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Culture of Celebrity Worship


Lowerdeck

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While we the American population sit here and debate

- Sarah Palin and all the stupid things she gets herself into

- Jon and Kate (from the TV show plus 8) doing whatever

- The guy from the Kung Fu movies accidentally hanging himself

- American Idol or Dancing with the Stars

- Michelle Obama trotting around in high society

...There's actual legit news that is more pressing on in the world.

And yet somehow this crap seems to get all the attention. The line between news and entertainment is so blurred, between the internet and the 24 hour cable news channels. Local TV news is slowly becoming a bad balance between legit news and Inside Edition. Newspapers are now putting celebrity gossip and reality TV results in their front sections rather than living/entertainment areas.

Is America really succumbing to celebrity worship? Is this a front for the politicians and leaders to secretly do their business and not get outrage against them? (Why are we not debating the farce of the Tobacco Safety Act, but instead have a topic on Sarah Palin's feud with David Letterman?) Are we as a society becoming dumber and dumber?

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My sediments exactly. The media hype and magazines out there dedicated to it is ridiculous. People ask me all the time things like "have you seen x is pregnant again?" or "doesn't y sing so well?" and it amazes me how they know so much about their lives, yet couldn't tell you about important events happening around us everyday. For my part, I'm completely oblivious to pop culture. Somebody asked me about some new Brad Pitt movie the other day and I couldn't even name one Brad Pitt movie, as I generally don't see movies by who is in them, but by what the movie is about. Only time I know is when its something that is typical of a particular actor, like with a historical, Mel Gibson would come to mind. I don't pay the least bit of attention to pop culture and the only celebrities I know anything about are those that are hard to avoid in the media, such as Brittany Spears or OJ Simpson. Other than that, I have my own life to worry about and its really not any of my business what they are doing.

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Indeed. There is so much that isn't covered by the American "news" organizations. Iraq for example has fallen off the radar screen even though we have spent the better part of this decade spending huge sums and expending lives to somehow clean up the mess we made by going at war with Saddam. I think Americans would be surprised to learn the big national news there yesterday is the demand from the Iraq government that the "Israel Entity" compensate Iraq for the 1980(81) bombing of their nuclear reactor by Israel.

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On the front page of yesterday (Monday's) Hartford Courant was a story about the auditions Sunday for American Idol... in Foxboro, Mass.

Hartford is at least two hours from Foxboro, therefore not local.

So why the hell is it on the front page? I could see if it was East Hartford, then it'd have some relevance. But since it was in another state and several hours away and just regarding a television show... WHY???

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Because in this world the unintelligent are the best consumer. Thus, the news, being a business, has to cater to the unintelligent to make a profit whilst leaving us, the intelligent who actually seek real news of at least mild importance, neglected.

This is one of the driving reasons behind why I actually would prefer a structured social class system -- only not so much driven by birth and wealth -- but rather by intelligence and understanding of social etiquette.

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The social class thing is a little extreme chief, but to each his own.

There is a movie about this as ironic as that is. its called idiocracy. its an entertaining and stupid movie, so it in some way is even part of the problem wile poking fun at the way out society is headed.

on an important note, as much as this is an American problem, the rest of the world seems happy to follow us along this path. The English are long time tabloid junkies, and the rest of Europe are chasing their football players around with cameras.

While I lived in New Zealand, all anyone knew about America was our pop culture icons sprinkled with a few political tid bits(this was during Bush's 2nd term)

We as a nation have only one really large and successful export.

Culture!

sadly culture is no longer about theatrical plays, culture is really just Pop Culture and our music, our movies, our useless celebrities are consumed the world over.

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