Think About It: Save Me From Celebrities
I recall the first time I ever heard of Britney Spears. I was in college and the entertainment editor of the campus newspaper - one of the reporters pitched doing a feature on Spears to me using the logic that, as she was from Kentwood, Louisiana, she would be of interest to our Louisiana-based campus. I accepted this proposal based on the fact that it was logical, sound reasoning that would save me from coming up with another 1,500-word feature to write myself when I had a term paper due.
Having made this momentous decision, I proceeded not to think about it again until later that week when we were laying out the paper and Britney’s most recent hit came on the radio we played in the newsroom. My immediate reaction was, if I recall, “What is this drek?” The editor, Rena, had a far more entertaining response to the song “Hit Me Baby One More Time” - she looked at me and said, “It sounds like the theme song for spousal abuse."
And so the cycle began.
Over the past several years, we have watched Britney's development. We've watched it whether we wanted to or not, because virtually every television station, newspaper or alternative media outlet, including the Children's Television Workshop, has followed her meticulously -- from hit to hit, to her painful attempt at a movie career to her infamous smooch with Madonna, her one-day marriage to Jason Alexander, her wedding to Kevin "if they call me K-Fed maybe I'll sound like I've got some testosterone" Federline, the birth of her first child, the reckless endangerment of that first child and, of course, up to her second pregnancy and Thursday's world-recognized interview on Dateline NBC. Here is the frightening point: I know all of this despite having never bought one of her albums, seen one of her movies or watching a single network interview with her. I know this because THEY won't... stop... TALKING ABOUT IT!
"THEY," of course, are those members of the national media who have taken it upon themselves to deluge us with constant updates on the Cult of Celebrity, those members of the national pop culture circus who have taken on such great importance in the minds of the bubbleheaded news anchors that every time one of them blows their nose there's a catfight trying to retrieve the Kleenex.
Let's keep using Britney for our example, just for the moment: I didn't watch her "Dateline" interview. In fact, for much of the interview I wasn't even anywhere near a television, hoping to avoid even absorbing any of the interview through ambient radiation. But still, somehow, within an hour of the interview's conclusion I knew exactly how Britney broke down and wept for people to understand that she and her family are people too, consarn it.
Regardless of whether Britney's just laying in a bed of her own making (yes), the fact is the media doesn't consider celebrities "people." Actually, most of them don't consider anybody people, but celebrities in particular are reduced to Q-Ratings and sound bytes, and when they get it into their heads that a celebrity is someone their viewers want to hear about, they will talk about them until our ears, collectively, begin to bleed.
Let's move on from "Britney," because if I type "Britney" one more time my computer is liable to crash out of a sense of self-preservation. There are a great number of celebrities whose personal lives have become so all-pervasive that you just can't stand to hear about them anymore, and I of course am speaking specifically about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.
I've never really had much of a problem with Tom Cruise before, but something has happened to him in the last year to make him, quantifiably, one of the most obnoxious human beings on the planet, and I include Rosie O'Donnell in that list. We've had leapfrog antics on Oprah Winfrey's show, we had his snarky assault on the medical community on the Today show, we listened to the day-by-day accounting of Katie Holmes' pregnancy right up until the birth of the child. It has reached the point that I can no longer watch a Tom Cruise movie without picturing him jumping up and down on that stupid sofa, and frankly, that sort of thing has no place in Mission: Impossible III.
And let's not forget Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, or "Brangelina," as they have come to be collectively known in the skulls of the extraterrestrials we have running the national media circus in this country. From the minute they met we heard the story -- the two prettiest people on the planet, they were meant for each other, they would mate and create the perfect offspring, a creature of such pure, perfect genetics that he or she would save us all! Gag me with a trowel.
NEWSFLASH: I don't care about Brad Pitt! I don't care about Angelina Jolie! But they will not stop talking about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie! If whatever African nation they're trying to save this week were suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, the top story would be what this means for the future of their Superhuman offspring Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt-Terwilliger-Bouvier-McClure.
While we're at it, I also don't give a flying fig newton about the personal lives of the following individuals:
· Ben Affleck
· Jennifer Garner
· Jennifer Lopez
· Jennifer Aniston
· Vince Vaughan
· Michael Moore
· Michael Jackson
· Janet Jackson
· Jessica Simpson
· Nick LaMr.JessicaSimpson
· Lindsay Lohan
· Paris Hilton
· That other chick that's not Paris Hilton -- you know which one I mean
· Ashton Kutcher
· Demi Moore
· Bob Newhart (I'm including him just in case those rumors about him and the Olsen twins prove to be true).
And virtually any other celebrity you can think of that's had a news story written about them in the past 12 years without having performed the vital tasks of saving an entire school of orphans from a burning building or dying.
Unless one of those things happens, I really don't give a darn. Please, everybody, shut up about them.
Blake M. Petit is getting a headache just thinking about this crap. Contact him with comments, suggestions or some way to add the Boomerang network to his cable package so he can see George Jetson instead of George Clooney at BlakePT@cox.net, visit him on the web at Evertime Realms.com and visit the Evertime LiveJournal at
blakemp.