How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tabloids
I love tabloids. As a way to unwind after “teaching” the
youth of America this school year, I would often peruse the Daily Mail at the
expense of reading “real” news. No one does tabloids better than the Brits. For
every grainy baby bump picture in People magazine, there are 30 clear shots in
the Daily Mail, plus actual columns devoted to all of the Middleton’s wardrobe
choices. Even their celebrities are better than ours. We have the Kardashians,
and they had Peaches Geldof (Let me quickly bring you up to speed: socialite/model/TV
personality named fucking Peaches, succumbs to drug problem).
When I realized that I was wasting a lot of time reading
about vacuous pretty people, I uninstalled the Daily Mail app from my phone. This
was a Bad Move, mostly because the situation in the world today is no better
than poor Peaches’ life. Since school let out, I have subbed real news for
celebrity news, and I’m just about ready to throw in the towel.
The world has gone bat shit crazy, and since this is
reality, and not a Jennifer Aniston pregnancy, it is somehow, much, much more
depressing.
Here is but a sampling of what I have learned after
following real news outlets (both American and British) in the last few weeks:
Salah Abdeslam, one of the terrorists responsible for the
Paris attacks that killed 130 people, is currently hanging out in a prison
south of Paris with his own special sports hall. He watches a lot of reality
TV. He was allowed to leave France the day after the attacks because Belgian
authorities did not tell the police in time that he was involved in jihadist
circles. He was not immediately arrested
in Belgium, because the police had to wait until 5AM to comply with a law banning
overnight police searches.
And,
Dropping the ball in a MAJOR WAY also relates to the tale of
Omar Mateen, the man responsible for killing 49 people in Orlando. He was
interviewed by the FBI in 2013 and 2014, but was not found to be a threat.
Regular old police can use evidence found against you after
an illegal stop, thanks to the SCOTUS’s ruling last month in Utah vs. Strieff
(I mean, who needs the 4th amendment?), but the FBI missed putting
up a red flag, not once but TWICE for someone who sympathized with suicide
bombers and had mental health issues.
And,
Racial tensions are mounting, mostly because cops keep shooting black people with seemingly no consequences. If you try to have a
conversation about this with people and draw parallels to the past, they stare
at you blankly. This is because the Civil Rights Movement is apparently not
taught in public schools anymore, but I'll be damned if all the kids get iPads and can make their thinking visible. Now people are
shooting cops.
Meanwhile,
The GOP-nominee presumptive tweeted out a picture of Hillary,
calling her the “most corrupt candidate ever” over a text box that looked a lot
like the Star of David.
Yet,
A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that voters deemed
this man more trustworthy than Mrs. Clinton.
Meanwhile,
Mrs. Clinton was voluntarily interviewed for the FBI for, at
best, gross negligence, and at worst, breaking the law and seriously
compromising national security. Her husband just happened to run into the
Attorney General at the Phoenix airport days prior. The FBI will not prosecute
her, despite giving a press conference that sounded like a fake-out of reality
show proportions.
If you’re keeping up with them, the Kardashians do more than the FBI
(except Rob, of course).
Also,
The United States Holocaust Museum has asked people not to
play Pokemon Go on their phones during their visit. A spokesmen called playing the game
inside a memorial to victims of Nazism “extremely inappropriate”.
This just might be the understatement of the century. Also, the end of the human race is probably nigh upon us, because that is a real quote from a BBC article dated five days ago.
In the end, the depression caused by the ubiquity of the
Kardashian family is somehow more manageable than keeping abreast of the state
of affairs in the world today. So I bid you adieu BBC, New York Times, Washington
Post, all of you lot. It’s not you, it’s me. Well, actually it is you, but it
is also me. Let’s call it a conscious uncoupling motivated by self-preservation. I
cannot and do not want to speculate on the state of the world in a year’s time.
I need something a little more hopeful, like the promise of a new Taylor Swift
album inspired by a monster break-up and rebound with famous actor.
Suddenly the future looks bright.
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