While finally putting the books onto shelves and cleaning up my 'Library' now that the shelves are all in, I watched/listened to the movie "Gettysburg" again. Longstreet passes on some intelligence from a scout named Harrison to Lee and reminds Lee that he knows Harrison. Lee is taken aback and asks, "We move on the word of an actor?" I found it odd to note that the Democrats continue to make the same mistake of resting their laurels in the words of an actor.
You hear actors all the time. They get involved in causes and sell products and get in trouble mostly, but from time to time they also try to tell you what you ought to do. They get into politics, not because they are actually good at anything, but because they are famous. We then allow them to dictate the terms of our lives when they are mostly people who pretend to be something else for a living. Who cares what Tom Hanks, Jane Fonda, William H. Macy, and the like think about politics? They are actors who are paid to pretend.
The saying goes that those who can, do and that those who can't, teach. I think those who can't do or teach, act. Sure, in industry and education, you find actors, people who show up and play the part of teacher. Some of them are capable people, but they're at least acting to be teachers, and some of them are pretending to be worth anything at all.
Beyond that, consider the words the Lee character uses (Lee is played by Martin Sheen, which I find even more comical). They move on the WORDS of an actor. They do not move on his skill, on his experience, or on any proof of what he says. They take his word for it. Now, Harrison happened to be telling the truth, but they didn't know. Unlike the commanders, Harrison had zero war experience or training; he was just zealous for the cause.
Most of what we see is a play. Most people play parts. You can usually tell when you talk to a person if they know what they're talking about. I try not to pretend or portend to anything I do not actually know, because if people make decisions based on information I give them and it's not accurate information, people die. That's what happened with Heth when he confronted Buford at Gettysburg. He thought and bought the notion that it was just militia, and the Confederacy paid for it.
This kind of fallacy trips people up all the time. In relationships, we buy into the notions- flowers, chocolates, and promises people don't intend to keep- because we want to believe in something bigger than ourselves. It's how we hire people who cannot perform, villify people who didn't do anything (Duke Lacrosse anyone?), marry people who do not love us, and buy things we do not need with money we do not have to impress people we do not like. Shoot, the producers laughed at the notion of an actor in politics in "Back to the Future" when Brown was incredulous that Reagan was president in 1985, and yet we still swallow the foist.
I know they use actors all the time. They use them to sell you cell phone plans and bone supplements and memberships to retirement associations or travel deals. They are people we recognize, but are they really people we know? They are paid in those endorsements just like they are on screen to tell us what they want us to hear. If you move on the word of an actor, you may pay the price.
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