’Hinky’ couple
“It will come as news to no one that there’s something hinky about the Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes Relationship Extravaganza. It’s a hilarious sham, so transparently ripe for satire. …
“In her interview [in the August issue of W magazine] … the 26-year-old Holmes — a television star who’s been speaking competently to the press for almost a decade now — comes off as nothing less than a chilling fem-bot, repeating her … scripted shtick over and over and over again, all while being closely monitored by her omnipresent Scientology baby sitter, the skeevy Jessica Rodriguez.
“’I’ve found the man of my dreams,’ ’I’ve never met anyone like Tom,’ ’Tom is the most incredible man in the world,’ ’Meeting Tom — I’m just exhilarated. He makes me laugh, we have fun, we understand each other, everything is so aligned. I feel so lucky and so — like I’ve been given such a gift … And it’s just really amazing.’ These are Holmes’ non sequitur replies to Haskell’s questions about everything and anything.
“In a 1,700-word piece, [interviewer Robert] Haskell can’t get Holmes to talk about anything else, and when he asks her reasonable questions about whether it’s been hard to adjust to living with ’her man’ after knowing him for just six weeks, she nonsensically replies, ’He’s the man of my dreams.’”
—Rebecca Traister, writing on “Holy fem-bot, Batman!” Tuesday in Salon at www.salon.com
Fear of freedom
“Parentalism … emerges when we begin to suspect that we ourselves are not competent to make our own choices, to yearn for someone to relieve us of the burden of choice. …
“Jean-Paul Sartre described the ’anguish’ that comes with our realization that we are ’condemned to be free.’ Marxist psychologist Erich Fromm diagnosed the totalitarian movements of the 20th century as symptoms of an urge to ’escape from freedom,’ from the displacement of a feudal world in which identities were given — a place for everyone, and everyone in his place — with a capitalist order that made who we were and what we were to become seem dizzyingly contingent. How much more true is that when the lodestones by which we navigated that sea of choices — religious communities, or localities with their own longstanding mores — are themselves objects of choice on the market, in an increasingly interconnected and mobile world that arrays communities and faiths before us like so many cans of soup on a [supermarket] shelf.”
—Julian Sanchez, writing on “Save Me From Myself,” Tuesday in Reason Online at www.reason.com
’Reality’ hoax
“Reality television is a hoax. It’s no more real than ’The O.C.’ or ’Law and Order,’ and it’s considerably more deceptive. It’s also much more profitable. … Dave Bell, president of Dave Bell Associates … produced the first ’Unsolved Mysteries’ specials, among other reality projects. He describes reality TV programming as ’the most unreal situation for something called ’reality’ that anyone could imagine.’
“According to Bell, ’most reality TV is, for the most part, scripted. … A lot of the people who appear in reality TV shows are actors or wannabe actors or wannabe celebrities at least.’ …”
Reality TV is a delicious scam. Producers provide an entertaining, voyeuristic Hollywood freak show nouveau, slap the label ’reality’ on it and tell us that they are unmasking truths of human existence before our very eyes.”
—Benjamin Shapiro, writing on “How ’reality’ shapes reality,” Thursday in WorldNetDaily at www.worldnetdaily.com
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