Is it just me, or do the supermarket tabloids bother anyone else out there? I don't want to read them, but they're the only thing to look at when I'm waiting in the check-out line (other than the chocolate which I really do want to look at but have to force myself not to). I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would care what Britney Spears had for breakfast, that Heidi Montag now has DDD boobs (how does she walk?).
And don't get me started on all those bathing suit "disaster" photos that somehow grace covers year-round. The faces are always blurred so we have to guess which "celebrity" has allowed his or her (usually her) thighs to "go," or who's ballooned from skeletal to merely anorexic. Oh, the horror of it all!
Isn't there some kind of reality disconnect here? I mean, are we really going to worry if we should have had our cheeks (either pair -- take your pick) lifted when we're pushing our rusty shopping carts down a cracked sidewalk, looking for a comfy place to sleep among our fellow huddled homeless? Are we really going to care that Britney and Haley wore the same dress to last night's awards ceremony when our spouses have been diagnosed with cancer and we don't have health insurance, or the bank's foreclosed on our home? Is Kate Gosselin's unfortunate new hairstyle going to be a cause for concern when we're actually considering allowing our children to join the military so that they'll have enough food to eat and all they'll have to do in return is kill other people's children?
We have an ex-president signing copies of his latest bestseller when he should be wearing an orange jumpsuit and pacing a 6'x8' cell. We have a future Presidential candidate, famous for her amazing ocular ability (seeing Russia from Alaska being the best-known example) and nonsensical Twittering, starring in her own reality TV show (and what could be more unreal than "reality TV"), who really needs a bigger hand to write on if she's actually going to keep track of trivialities like who America's allies actually are. (North, South -- really, what's the difference, anyway?)
And, we have the release of the WikiLeaks documents. Wouldn't it be nice if we were at least somewhat as obsessed with what was actually revealed by the documents as we seem to be about Julian Assange's thin-skinned condoms? From one of the most horrific releases, on video, where we actually saw US troops shooting at unarmed civilians (laughing as thought it were a game) to illegal spying on members of the United Nations to revelations of torture and thousands more civilians killed in Iraq than we'd previously known, the documents have revealed unprecedented cruelty, war crimes and criminal action within our own government.
Yet, we're more concerned with whether Koko (not sure if there is one) Kardashian really should have worn plaids with stripes last night.
Our tabloid mentality is certainly an asset to the "out of sight, out of mind" solution that seems to work so well for us. It's either that, or actually do something!
I really hope we choose the latter because, when you come right down to it, Lindsay Lohan's chipped nail polish really isn't all that important in the scheme of things.