Well, now
it is finally done. And as SAG-AFTRA accepts congratulations, I would like to
offer my own thanks.
First of
all, we need to thank you for what you have done. In the midst of all the
struggles that America is undergoing, including political polarization, crises
abroad, economic unrest and national turmoil, people like me have forgotten the
true heroes of society who are the members of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. For so
long people have thought that the people who represented the struggles were
teachers and doctors and lawyers, or even those who struggled to unionize for
Amazon, or who struck for better wages in medical care and the automotive industry.
But you have reminded us that you, a group of highly skilled millionaires, are
just as, if not more, exploited by the system as we are. Clearly the struggles to earn a minimum wage
pale to those of you who can not earn millions in residual from Netflix or have
to sell one of your houses to survive a strike.
Celebrities – you are just like us!
I mean,
sure we did have some doubts, when you decided that the offer that the WGA had accepted
a month before SAG-AFTRA was not good enough, or when you said the levy Netflix
offered would only cost each subscriber 57 cents. Or when that neoconservative George
Clooney got his far right celebrities to offer a pittance of $150 million to
make this strike end sooner. And of
course deciding to spent that weekend reminding your members that the most
important thing during the Halloween season was not to wear costumes of
trademarked characters might have seemed a tad out of touch with the working
man. The SNL sketch that aired
the following week may have seemed a little too tame compared to what was going
on.
But of
course you sacrificed too. All the red carpet premieres and film festivals you
couldn’t attend. The fact you couldn’t spend time with your staff and workers
on the set. Of course, when Drew
Barrymore chose to stand with those people you publicly shamed her in to not
filming her TV show and now her writers have quit and some people consider a
scab. But like Gandhi said, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some
eggs.
And sure
your industry just well over $10 billion over the last six months with no films
and TV shows being done. But hey, what’s a few billion for corporations that
are all ridiculously wealthy anyway? I mean sure Netflix has had to undergo
major restructuring, cable networks are beginning to fire their heads of
original programming left and right, and broadcast television did have no fall
season and may not have new episodes until January. And lots of shows have
already been cancelled and will continue to be cancelled as a result. But that’s
the sign of a healthy industry. Fewer opportunities for employment.
And let’s
not forget the big wins the WGA got. Sure it was more or less the same deal
that the DGA accepted before the strike and the studios offered it to you and
the beginning which you walked away from. But that doesn’t matter. You got your
point across. The best way to make sure
you make money in the future is to make your shaky industry shakier. It’s the
first rule of economic growth. And look how grateful the members were to the
rights they won. They waited a full week to have their members excoriate
leadership for not issuing a token statement on the war in Israel. That’s the
kind of gratitude that you only find in Hollywood.
But seriously.
I am happy for all of you actors and writers, especially SAG-AFTRA. For many of
you this was the hardest roles you ever had to play. For months you had to
convince America that a group of millionaires who had appeared on camera and
who had money that most of us will never even dream of, were typical members of
the proletariat. I imagine that your
staff who brought you coffee on the picket lines, getting you lunch from
McDonalds making sure your custom picket signs were designed from Amazon signs,
must have been so proud of you. And when
they asked whether any of the $10 million that Dwayne Johnson offered to some
of the rank and file members of the guild would help the people who didn’t have
a union and were out work, you just said something profound such as: “One
battle at a time.”
And of
course, you did initially get the praise from the left that you so often do. I
mean, they don’t mean it of course, but you give them money so they say they
do, and you don’t really care what they think, so it all worked out. Of course,
they moved on to elections and other political issues and they basically
stopped trumpeting your praises after you walked away from the table, but there’s
an election cycle coming up. You’ll be back working together insincerely in no
time.
And don’t
forget the real losers! No not the millions of Americans who had no TV to watch
and had to deal with reruns for months. Anyway they didn’t want to pay money to
watch your shows on streaming in the first place, so screw them. You didn’t do
this for them anyway.
No you
taught those billionaire studios a lesson. Their stock prices have all dropped
and they’ve suffered immense financial losses over the last several months.
Some might say that your stubbornness and intractability has made a much
shakier industry even shakier and will probably have even greater long-term
consequences for future employment and job security later on. Come to think of
it, some people such as Stephen Amell and Bill Maher did say that. But you stamped down any dissent, shut down
any argument and clamped down even in the face of all public reason. And isn’t
that what America’s all about?
But you
won. A pay raise. Now some might say that many of you are already rich, if not
wealthy. Some might also say that for a group that are supposedly claiming to
be part of the working class, your membership of a quarter of a million people
is in a sense as elitist as basically other industries. And some people might even
say that for a group of people who love to check left-wing boxes, you really
showed your inner John Galts in this strike.
But that’s
not what any of this was truly about. What
was it truly about? Well, some would say it was a bunch of privileged
dilletantes trying to get a pay raise and job security and who used the
trappings of the strikes across America to cage it that way. I mean, it’s not like any of you were going to
starve if you had less money or you didn’t have skills to fall back on unlike
most other Americans on picket lines. And in the last analysis, it’s not like
America was going to drop dead if they couldn’t see new episodes of Last of
Us or the next Marvel film until next year or even that many of them even
bothered to watch many of the films and shows you make anyway. I mean, at the end of the day, you did
sacrifice – you spent months without the paparazzi coming to your homes and
they had to go to picket lines instead. And you postponed the Emmys too. I know
how much it hurts for all of you to sacrifice going to an awards show and
acting humble when you win a trophy. Granted it may be a little awkward this
coming year when you thank all the people who helped you get there and this
time those people remember that during the last several months you didn’t help
them at all.
But it’s
over. You can now go back to work. You can perform in front of cameras and
write stories that the right wing dismisses as ruining America and the left says
come from a point that washes whichever group they think its watching. You can
start making movies that almost no one will go to and making shows not nearly
as many people watch as you think. And the people will forget – if indeed some
of them have noticed it happened at all. Many of them don’t watch your shows or
go to your films in the first place, and in quite a few case, it’s because they
can’t afford too.
But don’t
worry. Soon they’re will be award seasons and as the new shows debut, the
public will little note nor long remember why it happened in the first
place. Because like so many things in
our society, they only noticed your existence when it wasn’t there. Once it’s
back they won’t ask any questions. It’s the American way.
Anyway,
congratulations.
There
will be a (slightly) more serious epilogue to this series later on.
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