A while back I had time to waste so I clicked on one of those stupid click-bait things about what "celebrities" get up to and what-not. What was not was the celebrity status of the people on the list whose bad antics were supposed to be the reason you wanted to keep clicking. I think I knew who two of the people were, most of them were faded stars who were never very bright to start with, most of them in movies and TV from after the time I stopped watching that crap. I think I've mentioned before that when I was younger one of my goals was to be able to skim the gossip column in the Parade magazine that came with the Sunday Boston Globe and to not know a single one of the names on it. I haven't looked at that piece of crap probably since the 70s but I'm pretty sure I'd get there most weeks now. Do they still have it?
I happened to go to a relatives house to ask their advice on buying a very small TV to use as a computer monitor and the person I had to ask had on the TV watching a movie which was such a piece of crap I couldn't believe she had it on. Though I didn't say anything. There has always been a ton of crap churned out by the movie industry, it has gotten steadily worse as the venues for watching movies when from theaters to VCRs to DVDs and now on streaming media, all of which seem to demand far more and ever stupider crap to take up the attention of ever more Americans making us stupider and stupider, more and more materialistic and ever less capable of self-government. If you want to know where it comes from, watch what takes up the largest amount of peoples' attention. I don't seem to be able to find a TV small enough that I'd want to have the thing in my little house.
We have a finite number of hours in a day, in a week, in a year, in a decade and in a life. Time spent on degenerate crap is time that will never come back to be filled with the imaginary "more speech" that will be more ennobling or merely more edifying. The destruction of our democracy is led by the entertainment industry even more than the propaganda industry. Somewhere, in my orgy of watching old clips of the late Molly Ivins to cheer me up, sometime in the early 1990s, she bemoaned how not only the TV news, so called, but also the major daily papers and magazines had adopted tabloid practices. And that was almost thirty years ago, it was before Murdoch started FOX "News" to do what Republicans let the Aussie-Brit smut peddler in the country to do, turn us into a fascist oligarchy. We've been on that road to ruin well before then, I think it started in the local happy-talk local news format that I first recall wanting to puke over in the early 1970s. Shit tabloid fare like E!* set the pace, the media being all about making money.
I've been wondering if people getting together and reading through 2-hander scripts wouldn't be more fun and interesting than watching that shit. I wonder if there are people who do that, there are certainly enough of them around online. I'd imagine lots of them are better actors than the "celebrities". I wonder if it ever occurred to actors to do that kind of thing, certainly not the stupid ones, so that means a good majority of them.
* Which prominently covered Eric Swalwell's fart - if it hadn't shown up all over my in-box I wouldn't have known that piece of tabloid shit was still stinking.
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