Deadly nighshade, a semi-beautiful but undesirable fungus. (Wiki Commons)
This morning, I mentioned to Simon that a friend has posted that there are now more Kardashian TV shows than there are episodes of “I Love Lucy.” Most of us FB friends think that's very sad. When I explained my thoughts about the situation to Simon, I noted that the Kardashians were cultural fungus, grown from miniscule spores, attaching to hosts, spreading everywhere the climate is conducive, and difficult to eradicate.
The Kardashians are not, of course, the only cultural fungus clogging up airwaves and brain waves that could be put to much better use.
Anti-Semitism is clogging up a great deal of the available promotional space. It's easy to get a knee-jerk reaction from people if you post a photo of young Israeli boys being shown how to do something or other with machine guns. Immediately, even otherwise decently perspicacious friends will drag out their compassion guns and note how criminal it is to teach such stuff to young boys. Never mind that there are no photos of Palestinian mothers kissing their little sons goodbye as they go out with a bomb attached to them to kill Jews. Needless to say, there are no photos of Muslim women bombing Israeli buses, mainly because no one cares about them in the first place; they are women. Only women.
If one wants to talk about compassion, then let's have some for Muslim women whose life-bearing essence is used and abused by their imbecilic male handlers. In Iran, for a brief shining moment a relatively sane Islamic nation, men murder young women whose only crime was wanting to see her rapist punished.
Now, do we still want to talk about the poor Middle Eastern Muslims who are so incredibly endangered by little Israeli boys learning about machine guns? We could, if those little boys, when they reached the age of 18, were not required to enter the Israeli Defense Forces to protect their mothers and sisters from the much more than cultural parasites living all around them.
So let's go back to cultural fungus. By keeping our attention on the Kardashians, either because we are fascinated by their trashiness or because we are astonished that anyone would be fascinated by their trashiness, the media—becoming hourly more trashy itself—keeps us away from discussing actual news. It prevents us from having meaningful debate about the relative merits of Israeli youth learning how to protect themselves, their families and their homes, and the generations of Palestinians descended from the very Arab tribes who turned the Land of Milk and Honey—the land now Israel and reclaimed by Israeli effort—into a wasteland by ignorantly letting their herds of black goats graze it to perdition.
We could talk about David Cameron, the biggest political fungus since George W. Bush, now having at least 50 percent dismantled the National Health Service, a generous gift from the generation that suffered through WWII to the rest of the United Kingdom, and a model for the other universal healthcare systems enacted after it.
We could talk about the US press going apeshit nuts over Ebola...because that's SO much more important than the millions of starving children in America, a truly lost generation so that the captains of industry and those who live like parasites on inherited wealth can have even more than they already have.
We could talk about Monsanto, poisoning the planet one forkful at a time. We've ALL been poisoned, at least a bit, by the GM foods that intermingle with other foods...in short, it's too late to escape having our bodies—all our bodies except those who starve to death young—from being compromised by their lucrative poisons. We could talk about fracking. We could talk about the incredible fact that neither ethics nor logic is taught in US schools any more. Indeed, some states reject textbooks that even attempt to teach rudimentary logical thought.
The powers that be are intent upon making all of us into fungi, incapable of reacting in any meaningful way to threats to our well-being. Perhaps the only place on the planet such lessons are really being taught is Israel, where it is really simple and unavoidable; the people of Palestine and their oil-rich Middle Eastern supporter nations are trying to exterminate us, so we must protect ourselves.
Simple. Cogent. And buried illogically under a layer of cultural fungus, from the Kardashians sucking up airwave space to US corporations sucking up everything they can, to the US media, a pitiful gasbag covering its own cowardice and collusion with...right, you guessed it, Kardashians.
So, for more reasons than I care to count, or have time to at the moment, it's time for the Kardashians, and all other cultural fungi, to leave so the rest of us can see what we are up against and do something about it.