Monday 12/7/20
Although I see it all the time, it stuns and depresses me how intellectually lazy so many people are. But it's more than that. How illogical they are in their thinking. I said to someone recently that it matters so much who goes first. By that I mean, who says whatever remark initially. No matter if it's a lie. Or however it stupid it might be. First counts for so much. I saw a writer today--doubtless a pretend writer, who writes nothing, but posts a #amwriting hashtag on social media once every three months, when they take a photo of a pricey notebook, pricey fountain pen, pricey circle of lit candles--on Facebook talking about the new film, Mank, which glorifies Herman Mankiewicz as the writer of Citizen Kane, which is utter nonsense, factually incorrect, and as ignorant about American film history as you can be.
This woman/pretend writer had clearly never heard of Orson Welles, or knew nothing about him at the least. And she touts the film, saying it's "delish"--this is how these people talk--and that the movie flouts Mankiewicz's "preening, auteur boss" who tried to steal the credit from him.
This is a moron. This is a lazy moron. Someone so stupid that it is impossible for them to so much as ask themselves if this might not be true, or understand such a thing as an agenda. But she saw that agenda in evidence here. It went first. And that's often all it takes, and this was someone who views themselves as a member of the intelligentsia. And yet they are this obtuse, this indolent.
I'm sure she hates men who strive and stride boldly and expansively and move with genius, so that's what you're going to get. "Delish." Preening. When any cursory film knowledge, any background reading, any effort at all, and you can see exactly how Citizen Kane was written.
Not hard in the least. And Welles was anything but a credit-grabber. Then all of this woman's similarly stupid friends do their likes and their smiley faces, trash a guy they know nothing about, over a film they've never seen in Citizen Kane, because they've never taken the time to watch anything of significance.
Often I come along with my story, my letter of what I've done--just recently--to someone like this, who is an editor, who knows who I am, or who learns shortly who I am, and because of who I am, and because of who they are--and everything they are not and never could be--I am dead on arrival. No chance with that person. That's a lot of what I deal with every day. Then I get to listen to them talk about how open-minded they are and whose lives matter and social justice and how they hate discrimination and see all of their memes and filters as proof.
What is also disturbing is this person inevitably couches what they have to say in this tone that they are crusading, do-gooding, playing their part in the upkeep--or restoration--of justice. That's how they frame what's tantamount to total ignorance, their sloth, what is really their prejudice. Dangerous, dangerous people who corrode culture. And who believe, amazingly, that they are "thinkers."
