people love their idols, living or dead. when those idols are threatened, they get defensive. it is a behavioral trait as old as time. don’t go around tipping sacred cows, as they might tip back and crush you. this week, it was the conservative right who felt a looming threat from a television mini-series. while the mini-series was a force to reckon’d with in the late 70s and early 80s (roots, the blue & the gray, shogun, the thorn birds), you’d be hard-pressed to find someone in today’s society that was willing to give up their piecemeal reality television for six-hours of commercial-interrupted melodrama. even still, the picture painted by “the reagans” ran against the holy grain of that grinning presidential portrait hanging in the heart of every republican party member. they picked up torches of rhetoric and indignation. you could hear them for miles. “hollywood extremists are making light of ronald and nancy, the sainted royal couple that presided over the decade of greed! how dare they! they must be stopped!”

and they were. so now the pundits gloat. one in particular caught my eye today, and something he said rang a hypocritical bell in my mind. so i wrote him a letter.

Mr Leboutillier –

You asked a question in the parting shot of your recent article.

“If Hollywood wants to write about trashy White House behavior, why not a movie about Bill and Hillary Clinton?”

Sir, it’s been done. 1998’s Primary Colors, starring John Travolta as a President plainly modelled after Bill Clinton and based on the 1996 novel of the same name by Joe Klein. While published anonymously, it was revealed that it was based on Klein’s observations of Clinton during 1992.

So Hollywood has released a movie that bashes its own, and Primary Colors was in moviehouses while its subject was in the White House.

Just thought you’d like to know. Perhaps you will choose to ignore it, or perhaps you won’t. Either way, the choice is yours entirely. Just as I chose to send you this message. Just as artists are free to create. Just as Hollywood should remain free to produce. And especially because American citizens still maintain the right to decide what to watch and (more importantly) what to believe.

Thanks for your time,

Thomas L. Strickland

i wonder if he’ll send me a thank you note…