Can We Please, As a Culture, Just Move On?

[Currently Listening To: The Duke Spirit - Cuts Across the Land]

The title of this post is lifted from this XKCD strip - a commentary on the strange male preoccupation with penis size. I've never really understood it myself, but Idunno, maybe that's just because I have a huge cock. Anyway, today the concept of moving on as a culture applies to the media, and the focus of our national attention. Right now, CNN's front page is furiously ejaculating over its much-balyhooed post-jail interview with Paris Fuckbag Hilton. You know, the one Larry King conducted earlier today after scrapping a previously-scheduled interview with Michael Moore about some kinda important shit. I don't know what burning questions Mr. King ended up asking, because I'd rather watch an interview with my balls, but I'm sure it was a rousing hour of highly intellectual banter. You know what? Fuck you, Larry King. I hope you have trouble sleeping tonight because you realize you hit the rock bottom of journalistic integrity when you failed to tell your employers to go fuck themselves if they expected you to pretend to care about anything Paris Hilton has to say. You probably didn't, though - what do you care? It's more ratings, right? It's what people want. I think that makes Larry King and the highly respectable news team at CNN a fine choice for our second semi-occasional Embarrassing New Low Award:



At least someone on TV news had enough of all this (although since MSNBC is featuring that clip instead of being embarrassed by it, it's probably just a marketing ploy to take some wind out of CNN's sails).

The point is that we need to stop. All of us. We, as a culture, are being sedated with bullshit, day in and day out. And like Miss Hilton snorting blow off a toilet seat, it's easy and accessible and it's destroying us, but we can't get enough. In a world as fucked as ours, no one should be talking about Paris fucking Hilton. Not for any reason, ever. We shouldn't be praising her, we shouldn't be making fun of her, we shouldn't be criticizing her or reading about her or watching her shitty amateur porn videos. Not me, not you, and certainly not any entity presenting itself as a "news" organization. There are so many people in this world who are doing important things. There are people doing incredible, world-changing things every day, and you never hear about them. There are people who are doing unimaginably terrible things every day, and you never hear about them. Every day brilliant people are making new scientific discoveries, and creating new inventions. Every day truly evil people people are murdering thousands, and profiting from it. Every day powerful people are making new laws, enacting new policies, all of it affecting the world. Every day regular people are creating entertainment, running companies, teaching children, making sandwiches, and cleaning floors. Billions upon billions of people who are, in some way, positive or negative, contributing to society. Paris Hilton is not one of those people - the only thing unique about her is how astonishingly little she adds to the world. To devote so much of our national discourse to someone so devoid of value, at such a significant time in world history, is a crime - pure and simple.

Rich, powerful people - the one percent of the world's population who control 80 percent of its wealth - they love Paris Hilton. Dick Cheney and his big man-sized safe of evil secrets love Paris Hilton. They love Paris Hilton, and American Idol, and Britney and Lindsay and OJ and the Superbowl, and any of the other million things that our flaccid media uses to keep the fleeting national attention span distracted with issues of ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING SIGNIFICANCE WHATSOEVER. To keep us content, complacent, uninformed, and unmotivated to change. Al Gore recently wrote a whole book on the subject. In his words:

"We are at a pivotal moment in American democracy. The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, has reached levels that were previously unimaginable. It's too easy and too partisan to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes.

Reasoned, focused discourse is vital to our democracy to ensure a well-informed citizenry. But this is difficult in an environment in which we are experiencing a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time--from the O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson trials to Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith."

Gore perhaps doesn't chide the American public quite enough for their role in all this, saying that reason is "under assault by forces using sophisticated techniques such as propaganda, psychology, and electronic mass media." That's true, but it starts with us, as a society. As the people who consume this crap. It exists because we keep eating it up. We have to start by not giving one tenth of a shit what Paris Hilton has to say about anything - and even if you're talking about how much she sucks or laughing at her, you're still part of the problem, because you're still keeping the discourse going. Hell, I'm part of the problem by even writing this blog entry, but I'm vowing, right now, that even to make a statement, I will never talk about Paris Hilton ever again. I will never read about her, write about her, or allow myself to be exposed to anything relating to her whatsoever, and I suggest you do the same. Since no one's ready to start a revolution yet, we can at least take our own baby steps. Next time you see Paris on TV, change the channel. Next time you encounter a news article or a blog post about her, just move right along. When you inevitably see the Larry King interview featured on YouTube, resist the urge to click. Next time someone at the water cooler says "did you see what Paris Hilton did?" ask them if they know who their senators are. Don't even lecture them, just change the subject. Don't even talk about people talking about her too much. Don't even talk about not talking about Paris Hilton. Let's all, as a culture, just move on. But before you give your brain a Paris colonic, contact CNN and tell them that you're never, ever going to watch their network again, because you're tired of shallow entertainment masquerading as news. Tell them if their entire broadcast day was one tenth as insightful as one episode of The Daily Show's fake news broadcast - they'd have a good start. And while you're at it, drop an e-mail to the editors of People Magazine and give them a nice list of all the good things a person could do for the world with $300,000 - $300,000 of course being the amount People agreed to pay for photos of Paris Hilton to accompany a print interview.

Don't get me wrong - I love mindless entertainment and trashy pop culture as much as the next guy. I just finished laughing in jaw-dropped awe at R Kelly's latest masterpiece, a magnificent work of "urban poetry" which quells any fears I might have had that the next installment of Trapped In The Closet would fail to live up to the glory of the original. But when so much utterly inconsequential bullshit starts to become what America considers "news" that the entire national consciousness consistently ignores giant, glaring problems... well, we have a giant, glaring problem - and rich hotel heiresses being forced to serve jail time starts to seem less like sweet vindication and more like a symptom of a culture gone terribly awry.