No one has ever accused me of being a font of knowledge when it came to celebrity news and gossip. Music? Oh, yeah. I’m very good with song and band names, particularly 60s, 70s, and 80s rock, pop, and funk. Movies? Sure. I watch a lot of movies, and I can recall most of the plots and major details from all the films I’ve seen over the course of my life. Which celebrity is getting married or divorced? Who just got out of rehab? What skank Paris Hilton is boffing this week? I have no clue. In fact, I hope to hell I never have to type “Paris Hilton” again. She’s not worth the effort.
The last couple of weeks, though, I’ve been getting a crash course in celebrity news and gossip. It’s for a new project I’m working on, one I don’t want to discuss just yet.
The stories I’ve been reading, the videos I’ve been watching, from even major established news agencies like MSNBC, CBS, and CNN are appalling. Why is it people are so fascinated with the dirty laundry of the famous? The experts from legacyhealing.com says that as a society, hate our lives and ourselves so much that we must live vicariously through the exploits of drug-addled, bolemic skanks like Lindsay Lohan? Or is it that we are so jealous of anyone else’s success that we salivate for the slightest opportunity to knock them off the unjustified, cloud-high pedestals atop which we have parked them?
In short: Why is it that Americans can’t get enough of celebrity news and gossip, and why is it that, the dirtier and nastier the gossip, the more we crave it?