Miltnr

ninety9:

lilitmarcus:

“Last night, I spoke before a group of gay journalism students at Columbia and was surprised to find that one of their top concerns was that Kim Kardashian brings down our culture! I was amazed that serious Ivy League students even devote brain cells to thinking about the Kardashian clan. But I was also taken aback that they didn’t realize that 15-minute “famous for the sake of being famous” stars are nothing new and nothing all that dangerous. There have always been socialites, party people, Zsa Zsa Gabors, camera grabbers, Warhol Superstars, and “It girls” who seize the spotlight without destroying the world. They have always been fun guilty pleasures, cartoon characters to dish and dis while tracking their every move and dissecting their every offense by the proverbial watercooler. And they don’t end up decimating mankind, it turns out.”

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Michael Musto: Kim Kardashian Does Not Destroy the Country

As a lover of all things bad TV, I have been on the receiving end of lots of hand-wringing “Reality TV is ruining America!” comments from people. Many of said hand-wringers claim they only read Russian novels in the original and don’t own a television, so I guess they must have heard about the Kardashians via osmosis or something. Here’s the takeaway: there have always been stupid people. There have always been spectacles. But they were around before we had cameras to document them, so you can just go clutch your pearls somewhere else.

I can claim pretty easily that I have never seen a Kardashian show. But it’s not like I’m reading Musil all night long. I’m probably watching It’s Always Sunny or listening to Rush. But it’s also pretty disingenuous to argue that the people who claim they have to or that blog logic and page views compel pandering and no they really would rather write about Archer but UNIQUES PAGE VIEWS EDITORS PUBLISHERS READERS. Morality is pretty relative, but hey ‘Just Following Orders dot NYPD dot Godwin’, sort of applies. People who assign themselves the role of cultural arbiter or commentator eventually sniff something like ‘Well you don’t have to watch it’ or ‘If you would just turn it off it would go away’ as if everyone who as ever made public the observation that trash culture veneration is actually culturally debilitating has a secret basic cable bulimia and sneaks off to the closet to choke down some Housewives before staggering out to point a Donald Sutherland finger at all the slideshows puked out by bright young things in New York lamenting flyover culture before taking another apple bobbing dunk in the pig slop of entertainment reportage.

I don’t have to turn it off because I never turned it on. Just because trash culture doesn’t have high art aspirations it doesn’t mean anyone talking about it can’t use a critical lens to determine gradations within the genre. Rush is better than Triumph. American Dad sucked. See? Not so hard.

But we can agree on one thing: everyone who goes to j-school is an idiot.

Before I jump into the fray a bit too late for this discussion, I’d like to state for the record that I enjoy trash TV and guilty pleasures and all of that (I mean, I wrote my dissertation on LOLCats, let’s call a spade a spade, here). I don’t think that Kim Kardashian or any of her ilk are ‘ruining culture’— culture is culture, whether high or low, and all of it reflects something about where we are as a society at any given moment in time. Srsly, just ask those crazy British Cultural Studies kids.

I think the real problem (and maybe what the J-school kids were trying to get at? Maybe?) is the proportion of attention that Kim Kardashian gets in relation to other more serious problems. The fact that her divorce was something close to the #1 news story for a few days when the economy is collapsing and there are wars going on and Jesus H. Chris, Rick Perry— well, to me, that seems to be more of the problem. I’m not blaming Kim Kardashian for that, of course that’s not her fault. It’s just concerning that people are so disillusioned or disconnected or distrustful of the news, etc that the only thing they can muster up interest for is 72 hours in some LA socialite’s life. That being said, people have been hand-wringing about the decline of the media for years, so, you know.