That Meryl Streep "Golden Globes" speech in full - with a sympathetic Grønmark Blog commentary

I love you all. (No you don't  - you really don't. It just makes you feel good to say it.) You have to forgive me, I have lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend and I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year so I have to read (Actually, you lost your mind when you agreed to appear in Mamma Mia!).

Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said, you and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments of American society right now. (What - you're all white, working-class Trump supporters?) Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press. (Okay, I've thought about it.)...

...But who are we and, you know, what is Hollywood, anyway? (It's a place where they make tons of crappy left-liberal  films, have lots of sex, do lots of drugs, get divorced all the time, and where incredibly rich people like you imagine that their celebrity gives them the right to lecture ordinary folk on what they should think and how they should live, because living in a hedonistic fantasy world, protected from everyday concerns, apparently gives you a unique insight into what's best for the American nation.) It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey (well, bully for you!), Viola was born in a sharecropper's cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls,  R.I. Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio, Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Veneto, Italy and Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. (Sorry - is there a point to this?) Where are their birth certificates? (I haven't the foggiest.)

And the beautiful (this is relevant?) Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in Lon – no, in Ireland, I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a small-town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian. (Presumably they're nicer than Americans because they have socialised medicine, fewer guns, and they're so achingly politically correct that they induce an automatic gag reflex in sensible conservatives.) And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. (Get on  with it. Ed.) So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners and if we kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts. (I must have missed the bit where Donald Trump promised to kick every non-American out of the country. If he didn't, then the last two paragraphs are entirely irrelevant - unless the arts in America are entirely dependent on suspect Muslims and Mexican illegals?)

They gave me three seconds to say this, so. (So you're going to ignore them, because you're a very rich would-be Social Justice Warrior who can't resist the opportunity to feel really good about yourself by haranguing the majority of Americans - who don't agree with you - while basking in the approbation of a roomful of left-liberals, none of whom disagree with you about anything. That must take real courage!) An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like. (Well, that's not their only job, is it? Whatever happened to entertaining, thrilling and amusing the audience? And what about actors entering the lives of people who are really quite like us? Or don't they matter, because they might not be "victims" and, worse, they might not have voted for Hillary?) And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that, breathtaking, compassionate work. (Now she's lavishly praising her fellow-actors - is there no end to this woman's insane bravery! As for "compassionate" work - where does that leave moviegoers who don't want to waste two hours of their life being lectured by a bunch of mega-millionaire airheads on how uncompassionate and uncaring they are?)

But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart, not because it was good, it was – there’s nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. (Robert De Niro in "Dirty Grandpa"? John Travolta in "I Am Wrath"?)

It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege and power and the capacity to fight back. (What - like Hillary Clinton calling white, working-class voters whom she outranked in privilege and power and the capacity to fight back a "basket of deplorables"?) It, it kind of broke my heart when I saw it and I still can’t get it out my head because it wasn’t in a movie. (No, it didn't "kind of break your heart", and I watched you deliver this speech, and it made me feel sick, and I suspect it'll take me a long time to get it out of my head.) It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. (You are so right, Mel- like that time when Barack Obama sought to dismiss the perfectly legitimate concerns of rust-belt voters with the following arrogant pronouncement: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Yeah, you dumb crackers - what a bunch of losers!)

Disrespect invites disrespect. (Indeed - as when Obama made that contemptuous "at least I'll go down as a president" anti-Trump crack on a TV show.) Violence incites violence. (So does refusing to condemn violence - as when Hillary and Obama kept their mouths shut while their supporters rioted in American cities because their candidate didn't win - or all those times when Black Lives Matter thugs, fuelled by the Democratic Party's racially divisive propaganda, staged violent riots in the wake of what usually turned out to be perfectly defensible police actions against black criminals?) When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose. (Indeed - as when the Obama administration got the IRS to target conservative groups and the Justice Department went after reporters? I'm with you on that one, Streepster.) OK, go on with that thing. OK, this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage. (We do indeed. Which is why the left-liberal American press - i.e. the vast majority of it- should hang its head in shame for having totally and utterly failed to hold Barack Obama and his administration to account for eight long years. Journalists? PR shills.) 

That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in our constitution. (So, unlike Obama, you don't think the Constitution should be subverted whenever it gets in your way - and, unlike most liberal SJWs, you don't seek to deny free speech to anyone who disagrees with you?) So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood foreign press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, ’cause we’re going to need them going forward and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth. (I bet you wouldn't have given a damn about this if your ghastly, lying, manipulative chum Hillary had got in, Streepy.)

One more thing. Once when I was standing around the set one day, whining about something (which is exactly what you're doing here, isn't it?), we were going to work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me: “Isn't it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is. And we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. (I'm sorry? How did empathy creep in there?) We should be very proud of the work Hollywood honours here tonight. (Actually, you've just dishonoured it by using an event designed to celebrate it as a platform for your tediously predictable political views.)

As my, as my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once: “Take your broken heart, make it into art.” (Oh God - it going to take hours to clear up the vomit caused by this remark. And she does know that Princess Leia was a fictional character, right?)

Thank you, Foreign Press. (And thank you, Meryl Streep, for reminding everyone who didn't vote for Hillary Clinton exactly why they didn't.)