Cultural Effluvia

I was sitting around with my friend Clay the other night, and although I like to think of us both as being rather intelligent, grandly inquisitive and gleeful miners of esoterica, somehow the topic of conversation turned to Brangelina. I've never followed all that closely, but lately I've been struck by this frenetic, very visible do-goodism she seems to be partaking in. A kind of manic altruism one sees in the likes of Bono. (Fair trade clothing made of organic cotton! Environmental activism! Conferring with Heads of State! Acceptance speeches as Words of Hope!) It's wearying. It seems as though she can't merely be the "world's sexiest woman," she has to be the holiest, too. There's an interesting Janus-faced edge to the whole tiresome thing: Bisexual, incest-rumor-monger/ Orphan-saviour; Goodwill ambassador/husband-stealer. And speaking of impending motherhood, where on this globe will one be able to go to escape the Baby Jolie-Pitt juggernaut? Nowhere, I tell you. The "Baby Jolie-Pitt" story and the "Has Jessica Gotten Too Much Filler" story and the "1000lb Man Stuck on Toilet" and the "Hollywood Starlets Wasting Away on New Diet" stories are part of the great vomiting forth, the deluge of mass culture effluvia that this country perpetrates upon the rest of the world. C mused about a... I can't remember his term exactly but a kind of psychic retro-delete where not only would, say, J-Lo disappear completely, but all mention of her or anything she has touched would be excised from one's mind. Brilliant.