PrintMay 6, 2010
Our Dangerously Boring Celebutard Culture
Back in 2008, which strangely seems like it was both yesterday and 20 years ago, I appeared on a radio program with a candidate for public office I'll call "Dr. X." He was running for office against a well-known incumbent, or I should say, he was pretending to run for office, by boldly starting a website to note his opponent's extremely liberal voting record and history of outrageous, America-bashing remarks, and depending on the media and the League of Women Voter's to publicize it.
After several minutes of listening to him drone on in a sleepy monotone, I asked Dr. X to share the worst thing that his opposition, both official, as in the other candidate's campaign, and unofficial, as in the Lame Stream Media, could dig up on him. He replied, in a tone dripping with treacly self-congratulation, that they could accuse him of being "boring." Having been on the air with him, and having seen him speak, I can't disagree, but at the time, I suggested that proclaiming that you don't drink coffee or are the only member of your demographic who never experimented with weed, and are therefore "boring," may not be the best way to position yourself to the average voter. It turns out that incompetent campaigner, Dr. X, may have been ahead of his time. True, his slow motion train wreck of a campaign culminated in the inevitable and embarrassing crushing defeat that anyone with the slightest discernment would have seen coming from miles away. His very special kind of denial aside, he was a visionary. It's official: boring is the new famous. Our popular culture has jumped the shark, and taken the serious side of our society with it.
While the grown ups weren't looking, our popular culture became a 24-hour freak show, which was mildly amusing, until a sufficiently large percentage of the population lost the ability to distinguish between the celebutards and the allegedly serious people, and the allegedly serious people decided to worship the celebutards. The whole spectacle has become insufferably boring.
Last Sunday evening, in the interest of promoting the cause of destroying the tiny semblance of our national sovereignty that remains, and in between the commercials for denture creams and incontinence products, CBS' 60 Minutes treated us to a stultifyingly predictable, and sad, sob story about illegals who drown trying to sneak into the country. I say "sob story" because it was clear that the only solution to this problem that would satisfy the correspondent was open borders. Shocking, I know. Moments later, I looked up and thought they were doing a story about the infamous red-bearded alleged Tylenol suspect, James Lewis, but it turns out it was another tragic victim, horribly mistreated by not only his employer, but by his victorious rival, there to reassure us that he is "all right." Glad to hear it, Conan. I'm sure $32 million can do that. Now we can sleep at night.
Only a little over 24 hours before this cringe-inducing spectacle, we were treated to another unsettling event, the White House Correspondents' dinner. We're supposed to pretend that we're watching two worlds collide with two distinct and very different populations coming together, one a bunch of blow-dried celebrities and the other "serious journalists," you know, like Anderson Cooper. How fascinating to see the likes of Katie Couric and Kim Kardashian at the same glitzy party! One, a silly airhead desperately seeking validation of her value as something other than a mannequin for ridiculously expensive clothes and accessories, and then there's Ms. Kardashian.
The Celebutard in Chief presided over this mashup of idol worship and hopeless search for relevance with his cheesy con artist faux charm, his switch-on street dialect, and his Alinsky-inspired mockery of his critics, who are clearly getting under his very thin skin.
To the delight of the slobbering pack of sycophantic stenographers who fool only the most gullible observers into thinking that they are actually reporters, Barry competed against Jay Leno in a game called "Mediocre Monologue," and to paraphrase President Obama, he won. Mr. Leno perfunctorily and timidly read jokes from index cards, circumspect lest he offend the Great One and his acolytes. If he was watching, David Letterman must have thought, "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy." Now he knows how Hillary feels. The entire exhibition amused almost no one, other than the lock step group think band of idol-worshipping zombies, there to show off their dress up digs and collectively worship their cult leader over a few cocktails.
Barack Obama is not responsible for the slide of our public policy realm into the emotionally driven, personality-obsessed mosh pit of celebrity culture. In fact, his election is evidence that the process of the former being swallowed up by latter, something that began when nearly all our current social pathologies began, in the late 1960's, is nearly complete.
It turns out that there are three kinds of boring. There's the self-congratulatory, self-defeating kind that afflicted hapless Dr. X. There's the dangerous kind that results from incessant exposure to the minutiae about the self-indulgent lives of famous imbeciles and predictable liberals in Washington, and which seduces people to vote for an unaccomplished, empty suit with a radical agenda and a history of cocaine use. Then there's the good kind, the kind that bedeviled generations of students, forced by their un-unionized teachers to read, and in some particularly horrifying cases, even memorize, America's founding documents, written by uncool dead white Europeans, and to learn about the circumstances that allowed them and subsequent generations to pass along the legacy of freedom that they entrusted us to similarly deliver unscathed to future generations.
Can someone turn down the Lady Gaga, and check whether it's too late to make that happen?
Teri O'Brien is an author, speaker, and dangerous thinker. She hosts the Teri O'Brien Show on Blog Talk Radio, 2-3:30 p.m. Central time. You can contact her at teriobrien.com
