Is Angelina Jolie a Good Person?
I’ve been wondering about this a lot lately because, you know, she broke up Jen and Brad, but then she did adopt those children and does all that stuff for Africa. Okay, I’m kidding. In fact, sometimes I think that if I see another magazine cover in the supermarket checkout with breaking headlines about some celebs marriage, I’m going to hurl. If there is one magazine editor out there listening, for the record: at least one potential reader does not give a shit about Brad, Angelina and Jen (BAJ) . The mystery, the part I don’t understand, is why anyone does except BAJ and their friends and family. Last I checked, they weren’t in my little black book and, if I’m in theirs, I must not be on their A-List because those SOBs haven’t called me in a long while. I thought it was bizarre when I would walk by the newstand and see Cindy Crawford on the cover of nine magazines at once, but at least she was on the cover of magazines for one of the few legitimate reasons for being on the cover of a magazine: because she looks good on the over of magazines. Granted, there were all those stories about her marriage breaking up, but overwhelmingly, and remarkably it seems from our present vantage point, mostly she was on the cover because she was modelling clothes and that was her job. No doubt Angelina and Brad and Jen and… I’m blanking on the name… Jessica generally look good on the cover of magazines too, but actually, I think if someone had a really unflattering picture of one of them to make them look BAD in their cover photo, that would play too. In fact, while we’re at it, please raise your hand if you give a shit which star has the cellulite in that picture in the supermarket checkout aisle. If you raised your hand, can you please explain yourself?
Right, okay, I digress. BAJ are apparently cover-worthy because millions of Americans actually care about their marriages. Again, for the record, count me among those Americans who don’t. Nothing personal. I’m sure Jen’s a nice person and Brad was ever so mean to her, but you know what? I don’t actually know Jen and Brad and I have no idea who was mean to whom, nor do I care. I’m sure that within 50 miles of where I live (I would have said 5 blocks if I lived in a city), some man beat his wife last night, and I don’t care about them either because I don’t know who they are because, surprise, the information regarding their case is sorely lacking at my local supermarket, though by all rights it should be covered there every day (Gavin DeBecker says in The Gift of Fear
Celebrities complain about the papparazzi and the cult of celebrity and I have to admit that I sometimes think there’s something a bit disingenuous about it. They get millions and millions of dollars for the simple reason that people actually want to follow their personal lives. There are some absolutely brilliant actors who manage to not grace the tabloids, but then they also don’t manage to get 26 million dollars for a picture. But that is neither here nor there, because in that respect, the papparazzi are only inflicting misery on a tiny number of people while a lot more people living in misery because of policies of the Bush administration or Wal-mart and I’m more worried about them.
The aspect of the whole BAJ thing that is so pernicious is that grown people who could be worrying about things that actually matter, like their own families, are worrying about BAJ. Or, on the other hand, grown people who could be worrying about things that actually matter, like millions of Americans without health insurance, are being opiated by blather about Angelina’s wedding dress and who was on the A-List. According to Newsweek, 50% of all Americans say they’d like to crash Brad and Angelina’s wedding. Again, I’m just baffled. Why? Which of your friends who you really want to see because you miss him so much is going to be there? Why waste a day with wealthy strangers who don’t know you and don’t care about you, when you could spend the day with your brother, mother or friend?
I know, I know. It’s because seeing bad things happen to gorgeous, wealthy people somehow makes us feel better. Frankly, I think seeing good things happen to people I actually know makes me feel a lot better, so rather than spend 15 minutes reading up on the BAJ headlines, I plan to take 15 minutes to do something nice for someone who actually matters to me. That will make me feel a lot better about the world than I do right now, having just been subjected to the 9,634,231st magazine mention of the BAJ saga (and that in a semi-serious news magazine no less).
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January 7th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Hey, how else am I supposed to pass the time in line at the cash register? Talking to strangers? You realize how scary that is? Imagine how scary it is for someone to talk to me! Having the sleeze rags racked up near the cash registers is a public service.
January 8th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
I’m sure speaking to you in the supermarket checkout would be a trying and frightening experience and, indeed, I write this stuff here to save people the discomfort of having me hold forth about it in the checkout line. Of course, it is a mortal sin to look a stranger in the eye. Dan Bern
has a line about how he decided to look everyone in the eye for one day and by the time he came home, two years later, he was heavyweight champion of the world (which doesn’t even approach some of Dan Bern’s stranger lyrics).
Anyway, with all the amazing and fascinating things that happen in our world, the part that mystifies me is not that people need something to read in the checkout line, but that they are more interesed in BAJ and celebrity cellulite than in the guy who just got a mechanical arm attached that responds to his thoughts, like a real arm.
February 2nd, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Thanks.
Thanks a lot.