Herb Urban

In the intervening years spent procrastinating entering the blogging fray, I had visions of the audio/visual pleasuredome I wished to create. I noticed too many celeblographers were exceeding bandwidth recycling the same sordid tales of our dim witted modern Greek tragedies — the Lindays, the Britneys, the Parasites. I wanted to honor those unadorned with our adulation; the universally forgotten and formerly famous. In short, the human interest stories no longer deemed interesting by the self anointed opinion shapers.

When the likes of John Oates, Jack Wagner and Lionel Richie are expelled to Hollywood’s D- List purgatory, their dimmed star on the walk of fame is reduced to non-biodegradable toilet paper repurposed to prop up the Hollywood Hills’ landfills of lost hopes and dreams. Today’s A List gossip mongers turn their surgically repaired noses up at them, only pausing to callously extend fate’s fickle middle finger in the direction. We all deserve better.

Maybe their glory days of DUI’s and reckless coked up car chases have given way to a subdued suburban existence of taking the kids to soccer games in Chevy Astro Vans, grooving to smooth jazz and has been celebrity golf tournaments. Still, when Jack Wagner wins a no name celebrity golf tournament, someone needs to blog about it.

We live in a disposable society, where everyone and everything is easily commoditized; used, abused and tossed aside for the next big story or scandal. We know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. We are too easily distracted by corporate conglomerates who have their hands in everything from the news we read, the TV shows we watch to the billion dollar defense contracts issued at times of manufactured wars.

What comes through our series of addicting tubes — the online, the plasma screen, talk radio — is a slow but steady vile sewage leak of insignificance. Constitutional crisis are relegated to newspaper small print while the paternal suits of deceased, drug addled ex-playmates captivate the nation.

This incessant force fed craving for heavily processed crap corrupts our souls and minds, turning us into the neighborhood peeping toms with a needless bird’s eye view into the uterus of the rich and famous.

As one man with one seldom read forum, I refuse to contribute to this calculated corrosion of good citizenship, concocted by unethical politcans and their greedy corporatism allies. They exploit the human misery of the few in order to inflict more needless suffering on the many.

Each front page story detailing Lindsay Lohan’s latest legal woes is one less story about the near fifty million Americans without adequate health care, or an investigative report into the no bid military contracts awarded to Bush loyalists and craven war profiteers. The months long coverage of Paris Hilton’s jail term fills the airtime that could have been given to footage of the thousands of caskets returning from Iraq. As the last frontier of people powered Democracy, the internet should do better.

That is why I insist on shining the spotlight back on those forgotten faces we have cast aside. We can delude ourselves into believing the trivial antics of the spoiled elite make for rich and compelling human interest stories with relevance to our own lives. But how does that argument hold up when we examine the private lives of Richard Marx or Richard Moll? Suddenly we lose all interest. Therein lies the problem.

The intimate details of a stranger’s personal life bores us to tears unless we are told their lives merit our attention. Baaaa lony. Self governance can not function properly in a land of passive sheep. The Founding Fathers created a system of government that relied on a well informed citizenry to hold the scoundrels into account and protect the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. That means impeachment for the likes of George and sidekick Dick.

They also expected a free and fair press to aid in our cause. But somewhere along the way, we outsourced those duties to news divisions who take their marching orders from slick ratings driven Entertainment moguls, turning news into clever diversions and song fodder for Don Henley.

So I will continue to bore my readers to tears with the mundane daily doings of those no longer placed on a pedestal of the purpose of whacking around like a pinata on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Hard Copy, Dateline NBC, The Today Show, Good Morning America, the CBS Evening News, Current Affair, Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight, E New Daily, Larry King Live and their ilk.

To celebrate the unadorned reminds us celebrities are no more inherently interesting than you or I. We have the power to stop being pawns in their game of obfuscation, denial and distraction. Until we focus on the common good, rather than the regrettable misdeeds of the salacious few, things will continue to go down the crapper at warp speed.

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