A Rant on Celebritism

I think I have had my fill of the American obsession with no-talent ass clowns. Perhaps it is because I am near the entertainment mecca, but I am sick and tired of hearing about, reading about, being told about, or even knowing about the worst human beings alive. No, I am not talking about mass murders; at least they have an ethos, and are relatively intelligent. I am talking about the Kardashians, Paris Hilton, Britney, Lindsay, the douche bag Perez Hilton who is a parasite off of them, TMZ, E entertainment, and the entire support network.

We are not only the richest nation on the planet, but we produce the most useless resources known to human kind. Just like the cars we make lack complete quality, the celebrities we produce lack anything redeeming. I suppose the plebians have always been enamored with the aristocracy, but I think things are getting to a new level of decadence. Rather than educating ourselves politically, fighting for true financial sanity, for human rights, for stopping two ridiculously costly wars, for health care, for environmental sanity...we spend our time reading US and People magazine. I am currently looking for a job as a professor; working in California would be ideal, as would working in any major Western state. The problem you ask? The citizens, if you can even call them that, are so busy watching the shittiest crap on television, they aren't even aware that they are being raped by the government, the corporations who get tax breaks for staying in a community or relocating to a community while not creating jobs, yet destroying the environment and tearing communities apart when they move, and by lobbyists who continue to influence politics in ways that are not rational and do not benefit anyone but small constituencies. California, for example, is in the midst of a budget crises predicated on a few intersecting things:

(1) The electorate is full of people more interested in what celebrities wear, or what parties are happening and who is there, to actually do anything useful. Every year, a ton of propositions make the ballet and people just vote blindly. They constantly increase spending, while fighting the increase of taxes...except sales tax which hurts the poor more than anyone else because it is a level tax that all people have to pay. Meanwhile, property taxes are frozen at 1977 levels, corporations do not feed into the pot, and rich people have so many loopholes that nearly half of the schools are crumbling.

(2) The national education problem. At some point around 1980, with the hail to the chief entrance of Reagan, we decided education should be a business and the market should regulate it just like everything else. Stupid idea. Education is a right, not a privilege. Unfortunately, since 1996, the tuition at the University of California (all of them) has increased nearly 96%, while the State and Community college system have followed suit. Nobody cares. There are no jobs for me because Lamar Odom's marriage to a Kardashian is more important than voting, protesting, or doing anything else. Meanwhile, the taxes the electorate refuses to raise is being transferred to underprivileged college students who can either not afford to go or just settle for intense amounts of debt. Of course, nearly all college students in the US are now saddled with debt because tuition's rise when state budgets cut money from education can transfer it to stupid things like building more and more prisons, keeping people on death row, fighting a losing drug war, fighting any war, funding more weapons, and "securing" the border. The next generation is going to basically be retarded when it comes to writing, reading, and arithmetic. But, alas.

(3) The gas/electric companies great raping of the 2000's. Thanks to Grey Davis, and his predecessor and nearly everyone before him, untenable power agreements were made that essentially bankrupted the state. When he tried to fix it by raising car registration taxes, the electorate voted him out. Good job! We voted in a former steroid user who couldn't manage a paperbag.

(4) Populism! Yea populism! Nothing like being able to just vote people in and out whenever we feel like. Nothing like term limits that keep the government constantly turning over and giving way to ideological warfare. Nothing like people hiring poor people to stand on college campuses and in front of stores to get signatures for insane propositions which no one ever reads! Yea!!

This all is rooted in the infantile obsession we have with the most useless human beings in society. They do not entertain us. Madonna entertains. On the one hand, they make us pine for the nouveau leisure class. Think about it. There is no other society where people just acted recklessly, amorally, and with a complete eye towards pure, unadulterated hedonistic materialism other than ours. Sure, every society had crazy sex games. But, people like Paris Hilton would be selected against. They would not be allowed to reproduce because they did nothing for anyone else, let alone for the benefit of humankind. Alas, we celebrate these people's lives because we secretly wish we could do nothing and be famous. On the other hand, these people secretly disgust us. They revolt us. This is what I don't understand. Their uselessness, while often implicit, is really there on display. And we know it. We dislike them. We want them to fail because it reminds us where the moral boundaries of society should be.

Yet, we support them. We give them what they want, fame...prestige...status...validation that they are beautiful, and awesome, and worthwhile humans. Things their parents could never give them because they were too busy working, or partying across the globe and having them raised by nannies, or addicted to drugs, alcohol or other substances. They are a reflection of their shitty parents who failed at raising them. They are a product of endless amounts of money, never hearing the word no, and the dangerous of shallowness. You want irony. We should drop them out of planes onto our enemies...call 'em smart bombs.