Tabloid Truths (That's called an oxymoron)

My fellow Americans, why do you buy tabloids? Why do you get your groove on grazing on famous people's unhappiness,flaws and hardships?

I've never been able to figure out why people feel so free to criticize celebrities. I'm not talking about the wannabe celebutantes who feed on the paparazzi frenzy like sharks in a haze of chum. Those waddling bags of fatuousness deserve judgement on a Cecil B. DeMille scale. I'm talking about the folks who, in the course of pursuing their art, become famous simply because they are so damned good at what they do. Is that really a terrific reward for being tops in your field? Not being able to go out for a deck of smokes without being ambushed by a pack of carrion eaters with cameras who hope that you are sporting a hideous under-grounder on your chin, or, even better, expose a pound and a half of less then toned flesh? C'mon, my fellow Americans, think about it for a minute. Does it really make you feel that much better about yourself to buy a magazine with a cover photo featuring a young singer who is so fucked up and is in such great pain and confusion that she has shaved her head? Do you really think she did it, 'just for the attention?' Did it ever occur to you that 'just the attention' might have been what made her shave her head in a crazy sort of S.O.S in hopes of prompting some halfway normal person to take a bat and beat a pathway to sanity through the horrific scrum of human scavengers that surround her? And don't you dare tell me that, well, she's got all this money, and she's just spoiled and drunk and a whore and stupid. How do YOU know what she has? I can tell you one thing she doesn't have, she doesn't have the luxury of going into a public bathroom to change her tampon without worrying about someone sticking their cell phone under the wall of the stall to take a snap of her and then selling it to some rag who will airbrush the tampon to make it look like a syringe. Tell me that's the glamorous life.

And why do you take such sadistic glee in watching two people ending their love affair? Can you imagine walking out of your home after losing the person whose mere presence made your heart swoop and your lips tremble, and being attacked by some asshole who smells like tacos and Axe cologne? Who rushes up to you, sticks a camera in your face and screams, "HEY HEY HEY, what happened? Was it your fault? What did you do? Was there another woman/horse/man/prostitute? Did he think you were getting too old? Was it because your last album bombed? Are you getting fat? Whose car is that in your driveway? Why did you sleep in a hotel two weeks ago? Are you on drugs?" And on and on and on. And then, seeing the true story of your broken heart on a tv 'entertainment' channel trumpeted by a botox ridden host whose soulful commiseration is about as genuine as Iran's statement that they are using their weapons grade plutonium to explore alternate energy sources. To go through that, to have a glutinous mess of half-truth's and innuendos served up as the red hot gospel of your broken heart, to have this swill greedily gobbled by a public high on this heady hit of schadenfreude. To go through that because you can sing so well, so amazingly well that people fall in love listening to you, that people decide to put down the pills and try another day because of you, because of the years of dedication and hard work and persistence and shitty gigs because it's what you're built for and what you have to do or die? And this is how we say thank you? My fellow Americans, you know what? Fuck you if you buy those rags. Fuck you if you watch those jackals who make their living sipping tears and glorying in painful embarassment. Fuck you if you think the only antidote for your miserable life is to read and believe shockingly blatant lies about your fellow human being. Because if you continue to do those things the absolute tragedy is this; what you don't realize is how badly you need that voice that can sing you to a different place, that writer who can open your eyes, that actor who can transport you to a world that can change you. That's the antidote to your unhappy life, that's the magic elixir. And it costs about the same amount as your tabloid.