Nine-thirty a.m., hunched
over the computer in a friend’s bachelor pit in Washington.
Surrounded by dirty clothes like nesting material for a Norwegian
rat. Cup of coffee you could degrease an engine block with. Stack
of grocery-store tabloids: The National Enquirer, The Star, The
World Weekly News. I’m preparing to mine the nether regions of
the American zeitgeist as soon as I have a pulse.
I know. You thought this
column got written on a sprawling wooded campus in the Catskills,
with marble libraries, research assistants with nice shapes and
plaid skirts and big brains. No. Sometimes I write it from a
Dempster Dumpster in lower Manhattan. Laptops are wonderful for
that. Anyway, on the screen wait twelve Viagra ads and a plug for
breast enlargements. Maybe I’ll get a breast enlargement. Or
better, a codpiece. If it has a zippered compartment so I can keep
my keys in it.
Some of this stuff is
mysterious. “Fred Reed! Do you want a larger penis?” Whose, I
wonder. How much is shipping and handling? Is there a display
case?
And how do they know what
“larger” is? There’s probably a federal data base.
In front of me is a copy
of the National Enquirer, the mother of grocery-rack eddas that
chronicles the pervasive decline. It used to be good for keeping
up with decapitations, space aliens, and manifestations of Elvis.
It carried stories nobody else did: “Woman Gives Birth to
Trilobite.” “Giant Carrot with Face of Dalai Lama.”
“Dwarves, Evicted From Posh Hotel, Honeymoon in Cardboard
Box.”
Now it is about movie
stars. Or parts of movie stars: “Amazing Photos: Stars with
Cellulite.” Does that not make the heart sing? A lot of people
must have too much time on their hands. The cellulite in question
belongs to “Demi, Goldie, Nicole Kidman, J.Lo, and more,” none
of whom do I know who is. They’re probably important, like
Aristotle. The photo shows what I took to be the back side of the
moon, actually the back side of either Demi, Goldie . . . .
I worry about movie stars.
A website somewhere shows photos of presumed hot tickets in
make-up, and then in candid shots in the street. They run from
ordinary to ugly. Some have the allure of golf bags, especially
the ones trying to look thirty years younger with what seem to be
injection-molded cosmetics.
What’s the social
undercurrent here? Strap in: We’re about to probe a dark rivulet
of the collective unconscious. In the groc-tabs, it’s not
“Miss Jennifer Lopez” or “Mr. Scott Peterson.” It’s J.Lo
and Scott, with the easy familiarity of a high-school sleep-over.
The product here is artificial entré. If you’re forty pounds
overweight, lonely or wishing you were, and stuck in some boring
low-level job at the post office where you can’t even shoot
people any longer – why, the Enquirer will put you on a
first-name basis with glamorous over-promoted nonentities. For
only $2.99, you can do a line of coke with Sylvester, or share a
Cellulite Experience with Demi.
Television. That’s what
does it. It makes people in trailer parks, which for practical
purposes is most of us, think life ought to amount to more than
feeding the mortgage monster and bailing ungrateful kids out of
whatever disaster they’ve most recently managed to create. In
1900, before television, nobody expected life to be fulfilling.
And it wasn’t. You could depend on it. Unless of course you
thought it was fulfilling to lead a decent life and raise your
kids happily in a small town in Missouri.
You didn’t have any
knowledge of the rich and useless. You knew they were out there,
like malaria and the chupacabras, but you didn’t have to
look at them.
Now the lobotomy box rubs
the aggregate face in the rompings of the California glitz kennel,
where every guy is a hunk and every gal a babe, by definition
golden and happy and smiling, and off to Paris by private jet to
interminable gratification.
So people without jets
think ponder their lives and think, Is this all there is? Yep.
I don’t understand
supermodels either. But the tabs love them. Face it: They’re a
mess. They’ve got no breasts, no hips, and no fannies, and walk
as if they had something wrong with their feet. You’ve heard
crossed eyes? They’ve got crossed ankles. Imagine that a mad
Japanese scientist tried to design a human robot and came
reasonably close. Or think of women designed by homosexuals.
The poor creatures prance
down the runways wearing funny-looking clothes that no real woman
would let her dog sleep on, looking pouty and sullen like spoiled
adolescents—and they become celebrities. Yes. Everywhere women
stop eating: They too want to look like broom handles. I don’t
get it.
Super-modeldom is probably
treatable. Force-feed them Big Macs with lots of Secret Sauce,
give them estrogen supplements, and tell them to drop the snotty
expression or you’ll drown them.
The Weekly World News is
what really worries me. They should put something in the ink that
sterilizes anyone who reads it. May 13: “Viking Frozen in Block
of Ice,” plus, “Eight-Year-Old Pianist Has 14 Fingers.”
Probably from West Virginia. “Ancient Egyptians Invented
Baseball.” I picture Tutankhamen sliding into home, spikes high,
while an intermittently swooning Nefertete chomps hotdogs in the
stands.
Who reads this stuff? I
don’t want names. A phylum will do.
I can understand, barely,
reading about the cellulite of some talentless twit who may have
been cute twenty years go, but probably wasn’t. Given a choice,
I’d rather pound my thumb with a claw-hammer, but I’m a
curmudgeon. But movie stars actually exist to an extent. You might
want to know something about them. Scientists study those weird
funguses on the damp sides of trees that get all orange and purple
and goopy. Demi’s cellulite can’t be much worse.
But . . . “Gal Keeps
Hubby’s Corpse in the House”? You can hear the far-off
mournful tolling of the bell curve.
I mean, do people actually
believe this stuff? “Satan and Saddam Were Partners—and This
Picture Proved It!” A Photo-Shopped picture of a cloud over
Baghdad with a diabolic visage, in need of braces, peering from
it. Sure, an obvious plant by the Bush administration, probably
straight from Ari Fleischer, the White House ventriloquist. If you
can’t have anthrax, go with a demon, I say.
But . . . but . . . do
even, I mean . . . do even Weakly World News readers reckon the
Devil His Own Self is now a weapon of Mass whatever? That
scientists are going to revive a nonexistent frozen Viking? (How
would they know when they had?)
If there’s any hope, I
tell you, it lies with bugs and plankton.
