I was sitting at a motel this morning eating one of them hideous hotel complimentary buffet breakfasts and thinking to myself, "Well, at least they had the good sense not to charge for it," and therefore allowing me to feel good about myself for not paying for it, when a morning talk show comes on television showing a clip of Lady Gaga's latest music video which looked like something that didn't make it to the screen from one of the Adam West Batman episodes.
The video itself didn't trigger me which was something I felt could be explained by the efficacy of the pain medication I was taking for a gout flare-up than as to any palatability of the video itself. But one of the hosts had the temerity to try and express his higher position on the hierarchy of Wokeness by pointing out that the video seemed to be from the old school period of Gaganess as to be differentiated from her later work. Now, there isn't any amount of whip cream, chocolate sauce, cinnamon, or sugar to make a statement like that smell or taste like anything other than what it is, a heaping shovelful of unadulterated horseshit. I nearly vomited up my cold scrambled eggs and my see-through slice of Applewood bacon. The situation was only made worse by Kelly Ripa's and Ryan Seacrest's sudden appearance on the screen. I don't know who hooked them up with Michael Jackson's dermatologist, but if they looked any whiter, they'd have to be outlined with a magic marker to make them visible. It looked like their TV contract called for the two of them to be held hostage in a basement full of cultivated mushrooms and let out only long enough to ramble incoherently between commercials for Ford and Maybelline products. In fact, the whole show looked like the bastard product of a drunken sexual union between a Fellini movie and Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. The feeling I got was worsened by the knowledge that unlike those two movies, the child produced was not supposed to be a fictionalized take on reality. It was supposed to be real life, and there were some fans in the background screaming to prove it. Later in my room, I saw a Facebook article about how there were a sizable number of people who refused to drink Corona beer because of its suspected link to the Coronavirus! The article even mentioned the fact that the company that makes the beer was even being criticized for a ad campaign it was running for new product. It hit me like a ton of bricks; the bastards have won! I have been waiting for this moment since I sat in church as a teenager and listened to a Baptist preacher rant on and on about the end of the world. He said, and I remember it very well, that the day would come when the world would make absolutely no sense at all, and that's when God would have no choice but to have to sort shit out. I mean we did get kind of get a clue when Jeffrey Epstein died. The forces promoting chaos aren't even bothering to try and hide things anymore. The whole world was waiting for Epstein's "suicide", and damned if it didn't happen! That has to be somebody's way of telling us, "Yeah, it's like that. What ya going to do about it?" The scientist and author Jeremy Griffith wrote this controversial take on the nature of reality called FREEDOM: The End of the Human Condition where he presents this rather prescient thought that humanity has gotten off the rails somewhat since the arrival of mass communication capabilities. He argues that modern media, far from helping us to understand the world around us, has instead introduced an ever increasing amount of delusion into the equation. Griffith argues that the speed of things has taken us ever further and deeper into this delusion to the point that the situation now threatens humanity's very existence. With 33% of America's beer drinkers refusing to drink Corona because of the Coronavirus, I can't help feeling that he's onto something. How else can we explain the popularity of Gaga whose career, in a saner world, should have ended with the singer entombed in fiberglass egg shell that was then taken and placed on display on Madison Avenue as a permanent memorial to America's untreated addiction to flash over substance and the relentless desire to not ever the face the truth of our own mortality. A plaque on the memorial would have to read, "Don't worry about dying, you'll be so doggoned amazed, you won't even know that you're gone." And don't bother telling me about her voice. If great singers needed to resort to such trivial tricks, at some point in their careers Pavarotti would have a worn chicken suit at the Met and Whitney Houston would have sang The Greatest Love of All while riding on a wrecking ball in her underwear. Only people who would also be eager to be invited to a sleepover at Harvey Weinstein's house need resort to such cheap, theatrical gimmicks. Our biggest loss is the fact that there no longer seems to be any true authenticity in this world, and the imbalance will never be restored by any amount sport heroes, celebrities, politicians, or social media trolls claiming that they are all about keeping it real. I'm afraid that just can't be folks. I no more know who those people really are than I do the disembodied voice I speak to when I call to ask why I'm not seeing my favorite television show. I do know that a lot of them would sell their souls to the devil, or their own family into bondage if it would get them more time in the spotlight and more money in the bank. And some point in the near future, Kelly, Gaga, De Niro, Ryan, Eminem, Taylor, Miley, Quentin, and all the others of their ilk will have far less relevancy for me than the dried stains on a filthy, discarded mattress placed on a sidewalk outside of some low end bordello. Come to think about it, they already do. |
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