It’s admittedly unseemly to be writing about sleazy Hollywood while glancing, as I am, at the live YouTube stream from Sydney, reporting on the Martin Place hostage situation. But permit me to enjoy a little schadenfreude while I still can.
Many of us who have spent even part of our lives working in the film industry, particularly those who have committed the unpardonable sin of not adhering religiously to the orthodox liberal line, cannot but grin at the release of the hacked emails from the bosses of Sony Pictures. We were right all along about these self-described liberals and progressives and now we have proof — they are pond scum. They are about as liberal and progressive as Attila — not that those words mean anything anyway.
They’re also racist, but forget about that. It’s hardly surprising. What is surprising is that they are clueless. They don’t know what the average ten-year-old nerd knows — never write anything online, especially in email or text message form, that you expect is any way to be confidential. Digital writing is indelible. If you want to say something private, you’re better off with India ink than email. And if you really want to be secure, do what al Qaeda does — keep it face to face.
At this point a fair percentage of the English-speaking world and probably beyond is familiar with the hacked material from Sony. And now the unkindest cut has been revealed — the hackers have stolen the script for the next James Bond. (Well, maybe that’s not so unkind. Maybe they can explain the plot to us. The last few Bond films have been pretty inscrutable.) Not to mention …
Wait!
ABC 24 Sydney is reporting three of the hostages have escaped. I just watched the footage of them running out. Puts all this Hollywood nonsense in perspective. This is the real world of Islamic terror we have all been experiencing for well more than a decade and seemingly will never be without. But the movie industry has yet to really grapple with the long and serious war we are in in any depth. Even Zero Dark Thirty didn’t tell us much. And as I wrote in City Journal this week, Clint Eastwood’s foray into Iraq this year, American Sniper, didn’t do much for me either. No, getting inside our modern heart of darkness has been too much for the liberal mind.
Maybe the leaks at Sony will wake them up. In actuality, this has brought the long war home to Culver City. Someone stole their stuff. The war is real now, not some figment of Dick Cheney’s imagination. Just who is this Guardians of Peace who takes credit for the hacking? The first finger pointed to the North Koreans because of the new Sony comedy The Interview about an assassination attempt on Kim Jong-un. But the ever useful Daily Mail (everybody’s favorite paper nowadays) informs us that the emails reveal that Sony actually already changed the film at the behest of the North Koreans. You have to read the DM link to believe it — it’s almost surreal. Maybe Groucho Marx has taken over Sony Pictures (that would be an improvement).
So maybe it’s not the North Koreans. Maybe it’s their friends the Iranians. A number of people say that. And then there’s always the Russians. They like to [blank] with us and have been doing it for the better part of a century. Or could it be private parties? I’m lost here. I need my friend Michael and his ouija board. Speaking of which — and far from unrelated — I read something astonishing I hadn’t known in his PJM post of yesterday. Like most other people on the planet, I had believed that the NSA had spied on Angela Merkel’s cell phone. Now it seems that may not be true at all. We were lied to. By whom?
Maybe Edward Snowden hacked into Sony? Who knows?
Now back to Sydney. Five people have now emerged from the cafe, including two female workers.
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