TW: Slow news holiday weekend was ripe for a frenzy over the crashers- of the State dinner and into a hydrant outside his house. Folks can follow what they wish but relative to the State dinner yet another bit of civility and national class suffer a defeat at the hands of the exploiters.
From Tom Schaller at 538.com:
"I am sick to my stomach over That Couple. And now comes news they are peddling their exclusive story to the highest media bidder. Disgusting, but hardly surprising.
I’m not going to use their names because you can be sure that, between giddy calls to their agent and lawyer, they are rushing to their computer every half hour to Google themselves. Who’s talking about us now? What are people saying? Look, another picture of us on the web! We’re more famous than any of our friends—no, all of our friends, combined! Tehehehee—the joke’s on you, America!
No, you’re not famous; you’re infamous. You’re situated squarely at the bottom of an already too-deep and increasingly murky barrel of celebrity culture, celebrity journalism, and (un)reality TV, the depths of which are probably making even Andy Warhol cringe in his grave. I want this to be your fifteenth minute. I want your egg timer to ding now, so you can exit our national discourse as swiftly, completely and permanently as possible.
And, you know what? We can do something about it. We can let the producers of whatever crap program agrees to pay these creepy, pathetic, attention-starved goons for the rights to interview That Couple that not only will we tune out that specific broadcast, but we will tune out that program in the future as well. We can compound the effect by identifying the companies that sponsor the airing of the interview, and boycotting their products or services.
Why? Because there are literally millions of Americans who bust their asses through school and job training, who serve our country in the military in harm’s way, or merely plumb our toilets at home or change our baskets at the office—who, in short, work hard, raise their families and pay their taxes--and do all of that with zero expectation that they should win some version of the public celebrity lottery that suddenly showers them with a degree of fame and fortune that That Couple not merely aspires to, but clearly believe they deserve. When somebody like Captain Sully catapults from nowhere to national stardom--or my fellow Bethlehem Central High School alum Rich Jadick becomes a national hero after re-joining the Marines in his late-30s (and despite having a wife and kids and the chance to make a lot of money safely back in the States) to help the medical Corps revolutionize front-line emergency medical care--at least they earned their fame. And I harbor no complaints about how showmen across the ages—from P.T. Barnum to Muhammad Ali, from Harry Houdini to Madonna—maximized their opportunities in order to achieve greater fame and fortune, because they could boast an underlying talent or social value, and often both.
That Couple offers nothing of the sort. In fact, they offer nothing beyond their naked greed and attention-starved egos. They are private and public leeches..."
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/11/that-couple.html
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