Warning: The incredibly blasé tripe that follows makes absolutely no effort to accurately categorize Jackie Chan’s true political ideology. Neither does it attempt to properly use the term fascist, which instead will be used as a bugaboo word for any system of government that all "right-thinking" Americans deem to be "non-free." Comments are yearned for, but the author does not need to be told that he isn’t in any way able to differentiate between the different gradients of the “non-free” world. He proudly admits it up front!
Jackie, baby, what happened? Did you just fire your handlers? Didn't you see how bad that went down for Tom Cruise? You had a free pass for all these years. All you had to do was smile and act like you could barely understand English, but you had to go and open your mouth.
Speaking recently at a forum in China, Jackie Chan said that people need to be controlled.
"I'm not sure if it is good to have freedom or not," he said. "I'm really confused now. If you are too free, you are like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic."
He added: "I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we are not being controlled, we'll just do what we want."
I’m going to leave the saber-rattling anger at poor smiling Jackie to people with much stronger political passions than me. Maybe Bill Maher will bring this up at his next panel (you know the ones that always have two liberals and one conservative – which sounds unfair until you watch FOX or MSNBC). Either way, I will continue to get future Jackie coverage from the same place I’ve always gotten it — Entertainment Weekly.
Instead, I think we can learn two pretty interesting things from the beginning of the end of Jackie Chan’s Western career. (By the way, I in no way think his career is over. If he and Mel Gibson come hat in hand to Hollywood needing funding for a movie that they want to make together about Mao Tse-Tung, my guess is that they still get it.)
1. How incredibly bad is our current entertainment coverage?
The first Rush Hour came out over a decade ago, and, up until now, no one ever bothered to ask Jackie whether he was a fascist or not? How did Perez Hilton miss this? Where was TMZ with the footage of Jackie attending book burnings? Must all of our important news come from leaked porn videos?
2. How incredibly arrogant are Americans?
Propaganda for freedom is still propaganda. As Americans, we’ve been conditioned to just assume that any sane person that isn’t being tortured to say otherwise would be completely insane to support a non-free society. For over a decade, most of us took it for granted that all the cash Jackie was pulling down here in the States ensured his eternal worship of democratic societies. We make that mistake a lot. Americans have almost no ability to understand that some people in the world could possibly be motivated by something besides money.
So, as you watch the news channels bust on Jackie for the next few days, try to remember that he has a right to be a fascist here in America – which is why we are, supposedly, properly, different.
