Thursday, July 9, 2015

We Need to Plan Boycott of ESPY Award Advertisers

I don't know anything about how to go about getting people to participate in a boycott of advertisers.  However, I think it would be a great idea to boycott ESPY advertisers considering the extreme disrespect Disney / ESPN has shown to real heroes by using the Arthur Ashe courage award for a publicity stunt.

As I suggested in a previous post I started suspecting that Disney arranged for the actor formerly known as Bruce Jenner to get the award after  I discovered that Disney had premiered its own reality show about a man becoming a woman called "Becoming Us" at the same time as the Vanity Fair article about Jenner becoming a female impersonator and the courage award announcement.  

[News stories have misrepresented Jenner's plans.   Jenner doesn't want to have sex with men so he isn't homosexual.  He doesn't want a sex change operation so he isn't a transsexual.  He simply wants to pretend to be a woman.   An entertainer who appears as a female is called a female impersonator. A non-entertainer who does that is called a transvestite.]

There is an old saying in the field of counter terrorism that can apply to other areas of human behavior.    "Once is an accident.  Twice is a coincidence.  Three times is enemy action,"

It is unlikely that those three events occurred at the same time by coincidence.  The fact that Disney was in direct control of two events and could have influenced the third indicates that Disney arranged for the Vanity Fair article and the award announcement to coincide with the series premier.  

My understanding of the way programs are scheduled is that schedules are usually set months in advance because of the time needed to write, cast and perform the program.   Disney likely told  ESPN someone at Disney would select the winner of the Arthur Ashe award so the people at ESPN  wouldn't announce giving the award to a legitimate candidate.  Disney  probably didn't tell the people at ESPN the name of Disney's selection at first to avoid the name becoming public before Disney was ready.  The claim by people at ESPN that they weren't considering anyone else for the award essentially proves my case.

I've had trouble thinking of expressions bad enough to describe the actor formerly known as Bruce Jenner and the people at Disney and ESPN.  I've forgotten a lot of the "military language" that might work, but it wouldn't do any good to remember them because the text editor would delete them.    There are some western terms that might be appropriate like "skunk" and "sidewinder" [ a type of snake that moves sideways].  I've decided to borrow an expression from Jed Clampett on the "Beverly Hillbillies"  -- Jenner and company are "lower than a snake's belly in a wagon rut."  Walter Brennan's character "The Colonel" in "Meet John Doe" used the term "heelot" meaning a "lot of heels" -  people who try to get your money.

Jenner and the heelots at ESPN / Disney seem to believe that the rich should not only have all the money, but all the honors.   Those who believe that someone as wealthy as Jenner should receive a "courage" award for taking money to live out a long time dream must have warped minds.

Giving such an award to Jenner at the present time is particularly inappropriate considering the people whose dreams were recently taken from them by an evil madman in Charleston, S.C..

Lauren Hill was a young woman who played college basketball until a fatal form of cancer cut her life short.  When she found out she wouldn't be able to realize her dreams, she dedicate her remaining days raising money so that the disease that stole her dreams wouldn't steal the dreams of any other young people.

Sgt. Noah Galloway volunteered to risk his life protecting us through military service.  An explosive device in Iraq that took his arm and leg forced him to change his dreams.

This isn't the first time Disney has stomped on someone's dream.   If I were Walt Disney, I'd try to come back from the grave and haunt the sidewinding heelots who run the company.

Many of  your daughters know a lot more about a group called the Cheetah girls than I do.   I have read about the courageous creator of the book that the group is based on. She is far more deserving of a courage award than Jenner.   Deborah Gregory was raised in foster care from the age of 3 and aged out of the system at 18 -- that is no one adopted her.    The young black woman didn't let that background hold her back.  She began designing clothes and worked as a runway model before becoming a writer.   She thought she had it made when Disney offered to buy the Cheetah girls and offered her a share of the profits.  She didn't know Disney would claim the people in charge of the project were apparently so incompetent that the project wouldn't make a profit -- or at least so Disney claimed.   Disney's claim would be enough to discourage me from investing in the company.   If Disney lied about the project's profitability that would be an even bigger reason to not buy Disney stock.

Last fall Disney stabbed many of its employees in the back by replacing them with immigrants.   "[A]bout 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost."  Disney's action demonstrates that the biggest threat to well paying jobs is legal immigrants rather than illegal ones.  

A company that would treat the creator of a major revenue source like Cheetah Girls the way Disney did and turn the jobs of its employees over to immigrants wouldn't hesitate to abuse a courage award named after a courageous black athlete as part of a publicity stunt.  I hope someone knows an organization that could organize a boycott of ESPY advertisers.

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