There are occasional comments that someone will not support a creative work due to the personal beliefs of the writer/actor/performer. Frequently this is explained as not wanting him/her to benefit. If you are in that category with a performer, would you see the movie (read the book, etc.) after the person is dead?
If you didn’t want to support Michael Jackson, you can safely buy his CDs knowing the pedophile* will not profit.
Hmmmm. Interesting. I won’t read Orson Scott Card’s novels because of his anti-gay views, but I don’t know that my refusal is (at least not entirely) predicated on keeping him from making any money from me. So no, I don’t think his death will change things.
Yeah, I feel the same way about Card. My problem isn’t so much his bigotry, per se, but rather that his arguments against gay rights are so incredibly facile, trite, and obviously flawed that I’ve lost all respect for the man’s intellect. If I just thought he was a bad person, I wouldn’t mind reading his stuff. But after reading his anti-gay screeds, I can’t shake the feeling that the guy’s simply an idiot, and why should I waste my time reading books written by an idiot?
Not patronizing some writer/actor’s works because you don’t want him to benefit is silly. Your personal $10 or $100 will not make a dent in what he gets.
I never research the authors I read for their political views, but I see references to them here and there and don’t really care. For example I know Stephen King is a flaming left-winger. Still like his writing (well, not the latest, but you know what I mean). Or (not to compare the two) Kurt Vonnegut - as left as they come, but still the best writer in English of 20th century, IMO. Why would I stop reading his books, whether when he was alive or after he died?
Excuse me? King lived a life of utter poverty rather than going on welfare. He and his brother were brought up by a single mother who had the traditional New England family values of “taking care of your own.” She ended up living “a sharecrapper’s existance” by taking care of her aging parents and looking to her relatives for food and clothes.
I’d suggest reading King’s memoir “On Writing” before making such a statement.
Not sure why all that would preclude him from being a left-winger…
This.
And, obviously, the money issue underscores it – why would anyone pay good money to read the scribblings of a nitwit when there is an unlimited supply of nitwit scribblings available free of charge on the Internet?
I didn’t avoid 2 & 1/2 Men while Sheen was being a raving idiot*.
I stopped watching after the first return episode because Kutcher’s not that great and Cryer’s character hasn’t evolved (even though he’s no longer overshadowed…).
I didn’t stop listening to Michael Jackson’s stuff when he started getting weird; I failed to start listening after he got out of jail and just didn’t make much worth listening to (IMHO).
I’d still go see a Mel Gibson flick, if the topic/story interested me. His rants and anti-semitism are obnoxious but I’m not attending to see him, I’m attending to see his character do whatever that character is going to do, in the script. Ditto for Tom Cruise. I still like my old Schwarzernegger movies; it looks like Hollywood isn’t too interested in helping him make another one, though.
On the other hand, I won’t buy fuel from Exxon or Shell due to their heinous actions around the globe. Their astoundingly high prices at the pump make that decision a lot easier to maintain.
*He’s still an idiot, he’s just not raving (or at least not over mass media) so much any more.
Exactly.
Stephen King launches leftwing radio show
Author Stephen King: My next horror novel may star Florida Gov. Rick Scott
Nor was he. He just wanted the childhood he never had, and was trying to relive it thru others. Creepy- yes. Sad- yes. A pedophile- no.
And of course, being dead doesn’t mean your beliefs dont live on and benefit. For example, let us say you eschew John Travolta films due to his Sceintology. But there’s little doubt his estate would keep collecting and keep donating.
Ted Nugent is the person I think of when it comes to this sort of thing. I really, really like his first solo (eponymous) album, the one with “Stranglehold,” and I even like his 2nd and 3rd albums (Free For All and Cat Scratch Fever), but they’re progressively worse than the first. My reasons for posting this of course are because my politics are 180 degrees from his.
So the question is, would I buy his first album after he dies (I did buy it on CD, and that might me sort of a hypocrite, but damn, it’s such a good album that I held my nose and bought it anyway)? Probably, but even though I put money in his pocket for that one CD, I’ve not bought anything else of his.
Besides, my boycotting celebrities or companies doesn’t do much. I’ve shopped at Walmart maybe 8-10 times in my life, and they grew without me.
I’d have to make sure that not only was the writer/performer/producer/whatever deceased, but that buying or experiencing his/her works would not benefit any supportive descendants, companies that promoted or in any way profited from their association with the artist, as well as enabling fans or any persons whatsoever who might gain in any conceivable fashion from my exposure to these works.
You gotta be strong.
Wow, Jackmannii, you don’t buy much, do you? 
Thanks for the responses. I’m too selfish. My only criteria is if I have a reasonable expectation of liking the work. The creator of it can pretty much do anything on his on time. If the weird influences the work, then the expectation isn’t there.
HP Lovecraft is an example of this for me. He was quite the racist, I’d have been very reluctant to do anything that would send him money. Except he’s long dead so the issue of money going to a racist never came up.
I don’t have any problem appreciating the performance of an entertainer I don’t agree with politically, whatsoever. I’m a conservative. I don’t care for Harry Belafonte hanging out with Hugo Chavez, but I like the Banana Boat Song. Who doesn’t? Alec Baldwin is a big lefty- that’s probably why it’s so funny to watch him play total opposite Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock. Al Franken’s political views disgust me, but he wrote some darn good funny material for SNL. If I cut out everybody I disagreed with, I’d be left with nothing to watch or listen to.
OK, back to Card. Yes, Card’s anti-gay arguments don’t make any sense, as you say. But he’s not trying to convince YOU. He’s trying to convince himself. He sees the hedonists in San Francisco flaunting the life he decided he shouldn’t have, and he gets mad at them. He gave up everything for the sake of his church and his family, why don’t they? And the older he gets, the more bitter he gets.
Of course it’s not the case that if you scratch a homophobe you’ll invariably bump into a closet case. There are plenty of straight homophobes that simply hate gays like, say, Fred Phelps who seems motivated by sadism. But Card has left enough of a paper trail that it’s not hard to connect the dots, to mangle a metaphor.
Back to the topic at hand. If you refuse to support entertainers just because they’re run of the mill assholes, you’re going to find yourself picking from a very very very very short list. That’s because everybody’s an asshole of one kind or another. I assure you, if you got to know me, you’d find out something about me that you found odious, probably several things. So garden variety douchbaggery seems like a pretty flimsy reason to boycott someone. It’s gotta go a lot farther than that, unless you plan to boycott everything.
Because I guarantee you that the garbageman who collected your trash and the guy who made your Big Mac and the cashier at Target who rang you up were worse human beings than, say, Orson Scott Card. You just don’t know what douchebags they are, because you haven’t sat down with them and explored their pitifully narrow worlds. So why would you boycott Alec Baldwin for being a douche, when everyone around you is a douche, you just don’t know it?
Yes. This always bothers me when people get all self-righteous about not watching some actor because he’s a git: do you vet every human being you interact with on a professional level? How thoroughly? Like, do you quiz your accountant on his views about healthcare, racism, the Middle East and food labelling, and then fire him if they don’t match yours? What about your postman?
Or is it just artists whose work should be rejected, no matter how good it is, unless they’re perfect as human beings?
I think Russell Crowe is probably a jerk, from what I’ve heard. He’s also a phenomenal actor. This means that I don’t have any desire to go for a few pints with him, but it doesn’t stop me from wanting to watch him act.
It’s different if the *work *is racist, or homophobic, or anything else that I consider badly wrong. I haven’t read Orson Scott Card, but since he’s coming up a lot in this thread: if his work is homophobic, then I wouldn’t particularly want to read it. But if that doesn’t seep into his work, why does it matter - any more than it matters what my postman believes in his private life, as long as he doesn’t rant about it on my doorstep?