This Susan Boyle saga reminds me of a Nelson Algren short story in which a little boy from a bad home is at a friend's third-floor flat playing with a puppy and feels happiness for the first time in his life:
We must have been making a lot of noise, because this kid's mother walked past and said jokingly, to make us be a little quiet, "Why don't you kids just throw that dog out of the window?" I was so happy at just being there, so overwhelmed with an eagerness to please, that I picked up the pup, walked out the window and threw it out. Just like that.
I can still see that poor damned pup sprawling and turning and pawing for a foothold in mid-air on its way down to the pavement. And felt, suddenly, that I was falling too.
What is the matter with us, indeed! For me the key sentence in the NYT article was this:
“Such is the intense interest in Ms. Boyle that Prime Minister Gordon Brown, embroiled in the worst political crisis of his career, took time during a television interview Monday to wish the singer well.”
This is a truly pathetic comment on the depths to which we have sunk as a society.
I dare ANY ONE of these sad, empty people who alternate, seemingly unceasingly between gluttonously sucking back, and viciously criticizing, details of the lives of “public people” to let themselves be in the position Susan Boyle was put in for a week or so, and then come back and tell us how you enjoyed it, and how well you handled it!
There is nobody, seriously – I mean nobody -who’s life can withstand the kind of invasive, intrusive scrutiny we have permitted, hell demanded, to become the norm with anyone who obtains any sort of public persona.
This disguting stupidity happens because there are too damn many people out there who, instead of building and maintaining a full and interesting life of their own, choose to sit around gawping at the lives of “celebrities”.
The free market economy means if you idiots will watch/buy/read this garbage, someone will go out there and get it. What happened to that woman should be an embarrassment to anyone who considers themself a decent human being.
It was the same when Princess Diana died, and everyone was up in arms at the paparazzi. My question, then and now: How many of the people screeching for the heads of the paparazzi have a tabloid sitting on their coffee table right now? Everyone who raised their hand is equally responsible for the results.
Very, very sad.
Well and passionately put, Kristen. What’s to be done about it?
I vote for a system whereby, when Google detects you’ve typed in “J-Lo” more than 50 times in a year, it signals your computer to explode, filling your face and neck with glass and other shrapnel.
Kristen:
>>>>The free market economy means if you idiots will watch/buy/read this garbage, someone will go out there and get it.<<<< That problem is about to solve itself . . . here in the U.S. anyway!!! Steve C.
Kristen:
>>>>The free market economy means if you idiots will watch/buy/read this garbage, someone will go out there and get it.<<<< That problem is about to solve itself . . . here in the U.S. anyway!!! Steve C.
That is an excellent idea, David!
I also like the idea of creating an “anti-papparazzi-papparazzi” which hunts and publicly ridicules any and all persons caught (preferably on video, but still photos will do) purchasing, reading or particularly subscribing, to any tabloid or website dedicated to celebrity-gawping.
I envision (in my head of course) a system not unlike the FBI’s 20 Most Wanted list, but for “celebrity-obssessed” persons with their pictures and where they were last spotted engaging in this deviant behaviour up on walls in post offices, grocery stores and other community locations.
These posters would exhort decent citizens to shun, and point at these person whenever they are spotted out in public. To me, that sort of disapproving public attention would be complete and utter poetic justice, and would most certainly be a case of a punishment that ideally fits the crime!!
Steve: how DO you manage to turn EVERY SINGLE FREAKIN’ conversation into a diatribe on “you-know-who”?!
Seriously man! You need to find a way to get past this mania of yours – it isn’t good for your health, and how can I come back to Chicago to visit you if your health declines?!
Oh, and, also I’m concerned for you too!!
😉
Ha ha ha ha ha ha I was just kidding. Just to drive you a little crazy. Not even Obama, with his superior uber brain, can rid this country, or this world, of the scourge of reality TV or the people who watch it.
Steve C.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha I was just kidding. Just to drive you a little crazy. Not even Obama, with his superior uber brain, can rid this country, or this world, of the scourge of reality TV or the people who watch it.
Steve C.
Now I’m completely depressed, because I fear you are correct Steve.
Thanks. Thanks a lot!
It isn’t enough that I’m unemployed, but now I have the realization that these zombie-fied celebutards will probably out-last us all. After the nuclear winter it will be the cockroaches, and THEM – Yecht!!
Who are we feeling sorry for? Didn’t Susan Boyle go on this show to get her 15 minutes of meaningless fame? She got it.
JohnnyB, you’ve got a point of course.
I guess it’s the overwhelming and desperate way in which we pounce on the meaninglessly famous these days that took my breath away in this case, in this case, and clearly Susan Boyle’s too, and put me in mind of that deranged moment in that Algren story.
Right! That Algren guy was one sick MF-er. He would have been great in a reality show! I would watch that…
Good idea, JohnnyB. I can see it now: Extreme Puppy Throwers and the Mothers Who Haunt Them. Thursdays on FOX!
And Steve: Thanks goodness you were joking. I was beginning to worry that you’ve been stocking up on canned goods and ammunition and in preparation for a move into a nice secluded mountain cabin in Montana.
Ron – surely you jest?! Steve Crescenzo eating CANNED GOODS?!?! That would REALLY be the harbinger of the apocalypse!!!