[Cross-posted on Mas as Hell Club.]
In the past decade, Americans have become far more media savvy than ever before with more newspaper column inches and television airtime minutes being devoted to behind-the-scenes backstory gossip than ever before. Even our presidential campaigns are not immune to this new obsession. In this brave new world, it seems everyone is an expert on strategy, spin and framing.
My fear is that all this focus on what's going on backstage is taking our attention away from center stage, where wars are being launched, lives are being lost and people are starving.
A friend relayed a recent conversation he had with an acquaintance who never sees a play or a movie but reads Entertainment and Us Weeklies religiously. This guy-who-shall-remain-nameless apparently arrived at a recent lunch with the following pronouncement. "Drew Barrymore's career is over." When my friend asked the obvious follow-up "Why would you say that," the answer was: "Her numbers are down. She hasn't delivered box office gold in like two years!"
This, my friends, seems to be increasingly the world in which we toil. People are less interested in the work than they are in the Who What and Why behind it. It's like the world has become one big greenroom with an endless ticker along the bottom of our collective screen keeping us all up-to-date on where all the "players" fall in the pecking order.
As my grandmother would say: Oy!
