The wonderful thing about pop culture is that it alienates a majority of people from reality, persuading them that the criminal class consists of middle class white males, and that brain surgeons and nuclear physicists and judges are, typically, people played by Will Smith and Samuel L. Jackson.
by Thomas http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=525
The past two days, I was completely caught off guard by the front-page reporting on the death of someone I honestly had never heard of: Heath Ledger.
As I have learned from ABC News and The New York Times, Mr. Ledger was an Australian born actor who made a series of films I had never heard of, except for Ang Lee’s tribute to cowboy love, Brokeback Mountain. He was not, it turns out, homosexual, which makes him even more disgusting than most actors, and on the set he contracted a liaison with an actress by whom he had an illegitimate child. According to the police, his apartment was filled with tranquilizers for which he had prescriptions, and, according to rumors, he abused illegal drugs and had been treated for http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2221 addiction.
At its gushing worst, the Times compared Mr. Ledger with James Dean and mourned the premature loss of a great talent. Admirers have been dropping off tributes outside his apartment building, and a grieving nation is seeking comfort for this tragic death.It is not news that Americans since the 1920’s have gone gaga over film stars, pop singers, and athletes, but I do not recall the deaths even of James Dean or http://wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2618, genuine pop idols that they were, creating so great a stir. In watching Charlie Gibson recite his ungrammatical and mispronounced platitudes on the nation’s loss, I thought of George Orwell, both of how right he was and how wrong he was: right in sensing that the totalitarian states of the future would manipulate their citizens through propaganda but wrong in overemphasizing the role of political propaganda.
Nothing so clearly indicates the servility of most Americans as these manifestations of concern for celebrity life-styles. Leftists apparently know what they are doing since more and more of the reporting on NPR is taken up with pop-cultural inanities. This morning, they wasted a good 10 minutes on an LA group of Beatles imitators, “the Fab Faux,” who are performing the later material that the Beatles never actually put on in public.
The least depressing conclusion I draw from all the coverage of Britney, Lindsay, OJ, and now Heath is that elections mean nothing. People who care who the next American Idol will be or who will win Dancing with the Stars could not be trusted to elect the board members of the Parks Department, much less the temporary dictator of an empire of 300 million people. One small detail. We Americans laugh at the people of India and Pakistan who choose party leaders on the strength of their last names, and then a significant number of us run out to vote for George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton. http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2795 may be as crooked as Hillary Clinton, but she spoke far better English and was a fine-looking woman, which makes her superior to every female I know in American politics. And, while on this low topic, what man would not follow a pretty air hostess like Sonia Gandhi? Good looks, charm, and an impressive demeanor have always played a part in human affairs, but here in America even our screen idols are monkey-faced women and epicene males. To restore the republic, we should have to undertake a massive program of disenfranchisement, beginning with people who work for or receive benefits from government, moving on to unmarried women, and finishing off with anyone who has seen three films starring Heath Ledger or Brad Pitt.
Celebrity eats up reality, the TV and film cameras suck out the souls, both of the actors and of the watchers who live through the actors. George Garret’s brilliant book, Poison Pen, may be the single most important commentary on the people we have become. It is not easy to get a hold of–and uses language not suitable for women and children–but it is horrifyingly true. In any kind of republic or democracy, the electorate must consist of people in touch with everyday reality. The wonderful thing about pop culture is that it alienates a majority of people from reality, persuading them that the criminal class consists of middle class white males, and that brain surgeons and nuclear physicists and judges are, typically, people played by Will Smith and Samuel L. Jackson.
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