Smirking Sex, Mindless Violence -- Hooray for Hollywood

Everybody is going to watch the Oscars on Sunday because Hollywood is America. And every time I see some pundit say Hollywood is out of touch, I just want to take my TV and march it right down to the end of my private road and throw it over the big iron gate!

But seriously, Hollywood versus America is a theme that works well as conservative red meat, a continuation of the “red state versus blue state” theme of the last election, in which blue staters were convinced everything between New York and L.A. was one giant forest where Ned Beatty is constantly being sodomized by hillbillies, and red staters were told that people like me spend all our time performing abortions and figuring out new ways to desecrate the flag. Please, they’re just hobbies.

Politically, it’s always been advantageous to divide people -- to make the United States a place of warmongers and wimps, elitists and morons, gun nuts and people with normal-size penises. Only problem is, it’s not true.

Hollywood isn’t your cesspool, America, it’s your mirror. We made all those movies with the smirking sex and the mindless violence and the superheroes beating the heck out of zombies because that’s what you want.

It’s what the whole world wants. Movies are the one thing about the United States that the rest of the world still actually likes -- our nation’s last and only export. I mean, besides the torture. And even the ones being tortured are like, “Cool, this is just like in ‘The Deer Hunter.’ ”

What I’m saying is, Hollywood is nothing more than a restaurant that takes your order for entertainment. You like pornography? We’ll make it. And we do, a lot of it. And it’s not just people in blue states who’ve made it a $13-billion-a-year industry.

So to those who think there’s a direct causal relationship between “Shrek 2” and abortion on demand, and that if we just put “Leave It to Beaver” back on, the gay people would come to their senses, I say to you this: Stop worrying.

This week, a woman in Alaska cut off her husband’s penis and flushed it down the toilet. So yes, I would agree, our morality is in decline. Because 10 years ago, when Lorena Bobbit cut off her husband’s penis, she didn’t flush it down the toilet. She threw it out the window of a moving car, where it could be easily retrieved, and was. Which allowed her husband, John Bobbit, to have a career making -- yes, that’s right -- pornography.

So you see, both sides are really more alike than either would like to admit. And that’s why tonight I’d like to reach out and say to the people who live across the street from me: Don’t you think it’s time you took the Bush-Cheney sign down?