I saw a story yesterday about a man that makes a lot of money acting
in TV shows commenting on the use of his kind of people in a live
action remake of an animated feature movie.
What? I described the story without saying all the words that offended
him and offend some of the others. So now I'll use the words.
The guy is a dwarf. Midget, dwarf, little person, height-challenged,
whatever. It's not a bad thing, it's just a descriptor to put him in
a box so that when we talk about him you know who we're talking about.
The feature movie is one that was made in the early 20th century by
Disney. And he was talking a lot about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
I think it's a shame that our attention-driven economy is so hungry
for controversy that it looks for all the "content" that will catch
and capture attention and generate discussion like this that one guys
being offended causes an entity like Disney to react the way that it
did.
I think it's comical in general that the "social-minded" among us are
so right and righteous that they get upset that an actor who is
playing somebody else isn't actually just like the somebody else that
they're playing in whatever special classifier that they're focused on
this week is. Like the people who get upset when they see an old Lone
Ranger show and see that a white man is playing Tonto. Or when the
see a non-homosexual (read heterosexual) play the part of a homosexual
in a show.
It's a show! They're actors! They are paid to study and learn and
think about being somebody else.
Furthermore, the show is fake. It is not reality! It is exaggerated
escapism from the reality of a person's daily life made to manipulate
your emotions!
I just wish people would go by the maxim that was taught when kids
were spanked and punished for not acting correctly and people actually
got put in jail when they broke the law: "If you can't say anything
nice don't say anything at all."
