This is why Colbert nudged Penn on TV and said, “Have the Secret Service contacted you?… Because that’s the sort of thing you can’t make jokes about.” (Earth to Colbert: Your company published this garbage.) Penn said he wrote the novel as “kind of a venting.” It’s “venting,” like his fellow actor Jim Carrey getting jollies on March 27 by tweeting a drawing of President Trump’s two oldest sons being impaled on an elephant’s tusks.
Some “venting” is encouraged. Some “venting” gets you fired. It depends on who is president. These are the same liberals who wanted heads to roll when an unknown Republican congressional aide made a few rude remarks on her personal Facebook page that President Obama’s daughters dressed like girls at a bar for the Thanksgiving turkey-pardoning. She had to resign.
Meanwhile, Penn is getting paid by Simon & Schuster for writing “literature” that sounds like a bad high-school project. The novel’s hero is “evading the viscount vogue of Viagratic assaults on virtual vaginas, or worse, falling passively into prosaic pastimes.” Even The Huffington Post, in quoting this, warned “Sean Penn the Novelist Must Be Stopped.” They called it a “nausea-inducing mess.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member