Why is it that so many people who are technically in the entertainment industry forget what their job is? We take it for granted that entertainment is supposed to be entertaining, and that the various people who are paid to entertain us are going to be committed to the task. This is not something that can properly be taken for granted for one reason or another. All too often people who are paid to entertain us harbor secret ambitions to influence our lives for what they consider to be desirable social change, and instead of entertaining us, desire to lecture us and scold us and do everything except for entertain us because they view it as demeaning and degrading to pander to what we consider to be enjoyment, even though their sole legitimate behavior is in fact entertaining us, because that is what we pay them to do, and what gives them the lifestyle that they use to claim to be our moral superiors.

Over and over again, we see in contemporary society a failure on the part of people who should be entertaining us to do it. This failure can be chronicled in many ways. We see it in the way that certain companies like Disney who once made it their job to entertain the masses of humanity by giving suitably edited versions of tales in the public domain are now willing to lose the goodwill of large numbers of people, to say nothing of many billions of dollars of profits, all to preserve some sort of corrupt messaging efforts in their creative works as they damage the priceless legacies that took generations to build up. We see it in sports leagues committing to political lecturing and messaging rather than the goal of entertainment, or in musical acts openly telling people who have the “wrong” political positions that their support is not wanted or appreciated.

How does this happen? How do entertainers forget their role so readily in contemporary society? Who is it that tells these entertainers that they are something more than people who play for us, who amuse us, who distract us from the problems of our existence, and that they actually have something important to tell others when they in fact do not. Some of these people are knowledgeable enough to have seen Sullivan’s Travels, a classic movie set in the Great Depression where a filmmaker is frustrated by being a mere entertainer and seeks to make important message films, only to find himself imprisoned and dependent on the entertainment he once scorned to make to relieve the unpleasant existence he finds in jail, only to be freed from imprisonment a changed man, recognizing that entertainment serves a valuable social purpose. We pay entertainers because it is worthwhile to do so in order to be distracted from the problems of the real world–problems that include the politicization of everything, problems that entertainers fail to distract us from when they engage in the same sort of political messaging that has poisoned so much of our contemporary existence.

It is always an ominous sign when people leave their worthwhile tasks in order to engage in the quest for political power and influence. In our time, we would do well to remember the parable of the bramble in Judges 9, and the reminder that if one is performing a vital need in gladdening the hearts of people and in providing useful and beneficial labor, that one can only do harm to oneself and to the world as a whole by giving up this productive power to seek after the threadbare and worthless robes of political office. There is nothing worthwhile that a politician provides us that cannot be done better by someone else who gets less corrupt gain out of it in a better world than we currently live in. To have actors or athletes or musicians or businesspeople give up their productive labors to seek political office is a sign of failure within our society, failure to do anything useful without the need for power to see that things get done by the coercive operation of the state. We ought to prefer anything above that.