Whimperwood's Stars Stump For Peace

In yet another penetrating illustration of irrelevance, a number of bad actors accumulated yesterday to publicize a letter urging President Bush to avoid military action. As much as I applaud the efforts of people trying to prevent a war they believe is unjust, I have to wonder just why it is these luminaries believe anyone would trouble themselves over a powerless, plebeian core of quasi-thespians whining about the inevitable and underscoring the futility of their stardom.

Take a look, for example, at the star list that assembled yesterday: Tony "Token Arab-American" Shalhoub, Martin "TV President" Sheen and Mike M*A*S*H* Made My Life" Farrell were the headliners. I last saw Shalhoub, ironically enough, in some terrorist flick called The Seige wherein he portrays an Arab-American good guy must fight for his family's rights as the citizens of New York become increasingly paranoid about the Arab-American population. Yesterday he asked: "Where is the next pre-emptive strike?"

Sheen, an activist who apparently believes that the role that he currently plays as the President of the United States on West Wing isn't sufficient to change American foreign policy and so has taken to preaching from his petulant little Hollywood soapbox, led them all. Again, it isn't the message as much as the messenger that I vehemently execrate. When I need to get my politics from actors, I'll wait until another one of these addle-brained dons like Ronald Reagan comes along to screw things up.

Farrell tells us: "It is inappropriate for the administration to trump up a case in which we are ballyhooed into war." He oughta know. After all, he served countless episodes in a Hollywood-pretend-Korean War pretending to be a doctor, so if anyone is an expert about trumping up reality, it must be him.

I mean come on, this publicity stunt of collective whining is almost as repulsive as listening to Ape-Killer and Moses-Man Charlton Heston sermonize on the pulchritude of gun ownership as President of the NRA.

But Sheen, the virtuoso of this collective whimper, surpassed all with his doyen expertise in stating "I think he'd like to hand his father Saddam Hussein's head and win his approval for what happened after the Gulf War. That's my own personal opinion — I don't know if that's true. I hope it's not, but I suspect it is".

This insight comes from the loins of a man who sired Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, two Faulkneresquely failed sons who might better serve Daddy Sheen lending a good argument against nepotism and the cancerous spread of bad acting than for the root causes of the coming eradiction of Saddam. The question to me is when Charlie Sheen will ascend from deputy mayorship on Spin City to be the President who succeeds his father in a television series on political primogeniture. Something like "Deputy Mayor Kills President With Own Soapbox", or something like that. Now that would be a combination of protest, acting, farce and patrimony I could get excited about.