During a long-winded, dreary, and boring acceptance speech for a meaningless award of some sort or another, actress Merryl Streep, best known for movies that will make you want to open a vein so you can see color again, quipped that if you got rid of all the ‘creative’ people in Hollywood, all that would be left would be NFL football and mixed martial arts fighting to entertain us.

I won’t comment on Streep’s career, even though the only movie she appeared in which I enjoyed was “Death Becomes Her,” which is older than any of my children and to be honest, I watched for Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis.  I will say that for someone who has made a pretty good living out of mouthing words written by someone else in the manner another person told her to do it, after an army of make-up, lighting, costume, editors, special effects, CGI specialists, and dark mages have poured their souls into making her look human, she’s got a lot of nerve to look down upon us unwashed masses and tell us we’re lucky we have her and people like her.

Now, let’s for the moment assume that we all wake up one morning and rejoice to find that the oasis of distraction that is Hollywood, along with everyone who works in it, has mysteriously disappeared in the night.  After the fireworks and parades, along with long bouts of celebratory drinking, have subsided, whatever shall we do with ourselves?

I mean, it’s not like there aren’t centers of music, art, culture, and just plain fun scattered across this great land.  Whether your tastes go towards Shakespeare, Shelly, Shecky, Shakur, or Shania, there’s something for everyone. You just have to turn your face away from the trainwreck that is California and look around you to find entertainment in your own back yard, or at least closer than Los Angeles.

“But, DaddyBear,” you object, “where would we get our films, movies, and video games?”

Why, gentle reader, fear not. There’s nothing a market likes as much as a vacuum to fill, and many entertainment companies, long oppressed by the torrents of titilation tumbling from the towers of Tinseltown, will rise up to continue the stream of remakes, reboots, rehashes, and re-do’s that Hollywood has been flooding our cinemas and televisions with for years.  Super hero, car chase, sparkly vampire, and suburban housewife escapist movies will be made, television from my childhood will still be raped reimagined, and we shall all go on taking our digital soma with or without the perfumed princes of Pacific Palisades.

Ms. Streep, it’s not we who are lucky to have you and your ilk. Rather, it’s you who are fortunate that so many people have been willing to subsidize your forty-plus year game of ‘let’s pretend.’  When you are gone, some of us, not me, but some, will feel bad for your passing, then will shrug and get back to work.

In the meantime, as a lifelong consumer of film, TV, and digital content, all I can say is this:  SKOL VIKINGS!