Celebri-spiral™: Enough Already

Our culture is in a celebri-spiral. We're conflicted over our ridiculous, growing celebrity culture consumption via magazines, websites, and TV shows. In 2007, my love/hate conflict made me take to the blog-o-sphere. All writing on this site © Dave Singleton 2009.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

April 17, 2007: Celebrities for Gun Control and An Idiot-in-Chief Who Makes Me Celebri-spiral

Surrounded by junk food and escapist magazines, one with an incredibly important update on Jen and Angie (Feuding! Simmering! Splitting! Plotting!), I wasn't very successful at escaping last evening, as televised coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre played in the background like a bad, broken record.

After all, as Jossip notes, how do you get excited by network execs opting to show Dancing With The Stars, Deal or No Deal and Two and a Half Men rather than risk alienating advertisers by covering the deadliest school shooting incident in U.S. history?

Maybe the lack of escape was a good thing. I found this while surfing the Internet:

The NRA has posted a list of organizations and celebrities that have lent monetary, grassroots or some other type of direct support to gun control legislation (which they call anti-gun, of course).

The list encompasses just about every decent organization I can think of, and includes some surprising celebrities (Boys II Men, VIP protection expert Gavin de Becker, NBA star Rick Fox), as well as the usual suspects (Streisand, the two Democratic Baldwin brothers, Jane Fonda).

So while this tragedy renewed calls for tighter gun controls, our genius in the White House had the audacity to quickly cut them off, as noted feverishly in The Huffington Post's You're a Monster, Mr. President. The article excoriates W's so-called expression of sympathy that reinforced his policy to vigorously enforce the right to bear arms. Timely, Mr. President! Timely!

Most of the leading presidential candidates put out statements expressing their horror at the killings, but none mentioned that my home state of Virginia has some of the most lax gun laws in the country or that, according to The Washington Post, The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence reports no measurable gun control success in the eight years since Columbine.

Speaking of which, what will Michael Moore have to say, especially in the wake of his film Bowling for Columbine, which spotlighted on-campus shootings and America's relationship with guns? The one really scary, discernible difference between then and now is a lack of shock. How inured have we become to this level of social violence?

Other questions I'm thinking about today:

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It is weird that Michael Moore, Mr. Columbine documentarian himself, hasn't weighed in...

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 4:30:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Very weird, and also weird that no other famous people are talking about this much other than to quickly say they're sorry, blah blah blah...

Monday, April 23, 2007 7:19:00 AM  

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