By Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, April
15, 2015
Gwynnie P is down with the struggle, comrades.
She may make $19 million a year, own mansions in London,
New York, Brentwood, Malibu, and the Hamptons, charge $550 for her Goop.com
“travel backgammon set,” and fly by private jet, but she feels your pain.
OK, it’s not as painful as her last $5,200 Thermage
session in Santa Monica, but still, she really, really does feel the agony of
the ordinary.
Last week, the progressive princess celebrity joined the
“SNAP challenge.” It’s basically the ice-bucket challenge for bored Hollywood
liberals and media-hungry Democratic politicians. For seven days (or at least
for an hour or two after they publish their announcements to Twitter and
Facebook), the bleeding hearts play “poor” by subsisting on a faux welfare
budget.
Paltrow was invited to join the poverty voyeurism racket
by her good friend Chef Mario Batali — last seen eating his way through Spain
with G-Pally for a 13-part PBS TV series. What, you don’t have a chef bestie to
motor around with in a Mercedes across Galicia and Cordoba as you savor
almejas, salmorejo, and flamenquines?
When these self-indulgent stars are not binging on
European delicacies, they’re purging themselves of liberal guilt with phony
gimmicks like the SNAP sanctimony. The idea, Batali explains, is to “walk in
the shoes of” millions who rely on government assistance to supplement their
household budgets.
Fortunately for Paltrow, this doesn’t mean she has to
give up her $1,200 pair of Tom Ford black platform heels or anything else in
her well-appointed shoe closet. All she had to do was snap a Vogue-ready photo
of her $29 haul of austerity grocery items (likely purchased by one of her many
private kitchen assistants at an organic food market in West L.A.).
Pobrecita. Everyone on the planet except for rail-thin
Paltrow seems to have understood the hilarity of Hollywood’s most famous detox
dieter — whose calorie intake rivals an earthworm’s — pretending to have the
sads over her SNAP menu: seven limes, a tomato, one head of garlic, a bunch of
scallions, bags of brown rice, black beans and peas, a package of corn
tortillas, one avocado, a yam, an ear of corn, a dozen eggs, and bunches of
kale, lettuce, and cilantro.
Pepper Potts’s public relations stunt inspired global
derision from the hoi polloi of all political persuasions. Lefties excoriated
the privileged starlet for making a mockery of genuine anti-hunger efforts.
Righties debunked her dubious statistics low-balling SNAP benefits for a family
of four. And moms and dads across America helpfully offered cost-cutting
grocery lists of their own.
“A 20-pound bag of rice, a few bags of various kinds of
dried beans, supplemented with some chicken breast ($1.99/pound on sale at my
local supermarket), and she’s all set,” one savvy shopper wrote.
“I don’t see how it’s such a big hardship,” another
added. “$29 per person per week is 10 lbs of leg quarters ($7 at 70 cents per
pound), 10 lbs of cabbage ($5 at 50 cents per pound), 10 lbs of bananas ($5 at
50 cents a pound), 1 loaf of bread for $1, 1 jar of peanut butter for $2, 1 jar
of grape jelly for $2, one 5 lb bag of rice for $3, and $4 for various spices
to prepare the food. Cookbooks can be borrowed for free from the library or
bought for a couple of bucks at thrift stores.”
But let me be clear (to borrow a well-worn phrase from
Paltrow’s favorite man crush, President Obama): Paltrow doesn’t deserve
contempt because she’s clueless and wealthy. She deserves contempt because of
her own deep-seated condescension and loathing of the lessers she purports to
champion.
“I’d rather smoke crack than eat cheese from a tin,” she
infamously sneered. Presumably, she feels the same way about my childhood
favorites: Cheez Whiz in a jar and Ritz Crackers ’n Cheese Dip in those little
portable containers with the red plastic spreader.
“I’d rather die than let my kid eat Cup-a-Soup,” she told
Conan O’Brien. Yes, she’s judging you and me and every other normal person who
has ever purchased ramen by the pound to save money.
When she’s not flitting around the most affluent
neighborhoods of America, she’s overseas trashing her countrymen. Remember
this: “I love the English way, which is not as capitalistic as it is in
America. People don’t talk about work and money; they talk about interesting
things at dinner parties,” she told the foreign press. And: “I don’t tap into
the bad side of American psychology, which is ‘I’m not achieving enough, I’m
not making enough, I’m not at the top of the pile.’”
Paltrow openly despises capitalism and those who
unabashedly pursue it. Striving for upward economic mobility is gauche in the
eyes of the left-wing 1 percent. It’s so much more fashionable to show
manufactured sympathy for the downtrodden than to encourage them to lift
themselves up.
Only in the land of make-believe is it nobler to simulate
being dependent and poor than to aspire to be successful and wealthy.
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