CBS This Morning kisses gluteus of Hollywood tycoon Jerry Bruckheimer
Patrice Greanville
Bruckheimer flanked by two of his protégés—J. Depp and T. Cruise.
AT ONLY 70, and seemingly not weighted down by his reputed bank account already exceeding $850 million, American film and TV producer Jerry Bruckheimer is certainly sitting pretty atop the Hollywood dungheap.
No surprise then that on 3.26.14 the overpaid parrots at CBS This Morning, media courtiers, really, always eager and ready to pay tribute to tycoons, celebrities, and other members of the establishment (especially one of their own), sang hearty hosannahs to Bruckheimer, who over four decades has contributed powerfully to maintaining the myths that prop up the American empire and provided the masses with oodles of escapist entertainment of only occasional middlebrow quality (i.e., The Amazing Race, despite its often alarming superficiality).
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Who is Bruckheimer, you ask? You ought to know. This is the guy who gave the world the most recent case of bad police tv fungus, in the form of the still highly contagious CSI franchise, an expanding blob that includes CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, Without a Trace, Cold Case, and possibly other programs I never heard of. At one point, notes the Wiki, “three of his TV series ranked among the top 10 in the U.S. ratings—a unique feat in television.”[2]
Happy and grateful son of the status quo: “Tell me what I can do for you daddy!”
For the most part the Bruckheimer signature has been one of singing the praises of the police/military establishment, where he sources many of his scripts. Conservatism comes easy to him. As is the case with most self-made men rising from relative poverty, his meteoric success seems to prove that “the system works,” that the American dream is no fantasy, and that the whole boondoggle is not really a very capricious lottery, a rigged game, in which dumb luck, including genetic accidents, play a disproportionate role.
A true believer, Bruckheimer, along with similar Hollywood conservative stalwarts like the ubercapitalist, militarist and, yes, fundamentalist Brit Mark Burnett* (who just gave the world his fundie version of the story of Christ), has become practically an adjunct to the Pentagon’s propaganda machine (and profited handsomely) from the devil’s alliance. It’s a mutually rewarding lovefest, even if Bruckheimer didn’t invent it. Hollywood has been a willing and highly cooperative partner to Washington’s misdeeds since its inception. Bruckheimer is responsible for recruitment vehicles like Top Gun, A Few Good Men, Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor and similar tripe. His less propagandistic material has included concoctions like Beverly Hills Cop, Flashdance, The Rock, Con Air, Armageddon, Bad Boys, Enemy of the State, and the ludicrously lucrative franchise Pirates of the Caribbean. The monster hits Beverly Hills Cop, Flashdance, etc., were developed during his partnership with one of the most bloated egos in Tinseltown, Don Simpson, a man whose excesses made Hollywood overindulgence look positively ascetic.(1)
At face value, Bruckheimer and his ilk are too mediocre, despite their enormous success (let’s remember they attain such heights by playing by system’s rules and doing its bidding) to merit attention let alone praise for their intrinsic worth. Their importance is derived from the fact that, as a typology under global imperialism, they constitute a small group of propagandists able and willing to whitewash and thereby enable the American empire and its vastly immoral deeds, which by definition entail some of the most horrid crimes in modern history.
Patrice Greanville is editor in chief of The Greanville Post, and publisher of Cyrano’s Journal Today. His opinions, on a good day, are probably shared by about 0.001% of the American population, slightly better elsewhere.
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Notes
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(1) By the end of his life in 1996, Simpson, something of a Hollywood bully, and heavy drug user, was a train wreck, and the more judicious Bruckheimer decided the alliance had outlined its usefulness.
Simpson (l) with his junior partner in headier days.
“Simpson was a well-known party animal and drug user. On January 19, 1996, Simpson was found dead in his bathroom of his Bel Air, Los Angeles home.[11] His death was initially reported as “natural“. An autopsy and toxicology report later determined that Simpson had died of heart failure from combined drug intoxication (cocaine and prescription medications. At the time of his death, there were 21 different drugs in his system including antidepressants, stimulants, sedatives, and tranquilizers. In August 1996, investigative reporter Chuck Philips of The Los Angeles Times revealed that Simpson had been obtaining large quantities of prescription drugs from 15 different doctors and that police found 2,200 prescription pills in his home.[6][12][13]A 1998 book by journalist Charles Fleming reported that Simpson’s prescription drug expenses were over $60,000 a month at the time of his death.”[14
(Source: Wikipedia)
The Wiki apparently left out the notorious incident when Simpson’s weenie grew gangrenous due to complications from a cosmetic operation designed to enlarge it, and parts of it, never too abundant to begin with, had to be amputated.
