August 28, 2004
Who are these people?
Rob Long has a piece on Slate about the entertainment offerings at this weekend's RNC convention in New York. We're mostly talking pop country singers and Christian "rockers". Mr. Long puts it this way:
"There are two kinds of people in the world, famous people, and people you have to Google. Republicans have a lot of the latter and only a few of the former."
He also has hilarious things to say about the idea of "Christian rock", and applies it generally to the celebrities supporting the GOP:
"It's not so much that Republican celebrities are all Christian rockers, it's that they all pretty much adhere to the Christian Rock Principle—it sounds like rock, for about one second you think it's rock, but it isn't quite. Something's off."
There is, of course, a point to this, and it isn't just that famous rich people with nothing better to do than sit on their asses and spout garbage about things they don't understand. It's this:
"This may be why you rarely, if ever, see George Bush in a celebrity photo op. True, he probably has no idea who most of the beautiful people at the DNC were anyway, but there's also a political strategy to it, a certain faded-European-royalty logic at work: Always be the most powerful and famous person in the room, and if you're not going to be, get another room."
