Not Kvetching.




I was listening to the radio on my drive home from picketing the other day, and the radio lady was interviewing a writer, asking his opinion about the strikeness. "One thing that people say," she said, and I'm totally paraphrasing, "is that writers make a lot of money and they shouldn't complain."

I can say to you, Very Hot Reader, that I am not complaining. Striking ain't kvetching.

And I should know. My people have cultivated the ennumeration of complaint to levels of complexity and sophistication far exceeding my meager blogging abilities. Especially since I don't speak Yiddish, a mighty language when one is inclined to bitch.

Look, I make a nice living as a writer. I'm not a millionaire. (Not even close. More like, "I'm finally outta debt.") I live in a cute apartment, I have a cute dog, I own some cute shoes, I drive a Toyota. Most of the writers I know live comfortably but by no means extravagantly; they live and die by Trader Joe's and Targay same as everybody else in La-La-ville. And a few writers I know have made great successes of themselves. You've watched shows they invented in their massive, labyrinthine brains; you've stood in line to watch their movies. They are to the writing of scripts as those Top Gun fellows were to the flying of fighter jets. Those particular specimens, I must report, are quite well-to-do. They live the life I assume Radio Lady was talking about. They have lovely houses with furniture so velvety you wanna French kiss it; their cars are precision-German; their superfierce shoes are Italian.

Maybe I'll one day make the kind of money they do. Maybe I won't. Who can say? All I know is, I didn't get into the writing racket just to bank. And I'm not striking out of greed.

I recently experienced a chance litmus test that enabled me to take my own true temperature about the money thing. I was at some casino in the desert on the Fourth of July (long story). I was waiting to hear if a network wanted to buy my pilot idea. I passed a flashing neon sign that said

JACKPOT, FOUR MILLION DOLLARS!!!!!!!

I envisioned winning four million dollars. Pretty sweet, right? I asked myself, what would I do? Buy a shiny boat? Shopping spree for purses made of weird exotic leather? Trip to the land of the Euro, which is kicking the American dollar's tuchus ten ways from Sunday? And all I could think was.... GodDAMN I hope I get to write this pilot.

But, Sera, I reminded myself (silently, though I do sometimes talk to myself aloud like a crazy beyotch).... no pilot would ever earn you anywhere near that. In fact, you could successfully produce the subsequent show for a long-ass time and not rack that level of cheddar.

And I realized that someone could walk up to me right at that moment and hand me a check for ten million buckaroos, and I would still just want to write my own TV show. I wouldn't switch careers. I wouldn't quit and live the life of a character on Dirty Sexy Money. I'd write, and I'd write, and I'd blog about writing. I dunno, maybe I'd be writing with like a really expensive pen or something, but otherwise... I'd keep on keeping on. Because I am doing exactly what I want to be doing with my life, and the fact that it affords me a not-too-shabby lifestyle is a thick buttery layer of frosting on an already delicious slice of Fuck Yeah.

This makes me a lucky person. I don't do what I do for the dough. And when I look at my career - in fact, every single time I crack open my paycheck - I feel the same feeling. The feeling is the opposite of kvetchitude. It is gratitude.

So hell no, I am not complaining. Not by a mile. And I am not assuming that any of this is my right. I knew this was a competitive, poodle-eat-Frenchie biz when I jumped into the dogpark. There's no real job security in script writing. Every gig could be your last. Cancellation and bum box office hover in every shadow, staring at you like that evil subway guy in Ghost. That's the real reason the strike isn't freaking me out as much as one might think: I never assume I'll have a job in six months.

That's me in a nutshell: plum whackadooed that I managed to pull a fast one with this script thing and avoid having to go to law school/med school/ acupuncture college. And, on the other... half of the nut, or whatever, aware that with good fortune comes a certain degree of responsibility: when the contract being offered stinks up the joint, I gotta stand up about it. Not just for myself - we've already established I still look around corners waiting for Candid Camera to jump out and go Surprise! We totally fooled you into thinking you could make a living writing scripts about tragically misunderstood werewolves! But for my peeps: the writers of yore who stood up and got me pension, health and residuals. The writers of Tomorrowland, who will be writing snippets to be downloaded directly into your cerebral cortex, and need to be paid for that. The writers of Right About Now, even.

I'm not going to try to convince you that we're in the right here. I'm not here to explain the pie that is Hollywood and why we deserve a slice. There are plenty of hilarious and/or informative youtube videos that do it better. This strike is not fun, and it is not cute. It's serious shit, and it's a damn shame it's come to this. Layoffs. TV shows stalling at the starting gate. Incredibly talented writers holding signs when they should be typing something incredibly incredible. I mean, I was on the line this week with the guy who created one of my fave shows of all time (hint: high school; nerds; cancelled in one season). It took a lot of willpower not to gush about the level of influence his work has had on mine. I can't get over what a waste it is that all of us are standing around getting crispy in the Burbank sun when we could be merrily pulling our hair out over some form of filmed entertainment.

On said picket line, I've heard a lot of worry and guilt about having to fire below-the-line employees. Speculation about the fate of the holiday movie season. Frustration as another day goes by without new negotiations. Forced optimism. Only slightly less forced humor.

The only thing I haven't heard? Complaining. Not from the Emmy winners, not from the Oscar nominees, not from freshly-minted newbie staff writers or plucky middle-management hyphenates (that would be me) or guys whose show just got cancelled (sorry, staff of Viva Laughlin. You seem nice). Hollywood writers, from what I can see, know they're lucky. The (often Very Hot) ones I've met in the past two weeks remind me of no one so much as... me. They work constantly; they take little for granted; they're proud of their work and hope to sustain their careers. Oh, and when they introduce themselves to the man standing next to them and he says he's Peter Filardi, they fall all over themselves like geeky 13-year-olds to tell him how fucking awesome Flatliners was.

And if they are indeed like me, then I can safely say none of this has sprung from a place of egotistical entitlement. It's not about getting a pile more money and rolling around in it Demi Moore style and spending it on stuff that increases our carbon footprint or what have you; it's about protecting ourselves down the line. We - understandably, I think - want a working contract that prevents us from sustaining crippling losses as the industry evolves and the distant future becomes the regular old present. Writers like me want to negotiate. We want to come up with a fair compromise. We just want to get back to work.

You know, so we can settle back in to our comfortable routine of staring at our computers in caffeinated horror, agonizing over our scripts and kvetching.

Simon Respectfully Wishes You a, Well, Not Happy, So Let's Go With Meaningful Yom Ha'Shoah.

Just real quickly, today was Holocaust Remembrance Day, which would've been a great day for President Ahmadinejad of Iran to apologize for comparing said historical event's actual historcial veracity to that of unicorns and leprechauns and other beings that apprently caper about in his head when he isn't inciting impoverished farmers to take up their pitchforks against the hook-nosed enemy.

You know who else could've taken today to reflect on the past instead of opening his capacious piehole? Tommy Thompson, the "conservative" (that's code for "I hate you if you're not exactly like me or much richer") Republican who recently announced his bid for President. At today's function at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington D.C., he unhinged his yap to utter the following: “I’m in the private sector and for the first time in my life I’m earning money. You know, that’s sort of part of the Jewish tradition and I do not find anything wrong with that.” Nice work, Tommy. Have a knish.

How did I, personally, commemorate this auspicious yearly event? By writing taglines for an upcoming movie about, I shite you not, one of the architects of the Final Solution!

Professional discretion prevents me from being more specific, but let's just say his name rhymes with "Play-Golf Trike-Man." Spinning out dozens of pulpy teasers (in partial tribute to Grindhouse, about which more in a moment) for this undoubtedly gripping and dark production caused my mind to unmoor itself very briefly and to drift about airlessly like those hapless astronauts in Kubrick's 2001 who pissed off HAL the computer. As the darkness of genuine atrocity and the mad hyperbole of one-sheet convention deranged one another, I found myself typing things like "There's a New Adolf in Town!"

Not good. But it does afford a somewhat linear segue (for me, at least) to something that's been sticking in my big Jewy craw lately. OK, not just lately — it's been there forever, like a fetid caraway seed stabbing indefatigably at the inter-molar gums of my soul.

It's the way people still talk about Jews in the entertainment business, as though our Starbucks grande cups are really filled with gentile-baby blood and we spend each day wondering how to demoralize and degrade America.

It's the way "Jew" and "entertainment" bounce off each other in the reactionary-dumbfuck popular imagination, each making the other seem more evil and twisted and unwholesome.

And most of all, it's the utter hypocrisy of blaming the Jew-entertainment complex for all of America's problems but never once saying anything like, oh, gee, "The DEFENSE industry, which is largely run by non-Jews (many of whom give ample lip service to the merciful word of Jesus), is responsible for untold real destruction, unlike the entirely virtual mayhem of Hollywood (or, more accurately Vancouver)." Or, "The OIL industry, peopled by the evangelical golfers of Dick Cheney's inner sanctum, is truly and literally ruining America, unlike the squib-heavy pantomimes that glimmer fleetingly on the screens of your local multiplex."

Grrr.

Still, it's likely that the blame-Jewy-entertainment-firsters took heart at the much-ballyhooed underperformance of the Weinstein-produced Grindhouse. I suppose if you hate that kind of entertainment and consider it moral poison, I can't really blame you. But if you're one of those people who enjoyed this flick but have since, ahem, revamped their opinions in light of what the dunderfucks who consider opening box-office to be Holy Writ called its disastrous performance, well ... stop it.

I freakin' loved Grindhouse. I ate up every gnarly bit of gore, every geeky allusion, with a knife and fork. It afforded me more than three hours of delirious enjoyment. That America, the same America mentioned above, did not clutch this fearlessly gross and meta-referential labor of love to its bosom the way it did such worthy cinematic benchmarks as Norbit and Wild Hogs does not give me pause.

To reiterate: I heart the gun-legged Rose McGowan. I dig the crazy stuntman and his car. I relish the trash-talking chicks who take revenge. I adore the lurid trailers. And I love the fact that it was all hatched in the fever dreams of two movie freaks who didn't give a fuck if the focus-groupies didn't get it. I don't care either.

I love this movie because it takes all the funky compost of exploitation moviemaking and uses it to grow a beautiful film-fanatic's garden. It's a tribute to a fantasy realm full of fantasy violence. No doubt some will take today's horrifying headlines and try to blame the real-life carnage on the out-there imagery of Grindhouse and kindred flicks. Count on election-season sermons about our "sick" culture, alluding to some subversive element that rots America from within. They will tell you that guns don't kill people — movies do. And between the lines of their diatribes you'll know they mean movies made by Jews.

As far as I'm concerned, they can go sit with Tommy Thompson and President Ahmadinejad and shut the hell up. I'm trying to watch a fuckin' movie here.

Sleep Is the New Sex

Of all the many kinds of abuse and addiction now available — because America is the greatest country in the world — Jews are most predisposed to prescription pill abuse. This is in part because we tend to view physicians as deities and will greedily swallow any bolus that comes in a little amber RX bottle.

We're also likely to gulp down sleeping pills, because we worry a lot and the wee hours tend to be when the little anxiety factory we call the brain starts mass-producing visions of loved ones dying in flaming wrecks or hangnails turning into metastatic cancer.

Not that we Yids are alone. According to the Prescription Access Litigation Project (PAL), the folks behind the Bitter Pill Awards, the top five prescription sleeping pills raked in $2.7 BILLION in 2005. "Sleep is the new sex," reads a quote on their site from Arthur Spielman, director of the Center for Sleep Disorders Medicine and Research.

Of course, sleep was designated the new sex waaaay back in 2006. By now, slumber has probably been knocked off its steamy perch by, oh, I dunno, knitting or vomiting or watching preteen girls eating spaghetti with chopsticks on YouTube. Nothing's the new sex for long.

The point is, Americans are popping Ambien and Lunesta and other yummy bedtime remedies like crazed toddlers tasting the Skittles rainbow. Which would be just fine if the drug didn't apparently cause them to rise from their pillows and somnambulate into their cars, embarking on joyless joyrides to they know not where. Frequently they go the wrong way on one-way streets and crash into lightposts; when the cops finally pull them over they seem blissfully unaware of what's going on and have no recollection of the incident afterward.

Yep, "sleep driving" is now a frequent occurrence. UNCONSCIOUS PEOPLE are padding out to their Ford Foci and snoozing their way onto the nation's roadways. The problem has become acute enough to cause the FDA — which, as a Bush agency, is normally inclined to allow pharmaceutical companies to boil children alive if they so desire — to step in.

Now this class of drugs will require special labels, lengthy supplementary instructions and possibly concerned facial expressions from Walgreen's dispensary employees. All of which will satisfy the 10-second news cycle but begs the question: What difference do these warnings make if, after reading them cover to cover, you pop an Ambien, slip under the ol' duvet and an hour later are barreling through the Holland Tunnel, stomping the accelerator with your footie pajamas?

To be fair, many of the worst instances resulted from folks mixing the current generation of sleep-inducers with booze, antidepressants and other mood-altering wild cards. But plenty of ordinary, directions-following patients also ended up driving, cooking, terrorizing planeloads of passengers and doing other wacky things while in the throes of a dreamless, pharmacological oblivion.

Upon reading about this, we Jews at first experienced the same mix of incredulity and opportunity that no doubt caused frissons in the ranks of the nation's comedy writers. But a clammy, dystopian light bulb of rationality quickly took its place.

The ephiphany was something along the lines of: Well, this explains everything.

It explains the narcotic political culture in which we plod on down an infinite corridor of corruption, aware we should be outraged but somehow unable to scream.

It explains the snooze-button salon of celebrity worship, wherein the world's dumbest pretty people sit on our chests like well-scrubbed succubi, commandeering our psyches with the rapacity of prospectors in the Gold Rush.

It explains the nightmarish papering over of every last vestige of space with advertising, the sponsorship of all things, the branding of every square foot until there is nothing that doesn't serve the message of some corporate giant.

It explains the syringes in the ocean, the chromium-6 in the water, the melting of the ice caps on which the polar bears are scrambling to escape the onrushing waves, the general cheerful flushing-down-the-loo of the world that sustains us, all permitted with the drowsy insouciance of a Lunesta road trip.

Welcome, in other words, to Sleep Culture. We've all just been dozing — yet still active enough to participate in our own impoverishment. Just ambulatory enough to drive to the polling place to vote for the vague smiling face that swore to protect us.

We are the Manchurian Citizen.

And you know who'd really appreciate it if we woke the fuck up? The polar bears.

The problem, of course, is that coming to terms with this waking horror really, really makes you want to down a couple of sedatives with a tankard of vodka.

So if you see us zooming over the 405 tonight, don't bother waving — it's our naptime.

We Need to Talk.

Nîmen hâo, Beijing!

Howdy, Plano, Texas! Bienvenidos, Coro, Venezuela! Hej, Speke, Sweden! Shalom and Greetings, Tel Aviv, London and Indianapolis!

OK, yes, we’ve been digging on the VHJ blog statistics, and kvelling just a smidge because folks from all over the planet (Aloha, Honolulu!) are peeping our humble Semitic scribblings.

You know how it is: You work on something and you put it out there, and you’re happy if a few of your friends get a chuckle out of it. But when people all over the world (Namaskar, New Delhi!) check it out, well, sue us if we’re excited about it.

Khush amadeed, Tehran.

Tehran? Really?

We don’t know if there are Iranian Jews out there reading up on their American mishpuchah, or non-Jews seeking a perspective outside the locally available offerings. Perhaps a few were drawn to the title but expected something a tad more, shall we say, explicit.

(It should be noted here that while Simon was instantly tickled to hear that Iranians were reading this, Sera experienced a momentary shock of fear. What if someone high up in some funadmentalist group is reading this and basing their opinions of all Jews on our oversexed, nasty-minded, sailor-mouthed, inebriated, über-über-liberal, evil-TV-writing Jew asses? We're totally going to be responsible for some kind of attack! It should further be noted that is also Sera's first thought when she sees that we have readers in Mississippi. First comes the vision of a guy in a pointy white sheet sharpening a pig-sticker by the glow of the Very Hot Jews homepage ... then comes the realization that it's statistically likelier that (a) whoever is reading our blog, anywhere in the world, is awesome, because our readers by and large are unusually awesome, and also (b) the people who actually do hate Jews and want to attack us probably don't need a joke-tastic blog for motivation. But it should also be noted that the infantile, superstitious view of Hollywood Jews as sacreligious libertines who dine on the blood of fair-haired children is not so very far from the vulgar, dumbfuck stereotypes we've casually absorbed about people in other parts of the world. So, to reiterate: If you're reading this, wherever you are, whatever you are, you're awesome. And we thank you.)

But here’s our official statement – especially for the DOJ watchdogs monitoring the Internets for seditious signals, whose little ears perked up at the mention of Iran: The Very Hot Jews are all about peace, love and understanding. Put another way, we think dressing humans up in uniforms and giving them bombs to throw at other humans is so fucking stupid it makes Britney Spears look like Stephen Hawking. It makes Zalman King look like Martin Scorsese. It makes the hosts of Entertainment Tonight look like Roland Barthes. Bombs are for rap songs.

When we hear anyone (let alone our fellow Jews, who really should know better) talking blithely about dropping bombs on people, we’re fully horrified. In fact, we suppress the urge to do a double-take, like, are you serious? Did you just say we should drop a giant explosive device on a location where people are? Did you just justify that dumb-ass idea by saying some other genius in the past did it, so that justifies it? What the fuck is wrong with you?

Bombs don’t just magically fall on the heads of bad guys – they kill kids in front of their parents, parents in front of their kids, scores of shopkeepers and bicyclists and people in cafes and doctors and their patients. Forgive us if we're preaching to the choir here. Yes, it seems like a no-brainer, but nary a week goes by where we don't hear some geopolitical wizard in a Starbucks line waxing rhapsodic about his or her revolutionary idea that we can stop war by killing people. It is the primary reason that we eschew cable news. Well, that and the fact that the commentators actually get spittle on the camera lens. But even the sound bites that make it onto the Daily Show are enough to make us want to tear off our own skin in exasperation and despair.

Everybody seems to have a plan for the Middle East that involves more explosions – it’s the one thing most of the participants seem to agree on. Call us old-fashioned, dewy-eyed idealists, but we tend to think that if we communicated with each other, the worldwide tension level might dissipate slightly. (Ahlan, Amman and Riyadh!)

OK, straight up? Now that we've clarified the necessity of everybody sitting down and, like, opening up to each other over some baba ghanouj and Diet Fanta, we should put our cards on the table and admit that we’re a little nervous. Because we’re about dialogue, but the stakes seem incredibly high.

We thought this might be a good time to stop just marveling at human stupidity and give some clear and concise pointers to the powers that be. We realized there was much that we did not know about Iran and its honchos, so we hit up Wikipedia, that fountain of truth. We expected to find little to nothing in common with various and sundry highest-ups over there who have been known to deny certain events that occured in our families' recent history. But boy, were we surprised. Turns out we have so much in common we'd probably be insta-matched by the love computer at eHarmony.com!

You know how you meet somebody and you totally hit it off right away? You admire their blazer, and they compliment your shoes. And they say, I'm totally obsessed with my blog, and you reply, no way — I'm obsessed with my blog! And they’re like, my birthday’s October 28, and you’re like, omigod, that’s my sister’s birthday! And they go, I have a Ph.D in transportation and engineering, and you go, no way, I’m from L.A. and we need that! And they say, I was mayor of Tehran, and you say, what a coincidence, my mom once knew the mayor of L.A.! And then they go, the Holocaust never happened, and you’re like, um … what?

Yes, we’re looking at you, President Ahmadinejad. Seriously. You gotta cancel that shit, along with that tired line of garbage about wiping Israel off the map. We know you don’t really mean it, because you also talked about how much respect you have for Jews. The fact is, we know what it’s like when a President says something incredibly offensive and stupid and hurtful while playing to his base.

But our President has an excuse: He’s a blithering fucktard. What’s yours?

Remember when you told the BBC that you had nothing but respect for Jews? Well, we choose to believe this is the real you. You can't blame a lot of our friends for being skeptical, given all that Holocaust denial and wiping-you-know-who-off-the-map nonsense. But maybe you were just going through a difficult phase. Under a lot of pressure, sleep-deprived, maybe hitting the Xanax a little hard? You're listening to the wrong people. You've read your history; you know the way to be a player over the long term is to broker agreements, not drop antisemitic bullshit.

Prove us right, bubby, so we can get back to that enchanting conversation about your blazer and our shoes and the engineering of urban traffic.

We saw a news story today that says talks between the U.S., Iran and Syria are finally going forward. Great news! Remember to speak slowly and clearly, so our guys can understand.

(The news is so awesome, it even makes up for the other major news story of the day, that contract talks have completely broken down between Grey's Anatomy and angelically breasticled shiksa goddess Katherine Heigl. Grey's. Come on. I know you fear that if you give Katie a raise you'll have to give every homophobe and homo in the cast a raise, but she's the eye-candiest little weeper in a cast full of nails-on-chalkboard whiny-ass bitches. You should be slipping her and Sara Ramirez some extra cash just for assiduously avoiding the highly infectious TV disease of skeletal lollipop-headedness. Pay the bitch, would you? Also, we don't want to hear it about budget, since you are clearly shooting on the set of a daytime hospital drama circa 1983 and it shows. You're making House look like a science-fiction movie.)

And President Ahmadinejad, don't pretend like you don't watch Grey's. We know what you're going to say: It's totally manipulative, and a lot of the characters are poorly developed, and Katherine Heigl's ravishing ta-tas are, like, the only reason to tune in. But we also know you're hooked. We just know it, and so does the love computer. And don't try to front like you don't have time to watch it because, like, you're entering into serious, complex negotiations with the world's only remaining superpower.

We can read you like a book: You're gonna TiVo that shit.

Chicks With Balls: Why the Grammys Mattered This Year.

Your friendly Jews tend not to comment on the day’s events, following the frenzied calendars of publicists and TV producers. Do you expect a special Valentine’s Day entry, bubbling with cinnamon-scented love tips and bittersweet reminiscences of our fumbling, horny youth? You’ll be sorely disappointed, my friend. We barely even remember when the high holidays fall (thank goodness for that free calendar from the delicatessen, with its towering, food-porn photo of a pastrami sandwich).

And of all the greeting-card hypefests and pop-cultural ephemera about which we’re disinclined to blog, awards shows probably elicit the most resounding cry of “feh.” Or is it “meh”? They’re both good. But handicapping Oscar races and the sartorial digressions of cousin Selma are not our bag.

Well, that’s a lie – they are. We consume record-breaking quantities of sparkling wine, laugh openly at Teleprompter gaffes and rend our garments in lamentation when an overly self-serious, middlebrow epic wins Best Picture (as it usually does). We just don’t do these things in a public forum, because it’s unseemly. And because we’re too drunk to type.

So why are your smokin’ hot Semite pals devoting this steamin’ hot slab of online real estate to the guitar-slinging clown-off known as the Grammys? Because this year they made us think about how pop culture can actually make a difference — not by warbling sleepy ballads about suffering in the Third World, but by telling right-wing assholes to fuck off at the top of one’s lungs.

If you think we’re talking about the Dixie Chicks, you’re right. The point is this: They were fully vindicated after speaking the truth in 2003 and being shat on by a coterie of cowardly, venal, mendacious power brokers from Nashville to D.C.

They were tarred as Osama-coddling America-haters by the bloviating crypto-fascists of Fox News, shunned by the craven bootlickers in the country establishment (down whose collective throat Karl Rove’s titanium phallus was irrevocably jammed), quashed by the evangelical Resmuglicans who own the media conglomerate Clear Channel (ditto re: Rovecock) and — most painfully — pelted with illiterate death threats from mouth-breathing jingoists belonging (ever so loosely) to the “general public.”

It was an ordeal no one should have to endure, let alone three smart, lovely babes who sing, write and play like angels.

Now, of course, the Christian Louboutin is very much on the other foot.

About 70% of the public now shares the Bush-related shame that Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines so bravely voiced in 2003. Everybody wants this abomination of a war to be over. And the Chicks’ Grammy windfall – following a performance of the defiant smash hit “Not Ready to Make Nice” that gave us Jewy goose bumps – was a fiery rebuke to the cabal of creeps who once had this nation by the throat and who are now, we prefer to believe, scuttling back to their caves and bunkers in fear.

It wasn’t just Maines’ full-throated plaint about the despair of getting heartland hate letters but the look on her face when she sang “It turned my whole world around/And I kinda like it.” Hot.

Considering that most of the aforementioned Chicks-bashing ghouls are also casually anti-Semitic fuckwits, this is indisputably great news for the chosen peeps. But the VHJ are about humanity, baby. And this year’s Grammys offered several examples of humanity’s nascent comeback against religio-political tyrants.

Does that sound extreme, overreaching, pompous? Good; we’re not the freakin’ New Yorker. But as the Chicks say (and as we tunelessly wail along, with our earbuds jammed tight), we’re not ready to back down.

Pop culture — our pop culture — is routinely derided as a cesspool of iniquity, a pagan temple erected to the fleeting gods of fame and beauty. And much of this is deserved. But our songs and movies and stories and blogs can also, from time to time, shove a righteous thunderbolt up the oppressor’s ass.

To be sure, the Chicks are one such pop-cultural missile, but the political might and timeliness of their message shouldn’t entirely eclipse another powerful female presence. Shakira’s Grammy-night performance of “Hips Don’t Lie” (featuring a superfluous Wyclef) was volcanic, and these Jews could feel it reverberating around the world.

The song doesn’t really “say” much — it’s a sexy come-on — but that’s often when pop culture is truly powerful. The impact of Shakira’s performance was, in fact, all in the hips. Her joyous gyrations took place against a backdrop of Eastern tropes (she’s of Colombian-Lebanese descent, and her name means "graceful" in Arabic); each undulation of that mesmerizing torso seemed to strike at ayatollahs and Elmer Gantrys around the world.

Sex-positive, life-affirming, joyously, loudly female, Shakira’s performance was not a lecture but a burst of sunlight streaming into every moldy, woman-hating sanctum. Hips don’t lie, and that’s why hypocrites hate them.

So these Jews, so often mortified by the worst of pop culture, today celebrate the best. Because sometimes the best way to strike back at the legions of soul-dead power mongers who tell women to shut up, pray up and cover up is with a big chorus and a slammin’ beat.