Strange Bedfellows
This morning I was a little shocked at myself: I read a Bill O’Reilly column. . .and agreed with it. Kind of.
He was writing about Julia Roberts being followed as she drove with her daughter, so she swerved her car and drove the pursuer off the road, got out and gave him hell for violating her privacy and her daughter’s. O’Reilly’s point was well-taken, as far as it went. The paparazzi DO stalk and hound these people, and trying to make them stop takes a lot of time and money in our court system. "This collapse of privacy rights should disturb all Americans," he says. The right to privacy from government prying into our email, telephone calls or library books as it pursues “terrorists” is different, but we’ll let that pass.
The point O’Reilly and others don’t address is the other side of this harassment: if these critters didn’t get paid big bucks, they wouldn’t do this. And they get big bucks because millions of putatively normal people suck this garbage up. They love pictures of scantily-clad stars doing naughty things, they love stories, real or imagined, about the sex lives, psychological health and toilet habits of the stars. When people go on and on about Princess Diana, I wanna yell, “Know who killed her? YOU did!” If tomorrow people stopped buying vapid, mindless tabloids, the people who harass the stars would have to get real jobs. End of problem.
I suppose people have always thrived on gossip, and in this case somebody like Oprah is a person everyone spends an inordinate amount of time watching and thinking of as though she were a person they really know. A hundred years ago it was the cat lady down the street, the AC/DC police chief or the banker’s wayward daughter. But now because millions worship Oprah and follow her without question, she can pick the next president of the United States. Regardless of her intentions, her power is truly frightening. Imagine Eva Peron to the tenth power.
She may BE a nice person, and she may be right when she says Obama is wonderful, but why should we be so fascinated with stores about her weight and sex life? Surely we can find more constructive, important things to obsess about.
Like Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter hangin' on the Plaza smokin' their meds. . .