PARIS Hilton, the socialite fortune heiress come actress, model and internet sex tape star, will have an unglamorous new address: she was sentenced to 45 days jail today for breaching her driving conviction probation.That the editor of Sydney's most-read tabloid misused 'come' in place of 'cum' (it's a Latin preposition, y'all) in this lead paragraph only affirms the willful stupid-ization of mass market media and vapid, sloppy minds at work within the Murdoch Clown Show.
But it still pisses the sh*t out of me.
Yes, America's toxic cloud of soul-less celebrity worship has crossed the Pacific and afflicted the fine denizens of Australia. Every morning & every evening I squeeze beside fellow train riders engrossed in 'Cam's Booze-Fueled Night on the Town!' and 'Ange's Cry for Help!', or some variant thereof. That every stupified reader is a woman is very worrying.
Bashing celebrity culture isn't courageous, of course. What I find interesting is how no one ever cops to their addiction to celebrity mags and the latest 'goss'. Has it become a passive absorption, like knowing the words to a Dr. Pepper jingle decades after it stopped being aired? ("He's a Pepper, she's a Pepper ...") Is it an inevitable residue of urban living? Or, as tin-hat wearers proclaim, an oft-used weapon from the Big Corporate/Big Government arsenal that keeps generations of otherwise brilliant minds slack-jawed and ignorant?
No. It's a plague. More precisely, an anti-plague. A great big cultural void, a vacuum of innocuousness, a canyon of craven idiocy. Lack of intellectual curiousity, fixation on the inane, rewarding of fame over accomplishment, pop culture preference of selfishness to selflessness ... all these contribute to a world where a mental midget like George W. Bush may be elected leader of the free world not once, but twice. And a skank heiress to a hotel fortune can travel to Sydney during Christmas week and get prime-time news coverage on all three commercial TV networks. Every. Single. Night.
Somewhere down a dark, lonely White House corrider, a tiny voice may be heard chuckling to itself, "He he he he he ..."
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