Hollywood Insults

Please forgive me for telling the following awful joke that made us laugh so hard in the barrio, but it really is relevant. A man went on a pilgrimage to Israel, and while in the desert he saw a man dressed in biblical clothes leading a very pregnant woman on a donkey. In shock, the man asked him if his name was Joseph and his wife's name Mary. "Yes," the man replied. Then the pilgrim said, "And are you going to name your son Jesus?" The man laughed and said, "What do you think we are, Puerto Rican?"

As a Puerto Rican raised in Spanish Harlem, where Jesus was a very common name — albeit pronounced Hay-souz — I had to laugh at the seriousness displayed by the director of "Titanic," James Cameron, when he made his announcement that he had found Jesus's tomb, pointing to the names on the caskets. My father is buried in Calvary cemetery in Queens, and I'll bet Mr. Cameron could find quite a few caskets and tombstones there bearing the names Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I'll bet these actually have bones in them, unlike the tomb hyped by Mr. Cameron.

At a press conference in New York, the self-proclaimed "king of the world" insisted: "I'm not a theologist. I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a documentary filmmaker." Well, that explains it. Documentaries, especially those that win Academy Awards, cannot be taken seriously ever since Michael Moore won for "Bowling for Columbine." You see, Hollywood thinks we're stupid — and, in many cases, it is right.

In a letter to the editor of the Staten Island Advance, an artist friend of mine exhorted everyone to see Vice President Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," saying our future depended on it. Now, this woman is a fine artist but not a very deep thinker on the political scale. Whenever I'd point out discrepancies in her liberal diatribes, she'd stop me with, "You're better at the facts than I am, so let's not discuss this." So I didn't bother to tell her that Mr. Gore's film is more fictional drama then fact, because she can't be bothered by the truth.

My friend is a highly emotional animal lover, so I'm sure she was disturbed by the claim in Mr. Gore's film that polar bears are drowning because of global warming. Polar bears are declining in the areas where they are being hunted. However, a polar bear expert with the Canadian Department of the Environment at Nunavut, Mitch Taylor, says the polar bear population there has increased by 25% in the past 10 years. That's a bit too inconvenient for Mr. Gore to mention, as is the fact that scientists have found global warming on Mars but no humans to blame for it. Clever Al Gore may not have invented the Internet, but he certainly has invented the term "carbon footprint." In 2004, he set up a multimillion-dollar corporation, Generation Investment Management, for investors to latch onto technology that will clean these "footprints." Convenient, isn't that? What's that they say about "one born every minute"?

In "Bowling for Columbine," Mr. Moore edited clips of Charlton Heston in such a way as to give the impression that the actor gave a pro-gun speech immediately after the Columbine tragedy. That should have disqualified it from the Oscars, which stipulates in rule no. 12 that re-enactments, stock footage, stills, and animation must be based on fact, not fiction.

In Hollywood, this standard is routinely set aside if the subject is politically correct. As far as I'm concerned, this practice diminishes even further the value of the increasingly worthless Academy Award.

This leads me to ask ,Why was Mr. Cameron in New York to promote his Discovery Channel documentary, "The Lost Tomb of Jesus"? Did he think that just because this is the center of liberal elitism, we're all stupid? He clearly has no idea why Christians are Christians: in particular, what distinguishes the Catholic faith from the fundamentalism that is based on the New Testament. Catholicism was founded on both tradition and the Scriptures. The first Catholics knew Jesus and witnessed who he was. They went to their martyrdom believing he was the Messiah because of what they had seen with their own eyes. Would they have done so for an ordinary married rabbi? That just doesn't make sense.

Of course, what is sensible rarely determines what comes out of Hollywood these days. Perhaps Mr. Cameron needs to make another documentary titled "Searching for the Tomb of My Dead Brain Cells."