Whoring

I've been thinking about whores a lot lately. No no, not the walking the streets in Queens working for your next rock and having a HBO crew follow you around for an "after dark" documentary kind of whore. I'm talking about the anything for a buck as long as it benefits me no matter who else in the world it might hurt kind of whore.

I wrote about this a little over a month ago and I never really got any comments beyond Joe defending the practice of watching out for Number One, so I thought I'd touch on the subject again for my first Roundtable.

I love calling people whores. I do it all the time. One little word can pretty much sum-up a person. Like, it is the perfect description for both Paris Hilton and Donald Trump, right? Even more so if you use "media" as a prefix. If I tell you I think someone is a whore, you get very clearly how I feel about someone. It's one of those beautiful descriptive terms. Like ass-hole.

Side to actual whores: I mean no disrespect comparing your straight-forward service for cash business to bottom feeders like Donald Trump. There just isn't a better replacement word for my point.

Anyway, my point is that the whole world, and especially America, seems to be filled with whores. People just seem so willing to sell their soul for an easy buck, even if it contributes to the pain, oppression, maiming and death of others. "As long as I get mine, fuck everybody else" is the prevailing attitude of the world.

The example that comes to mind most often for me is people who do commercials or promotion for nefarious and just plain old evil companies. And it drives me nuts. Not just because I spent several years studying theatre and never really considered using what I learned to sell diet soda or car insurance. I mean, I think that still makes one a whore for doing it, but there is an argument to be made for an actor trying to make a living. But there is the kind of whoring that is on a whole different level than that.

When someone helps promote a company that causes human suffering because they are getting paid a lot, that's something I find unforgivable. Nobody seems to have a place where they draw the line anymore. Well, there might be one place. Nazis and the Holocaust. Whenever I'm talking to someone (i.e. an actor) about what they would or wouldn't do, and I get to the question of whether or not they would do (or would have done in the 30s and 40s) a commercial promoting the Nazi party or for the extermination of Jews, they say "well, of course not."

I usually like to broaden that question out to whether or not they would have made a commercial for a product that they know was the direct result of, say, forced labor in concentration camps. You know, would you accept money to promote widgets that were made in slave camps where people were forced to work 18 hour days and people were killed on a regular basis? Again, that gets treated as a preposterous question, no decent person would do such a thing.

But then ask that same person if they would make a commercial for the De Beers company, the world's biggest (almost only) diamond company. You usually get a different answer. But why? The actions of the De Beers are directly responsible for the maiming, torturing and killing of thousands of people in African countries that produce diamonds, one of the most notable being Sierra Leone. And many of the people who had limbs chopped off so they wouldn't steal the diamonds from the mines were children. Many were also enslaved to work the mines.

The irony that shadows of hands were symbol of De Beers for so many years is lost on many people.

And I think the two actors that played the parts of the hands in those ads are just as guilty of crimes against humanity as Leni Riefenstahl. Leni didn't actually kill any Jews herself, but she sure did a heck of a job of promoting the Nazi agenda with her propaganda films. Is she off the hook for just "taking a gig"?

To me, the biggest whore in the Whore Hall of Fame is Michael Jordan. The man has no shame or soul whatsoever. He certainly doesn't have the "need the money" excuse that so many actors tend to use. At one point he was the most recognizable person in the world, and a prime example of elite athleticism. And what does an elite athlete encourage kids around the world to do? Eat McDonald's and drink Coke. I would guess that he didn't get to be the best basketball player in the world by doing that. Oh, and he had his name put on a really expensive shoe that was largely made by child laborers working in substandard conditions for up to 16 hours a day for very low wages.

The kids who made the shoe may have not been getting much, but Michael made sure to get his. It has been said that while Jordan was playing he was paid more money each year by Nike than they paid their entire Vietnamese and Indonesian workforces combined.

Of course there are examples everywhere, not just in Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Doctors and scientists who work for the tobacco industry or do infomercials for "health products" they know to be worthless come to mind. Like I said, we seem to be surrounded by whores.

So what are your thoughts? Do you think I have a point, or do you think that anything anybody does to make a buck is OK? Where would you draw the line? Outta sight, outta mind, or do people need to think more about the effect of their actions on others even if they don't get to see it first hand?

But even more importantly, who are the people that you think are the biggest whores?