I say: Entertainment is not only important, it's one of America's MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCTS!
Saying something is "just entertainment" devalues and degrades something that each and every one of us seeks out daily. Now, if you're going to get specific, and toss "cure for cancer" on one side of the scale, and, say, the last S Club 7 cd on the other side, well, I've got to admit that the "entertainment" doesn't measure up to helping human beings find a faster way of overpopulating their planet and rushing headlong towards total oblivion in the name of sacred human life. But entertainment, including $252,000,000.00 ten year contracts for baseball players, is GOOD FOR AMERICA!
Twenty years ago, everyone was yapping about how Tokyo was taking over our television manufacturing through unfair trade practices. Soon, we wouldn't be making television sets at all! Jobs would be lost! Stupid Americans were doing nothing but making stupid television shows! Manufacturing televisions would belong to Japan! It was Pearl Harbor all over again! The zaibatsus were going to rule America! Your kids had better start learning Japanese to better serve their new masters! Calesthenics at dawn and everyone sing the company song, salaryman! Everyone would be forced to watch Pink Lady and buy Yellow Magic Orchestra LPs!
And what happened? Malaysia ended up with the television manufacturing business by beating the Japanese at their own game, and stupid American television shows RULE THE WORLD. The American entertainment industry makes more in one week than the entire television manufacturing industry makes in one year! And the Japanese economy has been sitting like a big fat rice turd in a toilet bowl going NOWHERE for a decade. And you, Dear Reader, don't even REMEMBER Pink Lady. We won, they lost - - - thanks to America's ability to churn out vast acres of ridiculous writing, reel after reel of movies consisting of ever larger explosions, enough CDs of bad R n' B per year to fill the Marianas Trench.
Let's face it: America produces the world's pop culture, and no one comes close to us in terms of quantity OR quality. ( A couple of points to the British, but let's face it, those Limey rat-bags aren't doing anything but slapping a coat of British accent on good ol' fashioned American rock and roll and selling it back to us in a Union Jack package. Personally, I think we ought to annex Great Britain, execute the Royal Family, and make 'em play baseball. THAT would be worth $252,000,000.00). The world is jumping and hopping to get their Third World asses into a pair of Levi's. People all over the world are throwing lira and deutschemarks and dinar and francs and whatever other sort of toilet paper they use for money in those godforsaken foreign hellholes at us, all in an attempt to get their greasy hands on the Director's Cut of Heaven's Gate, the latest Kronos Quartet score, videos of WWF Smackdown, Thomas Kinkaide paintings and those Ralph Kramden collectors plates from the Franklin Mint, not to mention 47 Bowie Knives for a mere two payments of $29.95 here on the Home Shopping Channel's "Knife-O-Rama" blowout sale and authentic pre-CBS Fender Stratocasters, to name just a few. Sure, our balance of payments suck because we buy all our hardware overseas. But more than any other product, our entertainment industry brings BOOKOO bucks back into America. Entertainment is one of the few things helping to keep this country afloat! So the next time you see a $252,000,000 baseball player, or a rich Hollywood star, offer to take them out to lunch on your tab. It'll be one small way of paying back the debt you owe them.
Юåf+êrvÕ¡: we're an American band