15 Minutes of Fame

Most of us won’t ever get it.  There are others, like White House party crashers or “real” housewives, who will.

Then there’s Steve Jobs, who got about 30 hours of fame post-mortem.  Plus there are books and who knows what else.  But the news cycle is short.  Exceedingly short because there are so many channels and so much competition.

I’m not neglecting print media, because everyone knows the Grey Lady will do a proper tribute.

In the 60’s people read the morning/afternoon paper, and watched Ozzie and Harriet, or Dick van Dyke or the evening news, perhaps a game show, on tv.

Now you have people selling their souls to get their lives on a reality show and get paid for it.  Look at the Kardashians, they’re laughing all the way to the bank!

I grew up in the 1960’s, no I had no idea of the summer of love or Dylan or Baez or Hendrix because I was just a kid.  But there is no way I’d subject our lives to a reality show, no matter what it paid.  There would be no interest because my husband and I don’t yell and scream or throw things at each other.

People seem to be screaming for attention, even if it’s the wrong kind of attention, like being filmed being a fool for everyone to laugh at.  And tv makes it easy to do these shows because they’re inexpensive to produce.  Look at even the home improvement shows that only allow $2,000 for a full home makeover.  How cheap is that?  Homeowners do a lot of the labor and there’s no fee for their involvement.

When I grew up we had three channels, ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS and the UHF channels which comprised one PBS channel in Toronto, Canada.  Sometimes I think it would be nice to get that again, and a morning paper.  Dee

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