A Pathetic Waste of News Space

Cable networks have gone wall-to-wall on the death of Anna Nicole Smith.

It’s disgusting, really. Several dozen more people died in Iraq’s Civil War, we lost another helicopter, the Congress still hasn’t passed this year’s budget. There are so many other tragedies out there — Darfur, New Orleans, the rising crime rate. (My son saw An Inconvenient Truth today in school. He cried. He’s got a soul. He’s a good person. Unlike the subject of this post.)

But you won’t hear about any of it today. Anna Nicole Smith is dead.

Who was Anna Nicole Smith anyway? What did she ever do to deserve this, or the rest of it? She was a gold digger who got lucky big-time. She did a reality show that portrayed her as a brainless, soulless twit. She won a Supreme Court verdict on behalf of gold diggers everywhere. She appeared in Playboy. Sure sure, she was pretty good in The Hudsucker Proxy, playing (what else) a gold digger. She had giant fake breasts, colored (or phony) hair, and a figure out of the 1950s, which went to hell at the mere sight of a bonbon.

She was a waste of protoplasm, frankly. Had she not met and married J. Howard Marshall, then nearly 90, she might have died on the same day as she did, a drug-addicted crack whore. Who’s to say that’s not what she really was, and what she chose to be, what she deserved?

Who gives a shit about Anna Nicole Smith? Why should I have to look at
her, and listen to her enablers moan, when there is real news happening
in the world?

Of course, she could have made something of herself. She could have
helped drug-addicted crack whores get off the streets. She could have
gone to college. She could have raised her son, who died of a drug
overdose last year.

As late as yesterday, she could have turned her life around and turned
into something, or someone, worthwhile. Arianna Huffington, maybe, who mainly  married into money, but did something with that money and tried
to do good, first for the Republicans and later for Democrats. (Is that
called bi-political?)

But not Anna Nicole Smith. She didn’t do anything worthwhile. She never meant anything to anyone but herself. (And J. Howard, obviously.)

So why does the TV news care? Why are the rest of us supposed to?

The wall-to-wall coverage of this "story" speaks to the deadness of the
TV soul today, and a certain deadness in our society. We care more for the
lucky, those born with or falling into money, than we do about real
people, real problems, reality. Earning is nothing, inheritance all. It’s a sick fantasy world that plays
out on our boob tubes every day, and we’re the boobs.  This is what is destroying us, not porn, not drugs, not war….

And want to know what’s funny? They dare call this nonsense journalism. To think I once sought, assiduously, for many years, to be counted among their
number.

Thank God I’m not.