Hear that slurrrrrp? That’s another hard-won American liberty going down the drain.
The hackers who brought multi-billion-dollar Sony Pictures to its knees with embarrassing e-mail and information leaks must be laughing their bots off over Tinseltown’s mad scramble to nix an offending movie, toe the terrorist line, cork the freedoms at the heart of its entertainment industry, and involve Al Sharpton in its rapids of self-revulsion.
Mousy Sony’s surrender over a third-rate comedy about an assassination attempt on North Korea’s tubby-but-thin-skinned dictator is an atomic attack on free speech, and tests the intention of every American to protect his or her privacy — and personal exchanges, no matter how controversial — from an emerging thought police. Studio executive Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin should stand by their e-mails — even the jokes about President Obama’s imagined movie tastes — and not grovel in shame to the civil rights distemper society.
The fallout from the cave-in could be as destructive to our way of life as the radioactive dust from Little Boy’s fireball that turned steel buildings into flour and killed countless people in the nuclear attacks on Japan at the end of World War II.
America’s annoying conflict over her values is birthing an institution of wallowers and cry babies who can’t make up their minds about which ideal to keep and which to kick. Last week we were spanking ourselves silly over waterboarding 9-11 detainees, but this week we could hardly care about protecting the national freedoms that define our ideals and are inked with the blood of brave Americans who would sooner die on the battlefield than see them fold.
Hollywood elites, waxing ad nauseam about the assault on creative freedom and the First Amendment, need to man-up on their lip service and pool their deep resources to release the film privately on every available platform. It would send out the message that freedom — American-style — is not free or cheap, but certainly worth the fight.
The grim future of hack attacks depends on the willingness of Americans to stop the self-denigration and confront the censors — wherever, however. The alternative is a weak subsistence in a phantom nation of fast-slipping liberties.
Follow me on Twitter @BritShavana
