ninme

This sounds familiar:

PJM - The New Blacklist: A Book Excerpt, by Roger L. Simon

Once inside the executive’s office, that pecking order between talent and management thus confirmed, it is instantly waved off in a burst of small talk and a call for the requisite mineral water – originally Perrier, now something more exotic like an obscure Welsh brand in a blue bottle whose unpronounceable name you can barely remember. But the small talk is what’s important, the prelude to the actual pitch, which can be as short as five minutes. This small talk can take a number of forms but usually revolves around the freeway traffic (a perpetual subject), the Lakers (declining in importance recently) and, over the last half-decade or more, a ritualized Bush bash. Fucking Bush did this or that… did you hear the stupid thing the idiot said, etc., etc.? You don’t even have to hear Bush referred to specifically – just the word idiot suffices. You know. (Who else could it be? Certainly not the Dostoevsky character.) The subtext is that we are all together, part of the secret society, the world of those who know as opposed to those who don’t.

If you don’t agree with this particular weltanschauung, even if you dissent from its orthodoxy just a tiny bit, you have but three choices: One, you can argue, in which case you are almost certain to be dismissed as a fool, a warmonger or a right wing nut (all three, probably) and therefore have little or no chance at the writing or directing job that brought you there. Two, you can shut up and ignore it (stay in the closet), in which case you feel like a coward and experience (as I have) a dose of existential nausea straight out of Sartre or, three, you can stop going to the meetings altogether, in which case you have blacklisted yourself.

I wouldn’t have chalked it up to Sartre (the guy who taught philosphy came into our AP English class to talk to us about existentialism after we read L’Étranger and all I really got from that was him throwing a rag doll across the room), but that pretty much encapsulates My Life In Seattle.