Couple of the Year
I've been thinking about why the White House Party Crashers have attracted so much media attention and I've concluded it's because they represent everything that is screwed up about America at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century.
To begin with, they have no shame. They lie, they cheat the little people in their lives, they run fake charities, they welsh on their obligations, and they value and pursue everything that is fake and shallow--and then they have the chutzpah to ask a network to pay them to tell their lies on TV.
In an earlier age in America, we would put them in the stocks in the middle of the public square for a public shaming. But in an era of "John & Kate Plus Eight", the concept of shame has been banished from the public square. Bruce Springsteen called reality TV the "theater of humiliation", but what's amazing is how many people are so willing to trade humiliation for that greater currency of this decade--Celebrity. The New York Times' Bill Carter suggests there may be 10,000 of these talentless but needy reality show "performers" floating around our current cultural wasteland.
It's easy to blame the TV network programmers for the plague of forgettable strivers like the Salahi's. But every channel surfer who pauses in slack-jawed amazement for more than five minutes on Flavor of Love, or Real Housewives of Orange County is encouraging this garbage.
The Salahi's are living proof you get the culture you deserve.















