Sunday, September 28, 2014

What is a Kim Kardashian and how do I get it off my Internet?

Wikimedia Commons.
I honestly didn't know. I very seldom watch TV and I think generally that all the tripe about celebrities is...tripe.

Looking her up, I see she was a model who "rocketed to fame" after a sex tape was leaked in 2007.  Oh, OK. Got it. She's a porn star. A female humanoid who seems, after all is injected and implanted and applied, to be made largely of plastic. Queen of the Photoshop selfie. She mostly seems to be famous for being famous.

I still have no idea how to not see her. Everywhere I go, I am confronted with that gooey smirk.

Kim Kardashian isn't the only one wasting space out there. There's tons of other things. President Obama is destroying America with a coffee cup. (Wow. He's a lot more powerful than anyone gave him credit for.) Justin Bieber uses drugs. (Yeah. News flash.) Look 20 years younger with this $5 trick! (Or, just look $5 poorer.)

This nitwittery is taking valuable space away from things we really should  know and care about. That fact isn't what really bothers me. What really bothers me is that Americans eat it up. Every time we click on stupidity, we set it up to get more of that stupidity flung at us. Garbage in, garbage out. It's demand and supply. If we ignore the tripe and read what matters, we'll get more of what matters.

What matters? The ubiquitous They, the wealthy few, pretty much own all the things that make up our lives, and we let them get away with it. Our government. The energy we use, our climate and our very planet. Our food supply. The education of our children. They own the media too, which explains the crap news we get. We should care about this.

We have prejudice and discrimination so rampant and insidious that they are embedded into the infrastructure of this country and act against every American who isn't a straight white Christian male. If you are a person of color, if you are LGBTQ, if you are Buddhist or Muslim or atheist or whatever, if you are female, if you are any combination of these -- this means you. If you are male or you are white or you are straight, you benefit from this corrupt system even if you don't promote it. We should care about this.

We have media that insist on pushing a ridiculous standard of beauty at us and urging us at every turn to take well-earned lines off our faces, eliminate the gray, lose weight, dress like models, plaster goop on our faces, and by all means look younger because old=bad. In line at the grocery store the other day, I counted 24 tabloid and magazine cover lines collectively designed to make me believe I look like hell. That's not counting the cover photos of celebrities who have been personally trained, dressed, made up, coiffed, and Photoshopped. I'm supposed to look like that, but they don't even look like that. Women are destroying their health and even dying because of this. We should care.

We have a health care crisis that is far more than health care coverage: it is the rich getting richer off of medications and treatment that Joe and Jane Sixpack simply cannot afford. A thousand dollars for one blippin' pill. That's what health care reform needs to be addressing. We should care about this.

And speaking of health, we should certainly care that there are cretins who are not vaccinating their children. This is classic stuff (language alert, but then, it's Penn and Teller):



Seriously. These are things we need to be paying attention to, and all we care about is that Lindsay and Britney still can't get their shit together? It'll be news when they do.

OK, I'm done ranting. I have to go be productive and study for my statistics class, which I anticipate will teach me even better how to look critically at stupid crap pushed at me by the media. I'm going to love this class.

But first I have to clear my browser history. Heaven forbid I drop dead and my family think I'd actually read anything about Kim Kardashian.

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