I've also been trying to wrap my head around the popularity of "reality TV" - I may be wasting my time. It's probably more in the commercials than the shows themselves, but they seem full of empty catchphrases like:
- "You gotta bring it HARD."
- "You're fired!"
- "I just ain't feelin' it, dawg ..."
- "Final answer?"
If you deconstruct some of these phrases, most of them are banal and vapid, some of them are funny or even profound, but some are downright creepy:
"When I want something, I go out and get it, and I don't take 'no' for an answer." I remember a dude say shit like this on a dating show and thinking "is this guy a date rapist?"
There's also the obvious appeal of schadenfreude. (For people who don't speak German or play Scrabble in foreign languages or pay attention to anything that doesn't involve celebrities, roughly translated into TwitterSpeak it means "OMG! What a DOUCHE!1!!1!!!!!") I'll admit, I sometimes get a kick out of watching people making asses of themselves, people like:
- Paris Hilton
- Perez Hilton
- Glenn Beck
- John Mayer
- Most of the people trying out for American Idol
- Most of the judges on American Idol
- The whole Tea Party movement (you really refer to yourselves as Teabaggers? Really?)
- Courtney Love
- The sycophant a few cubicles over (you'll have to look that one up yourself)
- Ashton Kutcher
- yer mom
The list is endless, but I LOVE watching guys like Rush Limbaugh getting fatter and hooked on OxyContin, or Jeffrey Skilling and Bernie Madoff being tried and sentenced and sent to prison, or George "Dubya" Bush choking on a pretzel. If I go to hell, I expect I'll be waiting in line behind guys like these. That's why, in addition to cold fusion, I'm also working on a way to upload my consciousness, and maybe even my soul, into all the computer servers in the world. So far I haven't had any success, unless you count this blog - and I don't.
I think celebrity and wealth and power are corrosive, but that doesn't mean I would necessarily pass up a piece of the action. I haven't made much progress on the cure for cancer; I've made more progress on my pile of dirty laundry, stacks of bills to pay, and list of things to buy and friends to make and things to learn and do. And while these lists grow longer and longer, I have less time and energy to tackle them. My days are numbered. Like Jay-Z, I got about 99 problems (I'm not very good at arithmetic), and being a potty mouth is one of them.
I gotta get off my ass, or at least off the computer.
