Alonso V Penn

(Cross-posted on my blog at The Marshall Independent.”

For those who enjoy following celebrity public spats, there was rather a good one at the American Airlines lost luggage area at LAX on Sunday (Dec. 18.)

Cuban-born star Maria Conchita Alonso spotted Sean Penn, approached him and braced him for his support of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

Things escalated until Penn called Alonso a “pig,” and Alonso replied, “And you are a communist a**hole! It is great to live the way you do as a communist!”

Penn would not reply to press inquiries about the incident, but a representative told the New York Post that a “hostile woman was nonsensically berating” Penn.

Alonso later made a statement, “The only thing I regret is me calling him an a** hole because I lowered myself to where he is at, and took away my class at that second, but I don’t regret calling him a communist. The other thing I regret that nothing came out of this for us to meet in private. What happened Sunday isn’t really the way I wanted things to happen, I thought, ‘This is the perfect moment for me to go and tell him lets meet and talk.’ I have facts and he doesn’t. All he sees is what Chavez has presented. I am still not having a conversation with him, which is what I wanted to achieve that day. But all this is still good because I have an opportunity now to tell people that what Sean says is not true. How can you believe someone like Chavez? You have to be stupid, which I know Sean is not.”

Alonso was raised in Venezuela after her parents escaped Castro’s Cuba. She is a former Miss Venezuela and first entered show business in Venezuela and Mexico.

Penn is Hollywood royalty, the son of actor/director Leo Penn and actress Eileen Ryan. Leo Penn was blacklisted during the 1950s, and though you have to dig a bit to confirm it, was in fact a member of the Communist Party (CPUSA.)

Sean Penn has palled around with Chavez, as well as spending some serious face time with Cuban dictator Raul Castro in 2008. Back in 2002 he toured Baghdad as celebrity guest of Saddam Hussein, and on his return erected a larger-than-life sized statue of the late unlamented dictator in his front yard.

So is Sean Penn a communist, a chip off the old block?

I seriously doubt Penn has the brains or the patience to wade through ‘Das Kapital.’ Nor does he seem the kind to give up his fortune to live in a commune, or subject his professional judgment to Party discipline as so many Hollywood writers did back then. His fairly lengthy arrest record for assault indicates “does not play well with others.”

Penn once described himself in an interview, “Let’s face it. I’m a person that feels pretty alienated from the rest of the world and never felt understood by anyone.”

Poor misunderstood fellow, with nothing to console him but his millions.

“I’ve been spreading the word around for a while that I’ve wanted to talk to him and Danny Glover and even Oliver Stone. But they haven’t wanted to talk to me. I want to believe that it is just ignorance. I want to believe that those amazing directors and writers and actors that praise communist leaders just don’t know the truth and have been brainwashed by the propaganda,” Alonso said.

With all due respect to Alonso, I think she misses the point entirely.

What Penn, Glover, Stone, and a lot of their ilk are, is dictator groupies.

Dictator groupies, to put it bluntly, like hanging around with people who kill people. Similar to gangster groupies, like the celebrities who liked to hang around with “Crazy Joey” Gallo before he got whacked in the Gallo-Profacci War in 1972. (But hey, he got immortalized in a song by Bob Dylan no less.)

Dictator groupies are not unaware of the mass murders committed by their idols, how could they not be? They admire them.

Probably everyone has had the “if I were king of the world I’d set everything to rights and kill all the no-good $#!+s” fantasy. The difference is, these people take it a lot more seriously than us grownups. And of course, who else but professional creators of fantasy would be so susceptible to taking that fantasy seriously?

But there’s another thing too I think. Academics, professional intellectuals, and people who have inherited wealth and professional advantages (and note how many prominent Hollywood people these days have inherited their intro into the entertainment industry,) tend to be a bit on the wimpy side. They admire strength, but they don’t know what real strength is.

And all too often, they think strength is brutality.

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