The No-P.R. Zone...I like it!!

Although I generally don't care enough about reality show "stars" to comment about them, I just found this morning's interview Jon Gosselin gave on Good Morning America somehow so...refreshing and satisfying. You can also read about it here.

In a world where just about anyone who ever finds himself in front of a camera somehow seems to sound like they've already been coached by armies of P.R. people, Gosselin just said it like it was. This otherwise annoying, irritating, and utterly uninteresting human being spoke of his even more irritating shrew of a wife, Kate, their breakup, and explained how much he "despised" her. YES!!!!! My man! I mean, aren't you just tired of hearing so many public people who go through conflicts and messy breakups - people you know just detest each other - and they usually wind up talking in a sort of plastic P.R.-speak like "I still care and respect her," "it just didn't work out," "we're the best of friends" and so on and so on? Care and respect...yeah, right!

I can't believe that I'm writing this in a public forum, but Jon Gosselin on Good Morning America was the most interesting thing I heard all day long so far. And the day's more than half over!

You're fat, ugly, and stupid!

Now that a new school year is starting, one is bound to run across a lot of articles like this. You can find them online or, I bet, a lot of the various women’s and mom’s magazines will run them. It’s all about building self esteem in children. And it’s all a great, big, fly-drawing, steaming pile of bovine manure!

If I hear yet another person whining about developing children’s adequate level of self esteem, I’m going to punch them in the face hard enough to cause serious permanent damage…the kind that will give them a low self esteem, develop body image disorders, and leave them spending thousands of their hard-earned dollars in therapists’ offices trying to get in touch with their inner child and learning to love themselves.

As a person who primarily earns his living teaching in college, the self esteem movement has just about driven me to the end of my rope. This is a movement that has been turning people who have started grade school roughly in the 90s and afterward into sniveling, whining, near-psychopathically self-centered douche bags.

Is low self esteem really the biggest problem America’s children are contending with? Looking at some research comparing U.S. kids to those in the rest of the world, I think not. Guess what, folks: American kids have the highest levels of self esteem in the world. But not only do we seem to think we’re God’s gift to everything, but usually people who are the least competent, the most inept, also have the highest levels of self esteem.

And yes, incompetence and ineptitude are really important concepts. Sometimes people need to be told that they SUCK! But in the world of the self esteem movement, we have seen an educational system that tries to create a good self image among children by telling them that they are always perfect, they are flawless, they are the greatest in the world no matter what they do, and that no one has a right to ever criticize them or correct them…EVER!

This is an outrage and something that this culture will be paying a higher and higher price for with every passing year. You see, all the people who are incapable of finding China on a map, who don’t know who the U.S. fought in World War 2 (by the latest estimate, that’s about 40 some percent of the American population), who can’t name the first President of the United States, who don’t know who the governor of their own state is, who have no idea who the Vice President is, are people who all have a very high self esteem, who are in touch with their feelings, and who have learned to feel good about themselves and know that they’re special and unique little gifts to humanity from God, and they all have very unique and very important other abilities.

But that's what THEY want you to think!

This article about the Michael Jackson death hoax hoax is just priceless. Apparently someone started the online rumor about Jackson faking his death as an "experiment" to see how fast rumors and conspiracy theories have spread on the Internet. And, indeed, they spread very fast because there is still a whole crop of Michael Jackson conspiracy theory web pages up and active. As conspiracy theorists usually do, they point out all the "obvious" mistakes and inconsistencies in the "official version" of the story.

So now that the death hoax conspiracy has been outed as joke, I wonder how quickly the true believers will claim that the real conspiracy is the claim that that conspiracy is not real?

Confused yet?

Well, keep surfing the web this week because as we're heading toward Friday, the 11th, all the "9/11 was an inside job" nutbars will be busier than ever, so confusing conspiracy theories and conspiratorial fantasies will be busier than ever.

And tune in to "Culture Wars" on the 10th to hear me and Ernabel Demillo put in our two cents' worth!!!

Well, it's about time!

The Michael Jackson death-hoax conspiracy theories are starting to spread on the Internet. At last!! Check out the story here.

Actually, I'm kind of surprised that it took so long for this conspiracy theory to get going. I do have something of a fascination for this since my book on the cultural history on conspiracy theories and conspiracy theory films should be available from McFarland publishing by next year. So now I'm looking forward to reading more of how this particular theory will grow and play out in cyberspace. Will it have the sort longevity as the Elvis is alive or the government-was-behind-the-9/11-attacks conspiracy theories?

Although my favorite cyberspace conspiracy theory is still the one being spread by a small handful of Apocalyptic religious nuts. These are the folks who believe that the third Antichrist is none other than...Arnold Schwarzenegger!! Just google that one and check it out.

As someone who was called the "Antichrist" on the Culture Wars radio show (Returning on September 10, only on WSPC radio), I am kind of partial to all the Antichrist conspiracy theories.

Billy Ray is Da Man!!!

This article about Billy Ray Cyrus is a couple of days old only because I just ran across it by accident. I haven't made it a point in a while to keep up on all of Billy Ray's comings and goings. But I do love this article about him coming to his daughter's defense after she was criticized for dancing too close to a pole at the Teen Choice Awards. Apparently in the demented, perverse minds of all the country's concerned "family advocates" and media critics, the pole suggested strip clubs or some such nonsense.

Papa Cyrus, of course, disagreed and defended Miley in an Entertainment Tonight interview. Nice going!!

But now I wonder if he's still on the advisory board of a bunch of censorious, reactionary morons like the Parents Television Council, the kinds of people who would notice things like this in the first place and get outraged over the sleazy degradation of America's wholesome childhood and traditional family values.

Oh, mother! Blood!!

This is a quick link to more fascinating studies confirming the genetic roots of evil, violent, and antisocial behavior: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090804090946.htm Psychos, it seems, are born.

Nowhere does it mention media use, video games, and horror movies. There are some cool supplemental articles too.

The big monkey movie.

Out of a good summer, the only thing to suffer on this end has been the upkeep of this blog. A million apologies!!!

Although some of my travels – which I’m kind of using as a feeble excuse for not always managing the blog the way I should have – did give me some interesting things to ponder…and to remain amazed by how right I am about my ideas about media and audience interaction.

For example, I was so glad to have wonderful bonding experiences with my 4.5 year old nephew…over films like Peter Jackson’s King Kong. As a matter of fact, watching that film over and over again with him (at his request: “I love this movie, Uncle Barna, I want to watch it every day!) created the best sort of relationship that can exist between uncle and nephew: a favorite uncle can always be counted on to show you fun films your parents would never let you watch.

But my nephew’s ongoing requests to see the film – with its many frightening and violent scenes – whereas he avoids other entertainment that upsets him, demonstrated how active even a small kid can be in controlling what he knows he is capable of handling and censoring his own viewing choice when material becomes too intense to handle.

In the words of the genius George Carlin: “If you want to help children, leave them the fuck alone!” They’re not made of glass and they don’t need to be locked away in a cabinet to be kept safe.