly warranted with “Fahrenheit 9/11,” whose distortions have been widely chronicled.
But it is not necessarily the case anytime a famous person makes a moral argument. Arguments should be judged on their own merits, but often they are not. Tim Robbins, for example, penned some eloquent defenses of his ideas (and his right to say them) before the Iraq war. I don’t like his politics, but it’s on those grounds he should be countered, not on the grounds that, hey, he’s Tim Robbins and what does he know about war?
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