Anna Nicole Smith is dead. She's been dead for the better part of a week. This is apparently the biggest thing happening in the United States right now. Five servicemen died in Iraq in a single day during the same week. Not front page news. Anna Nicole Smith, a lower case “c” celebrity at best is the front page news. What's wrong with America?
I swear I've seen more of Anna Nicole in the last week than I had cumulatively during the rest of her career. I barely watch mainstream media because it really does suck, it's always harping about the same thing for twelve hours in five minute blocks. One of the best things about CNN is how their footage is in 30 second bits, and you'll see the same 30 second block running continuously in the background for the entire 5 minutes that Wolf Blitzer is going over what happened during Anna Nicole's last minutes…oh CNN, you ARE America's most trusted news source.
This is a country where congress got up in arms because a sex scene was buried deep in a video game (which was rated “M” for “Mature” anyway). This scene was absolutely NO worse than anything you'd see during the 8:00 hour on any major network. There was no nudity, there was no graphic depiction of a sexual act, and to get to it, you had to jump through so many hoops it was ridiculous. This is also a video game in which through the course of normal play you use a sniper gun to blow the heads off of bad guys, civilians and police.
Sex = bad.
Violence = good.
This is a country where two years later Janet Jackson's semi-exposed boob is still talked about (and anyone who actually saw the incident would have to analyze the footage more than the Zapruder film…back, and to the left). It's the same country where last night on TV I watched a woman doctor on a TV show use a power drill to burr into a man's skull to relieve the pressure of his injuries. With no warning.
Human body = bad.
Burrowing into the brain of a man = good.
A country that's become so Xenophobic that getting into it from Canada requires a passport. A country which regularly stops the oh so terrifying comic books that we ship to it and holds them for up to a month with no reason whatsoever. A country where George W got voted in…twice.
Thank god I'm Canadian.