For example, why is it that I can go to Google News, and right there on the front page, I can find out that Bristol Palin "has to be happy" about Levi Johnston's new girlfriend? I mean, COME ON!!! This story doesn't answer any burning questions in my life; it only raises other questions!! Questions like "Why does "E! Online" come up on a Google News search? Wouldn't that be more appropriate for a Google Crap search?
I mean, really? Levi has been dating Sunny Oglesby, a day-care instructor, for two months? And Bristol is happy because "it sounds like his new girlfriend is influencing him to want to actually spend time with Tripp"?
And this is news how, exactly? Because a woman named after a British town is cheerful about a pair of jeans getting involved with an adjective for "not cloudy," who makes him want to visit his son Stumble?
Or to put it another way, sometimes you have to ask yourself why the fuck Bristol Palin is still in the news. Or really, why was she ever in the news at all?
(Please note that I fully understand the irony of going on at length, as I'm about to do, about a woman who's getting too much press. That would be part of my charm, if I had any.)
As an example, here's a report from another internet gossip rag calling itself Pop Eater, which asks the question of the ages: Is Bristol Palin a Bigger Star Than Her Mom Now?
Yes, you read that right. And this guy's reasoning is a fascinating exercise in logical fallacies.
"Without any doubt Bristol is now the biggest star in the Palin household," an A-list Hollywood publicist tells me. "At the moment I would argue she's one of the biggest stars out there."Quick breakdown of that paragraph.
1. Without any doubt - completely unsupported statement.
2. The biggest star in the Palin household - Funny thing. Since only 1 in 4 adults think Sarah Palin, a political figure, is qualified to be president, it's actually difficult to tell how low that bar actually is.
3. an A-list Hollywood publicist tells me - Funny how this guy is anonymous, isn't it?
4. At the moment I would argue - "Don't ask me what I'd say in another five minutes, though."
5. she's one of the biggest stars out there - Undefined term. Are we talking "name recognition"? Sure, she's got some of that. What about "actual accomplishments," though?
But I digress.
Easy, now. It's true that Bristol is finally finding her voice (with the help of a speechwriter, as Billy Bush opined this week on 'Access Hollywood') and this added attention along with her success on 'Dancing' has led to a whole host of offers and opportunities for the young mom. Books, reality shows, product endorsements... you name it, she's been offered it.Kim Kardashian. Ooh, there's something to aspire to.
One weekly celeb magazine editor tells me Bristol is "the new Kim Kardashian" on the scene.
"She's beautiful and real and not another one of those skinny Hollywood types. Add that she was a teen mom, which is very in right now with the MTV show and all, and you couldn't have written a better or more dramatic personal story. Sarah is yesterday's news. Bristol is today."So, what makes Bristol so fascinating? She's the daughter of a failed vice-presidential candidate.
In 2004, John Edwards was John Kerry's VP candidate. Prior to his wife dying two weeks ago, had you heard anything about his kids? I just looked it up - there's four of them, ranging in age from 31 to 10. (Wow...)
But there's Bristol, right out there in the public eye. She doesn't have any discernible talent, she doesn't act, she doesn't sing, and, let's be honest, she really doesn't dance.
It's widely known that Bristol should have been bumped from Dancing With the "Stars." After all, the person consistently scoring as the worst dancer is normally voted off of a contest that isn't rigged, right? But the zombie-like followers of her mother gamed the system; they kept her in by cheating. Openly.
Now, admittedly, despite Sarah's insistence that the press needed to leave her family alone, she was the first one to push them into the spotlight. And since Sarah's kind of a media whore herself, her kids are still getting light reflected off of her. But Bristol seems to be pushing herself to the front of the Palin crowd as much as she can. And our media is doing everything it can to help her.
The whole thing gets ridiculous fast. The media, starved for any actual content, has decided to promote every response she makes to anyone, positive or negative, as evidence of a "feud." They've decided that she's feuding with Keith Olbermann because he made fun of her making a commercial for abstinence.
Now, note the caption: "(Not really) World's Worst." Even Olbermann knew this wasn't really a bad thing, but it was somebody being stupid, and he could call them out on it.
Bristol, part of a thin-skinned family, fired off a response on Facebook (the only way the Palins communicate any more), talking about Olbermann's "insincere incredulity," and apologizing for "not being absolutely faultless like he undoubtedly must be."
Then there's her "feud" with Margaret Cho, probably the least feud-like of all. Cho blogged the following:
Why did Bristol do Dancing with the Stars? I heard from someone who really should know (really should seriously know the dirt really really) that the only reason Bristol was on the show was because Sarah Palin forced her to do it. Sarah supposedly blames Bristol harshly and openly (in the circles that I heard it from) for not winning the election, and so she told Bristol she “owed” it to her to do DWTS so that "America would fall in love with her again" and make it possible for Sarah Palin to run in 2012 with America behind her all the way. Instead of being supposedly "handicapped" by the presence of her teen mom daughter, now Bristol is going to be an "asset" – a celebrity beloved for her dancing. I am sure the show wasn’t in on this (but who knows anything really)But Cho spent the majority of the post asking why people talked about Bristol's weight, and pointing out that she wasn't really fat.
To this, Bristol replied (again, on Facebook) with a long post, where she showed insincere incredulity about Margaret Cho's opinion, and ending with:
To my friend Margaret Cho, if you ever have a question, call me girlfriend. Don't ever rely on "sources" who claim to know me or my family. You will be taken every time. And we need to talk. You say you "don't agree with the family's politics at all" but I say, if you understood that commonsense conservative values supports the right of individuals like you, like all of us, to live our lives with less government interference and more independence, you would embrace us faster than KD Lang at an Indigo Girls concert.("If you ever have a question, call me girlfriend." Did Bristol just come out? Did Levi put her off men entirely?)
OK, let's contrast two parts of that statement. "if you understood that commonsense conservative values supports the right of individuals like you" - You think the GOP is pro-gay, Bristol? I've never thought you were stupid before. Just naive.
I mean, you obviously know that Cho is gay. Look at the last bit there: "you would embrace us faster than KD Lang at an Indigo Girls concert." - have you ever actually talked to any gay people? Do you think that they go around making out with every other gay person they meet?
OK, maybe "stupid" is unfair. After all, look at the poisonous gene pool she sprang from. When your mother makes a career out of openly dishonest statements, the cognitive dissonance is probably built into your personality.
But that leads us to the one truly mean-spirited one: Kathy Griffin, who is actually less newsworthy than Bristol Palin. Let me start out by saying that I've never thought that Kathy Griffin was particularly funny - she's a shock jock, saying outrageous things in an effort to get publicity.
But when Griffin called Bristol fat, that was a little over the top. After all, Kathy, just because Bristol isn't as cadaverously thin as you are, you probably don't need to call her "fat." (Hey, at least Bristol has breasts - why do you even bother wearing a bra?)(And by the way, wasn't it you who talked about nearly dying due to a botched liposuction a few years ago? Are you seeing the irony here, Kathy?)
However, Griffin does manage to give us the best example I can think of to highlight the dangers of the American mania for meaningless minutia.
It’s actually not the man so outraged by Dancing With the Stars that he shot his television - although that is an excellent example of why the Second Amendment should possibly not be a universal right.
It would be the fact that both Kathy Griffin and Bristol Palin are receiving death threats.
Because of a woman barely out of her teens. Dancing.
Well said. It's all idiotic!
ReplyDeleteYes, being famous for being famous is mighty popular. I suppose one could come at it a number of ways. Partly it seems to be a function of something that's been decried by critics ever since the development of a middle-class public. Dr. Johnson worried about the moral well-being of increasing amounts of not very nicely educated perusers of literature, and of course the Inevitable Oscar mocked them to great effect towards the end of the nineteenth century. "In old days, books were written by men of letters and read by the public; nowadays, books are written by the public and read by nobody." Well, sort of, Oscar -- I think we would mostly have to replace "books" (at least other than ghostwritten ones) with "tweets," internet poll results, and suchlike, and we would have to admit, too, that the tweets and such are indeed read by the same public that produces them -- if one can call what's done to such stuff "reading." But the idea's the same: what drives modern culture, if we take this view, is lots of people with few standards, whose want is for easy entertainment, not for something that involves striving towards excellence in oneself or even recognizing it in others. Such folk would perhaps respond with a shrug to Robert Browning's line, "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp -- or what's a heaven for?" with a shrug, or blank incomprehension.
ReplyDeleteThe same critics who railed at the mindlessness of it all were on to the deep anxiety just beneath: Wilde said that "the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about," and Sam Johnson wrote movingly in Rasselas about the fear of solitude that underwrites a great deal of human activity. Boswell's biography of Johnson remarks that the great man himself very honest about his own dislike of social isolation -- it was connected to his terror of death, that vanquisher of "the vanity of human wishes." Much of what we do is done in the shadow of our eventual demise; it's a way of making the time pass without having to think about the passage of time. Sleep may be brother to death, but solitude is a first cousin.
We don't like to admit that we are generating the very meaning of our lives from one isolated instant to the next. But deep down, I think, we know that's exactly what we're doing -- thus the constant need to cover it up by an astonishing variety of means, from the trivial to the profound, and the remarkable energy we throw into the task, whatever forms it may take.
Bristol who?
ReplyDeleteI am intrigued by Bloggingdino’s comment here, and I agree about the appeal of celebrity gossip as having many facets. It is too easy to dismiss celebrity junk as the work of publicists (sometimes but not always), as editorial numbskullery (sometimes but not always), or as distractions conjured by conspirators who want to distract or dumb down the public (sometimes but not always). There is something downright primeval about the appeal of celebrity gossip (no matter how much it irritates us). Broadcasters cover celebrity news because that is what attracts audiences. The phenomenon is as old as 'yellow journalism.'
ReplyDeleteLet me focus on the last word of Bloggingdino’s Oscar Wilde quote, ‘Nobody,’ within the context of Christine O’Donnell’s infamous TV ad: “I’m not a witch. I’m nothing you’ve heard. I’m you” (my bold).
Sarah and Bristol Palin, Sharon Angle, Levi Johnson, and Joe the Plumber, et al., are ‘nobodies’ who empower ‘nobodies’ who self-identify with them. “I’m you,” Christine O’Donnell insists, and I believe we should take her a face value. When the most marginal characters achieve celebrity status on the political stage, the nobodies of the world feel transcendent and ennobled. I believe this explains the appeal of the nobody as a political force and explains their antipathy to all things perceived as elitist … education, science, liberals, the media, including establishment Republicans.
I think Bristol was named after Bristol, CT as her whitetrash momma always wanted to work at ESPN which is headquartered there.
ReplyDeleteNot that I give a shit about Bristol, other than to say I hope she can eventually lead a normal life away from Sarah and her butler Todd.
(O)CT(O),
ReplyDeleteThat makes sense. How many times have I read or heard Palin's fans say "She's one of us!?"
Of course, Palin is not one of them anymore; but I think even though she's now part of the American moneyed jet-set elite, those who still regard her as one of them probably hold on to the idea that if a small town know-nothing like her can become famous and rich by tweeting and facebooking, well so could they!
As for the unfortunate daughter, I've wondered why Palin, with all the money she now has access to, doesn't encourage Bristol to complete her high school education and find a college or university to accept her so that she will have something to fall back on when she's older and people have forgotten who her mother was.
Shaw...
ReplyDeleteThe answer to your question resides in Edward C. Banfield's The Unheavenly City Revisited...
There is no future only today....its called, in southern slang, "gettin' while the gettin' is good...."
I keep wondering who is behind keeping Sarah Palin in the news... and why? I hope she does run in 2012 and the opposition repeatedly hammers the governor who did not complete her term as a "quitter"
ReplyDelete