I can’t imagine how stupid our world will look someday when people try to figure out why more time was spent covering Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsey Lohan than George Bush’s Reign of Terror (trademark Borat). One can sort of act, one can sort of sing, and the other sort of tries and fails at both. They have led to an era where Perez Hilton is considered expert testimony. I would almost feel better if I found out that Bush had a whole team of writers working around the clock thinking up their escapades of white trash brilliance to keep our minds off of the hunt for the evil doers.
Here’s how low we’ve sunk as a society. The Chicago Tribune has a free paper called the Red Eye. It’s sort of a fun periodical for people who recognize that USA Today is over their heads. Two years ago I was willing to bet that Lindsey Lohan would be mentioned every day in the Red Eye for the next six months, and since then it’s only gotten worse. This unholy trinity can’t really exist. It has to be a sort of real life Mary Worth experiment or something. River Phoenix was talented and his flame out didn’t get nearly this amount of press. Men are allowed to make a drunken mess out of their twenties and no one gets too uptight, but the notion of girls in their young twenties doing the same is still just prurient enough to keep the web hits spinning.
Somewhere what would have been the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein just called his mother and excitedly told her he’d been given the Lohan beat.
We can not ask ourself who is to blame for this unholy trinity, because we’d time and time again have to come back to ourselves.
