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    John Cusack talks about political activism Archived Message

    Posted by Gerard on October 19, 2020, 10:22 am

    "I ask him what he thinks about the idea that actors ought to stay in their lane, away from politics, and he takes a deep breath. (The “you” in the following speech can be taken to be directed at the person for whom Serendipity has been ruined.) “When you see children being ripped away from their mothers’ arms and put into kennels,” he says, “I’m sorry if you think someone speaking out against that is someone not staying in their lane. But let’s agree that, if you can’t figure out that that’s fascism, then we don’t have anything more to say to each other, and I don’t have any respect for you, and we should probably not talk. I mean!”"...

    "Followers of his Twitter feed will know the powerful aversion to the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg this actor has. When I suggest to Cusack it must have been cathartic, playing a founder-saviour type, and getting to channel his deep suspicions about Musk and the rest, he corrects me: “Yeah. They’re not really suspicions so much as they’re, um, factual observations.” His unease about the Silicon Valley founder class stretches back to the 00s and his time aboard Bill Clinton’s plane as part of a celebrity delegation to Africa. Musk was on the flight, too, as were Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Google.

    “Too weird an adventure to pass up,” Cusack says, explaining his unlikely presence aboard. “It’s not like I’ve always been pure. No! I was the dog, and I was walked too. But then you start to see through it. You see these people saying, ‘Don’t be evil! We’re not evil!’ A nice catchy phrase. But then you see that their business becomes data-mining… You learn about what’s really happening with these companies. What their back doors are.”

    His strong political views evolved from that trip, Cusack says. In recent years he has travelled to Russia with the novelist Arundhati Roy to meet American exile Edward Snowden – “Ed” – and show him support. He has been a full-blooded supporter of Bernie Sanders for a while now, and though he will vote for Biden in November Cusack insists he will do so grudgingly. (“You’re voting for an extension of the neoliberal order. But the alternative is fascism. You have to vote against Trump.”) A year ago his politics got him in trouble when he put out a tin-eared tweet that he meant as criticism of Israeli foreign policy but which was antisemitic."..

    "When our interview is over he will be back online, barracking Trump, expressing his fury and his contempt. Before he goes I suggest to Cusack, gently as I can, that Twitter does not always look the healthiest place for him. “I would love to think about other things,” he agrees. “Poetry. Love. Anything else. But that’s just not the times we’re in. And, y’know, not all anger is just sort of somebody stuck in some rut in a basement. If you can’t be outraged on behalf of other people, or express anger at injustice, maybe that is its own rut. Sure, I might go too far sometimes. But I really just want to get across the message: that we’re sleepwalking into an incredibly dark possible future.”"

    Link: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/oct/04/john-cusack-i-have-not-been-hot-for-a-long-time

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