I generally try to keep celebrities as far from my field of vision as possible. I am quite successful. I am a holier-than-thou hipster. Bask in my sneering sense of cultural superiority, which relies partially on pride of ignorance. Yes, that is ironic for someone who works in the field of knowledge, but pride of ignorance is a thing when it comes to pop culture. I don't know what your pop culture phenomena are, and I don't care about them. I pride myself in my ignorance of them because my stuff is better. To appropriate from George Carlin, "my shit is stuff, and your stuff is shit," with "stuff" being defined here as cultural/entertainment-related tidbits. (Damn. Carlin was famous...)
Unfortunately, the walls between politics and the most vapid of pop culture came crumbling down when a reality show huckster became the center of the political universe. And he keeps dragging more vapid people into my news.
I don't care about celebrities. At all. I don't care what they have to say about anything, until they prove themselves insightful. Why do I keep posting songs by Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers? Well, he isn't famous enough to count as a celebrity, but even if some fluke of pop culture made the band famous, he's insightful. I pay attention to people who demonstrate themselves to be insightful, but I don't look for insight from someone who just happens to be, for example, a great guitarist. Frank Zappa was a great guitarist, and insightful. Coincidentally. You have probably never heard of Steve Tibbetts. He is one of the greatest guitarists around. Does he have anything insightful to say about politics? Nothing in his music suggests so, and I wouldn't bother to ask. I don't care. Do I bother to read into the political histories of Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian and the other heroes of jazz guitar? No. I don't care. And they're too obscure to be famous these days.
I don't care what celebrities have to say.
This blog consists largely of whatever I choose to write when I park myself at the computer after brewing my morning coffee and scanning the morning news. Sometimes, I'll write a post that has been brewing in my head for a while, but frequently, it's just a morning brain-fart, pontificating on the news. That means it doesn't necessarily reflect what is most important at the time. Sometimes I comment on that. I'll do posts on what does or doesn't matter in any given week. This week has been particularly bad for public attention. Celebrities. From the mail-order bride first lady to the variety of other famous names that I wish I could say I didn't know... Why does anyone pretend that there will ever be insight from any of these people?
And yes, there is a cost to this pattern. The cost is that time and attention are finite. Time and attention spent asking some vapid, mail-order bride questions and dissecting her answers? That time and attention could have been spent on something that does matter. Like climate change. Or even dealing with the very real issues of Trump's criminality. Distraction has allowed Trump to escape any consequences from that New York Times story exposing all of the tax fraud that got him his money.
This blog isn't a blog about what matters. I regularly try to remind you, though, about what does. When was the last time you thought about the fact that 10,000 or so died yesterday, and every day, due to waterborne pathogens? And we could stop that with water sanitation. We could do something about malaria by distributing mosquito netting.
OHHHH! Tell me what some vapid fucking celebrity said! That matters WAY more!
Do I need to explain why I'm a misanthrope?
