And I am a better person for it...

As I was buying baby arugula for today's lunch salad ("It is a veg-etable"), my eyes wandered to this magazine on the rack at checkout.



WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?

Ashley and JP are together but JP still loves Stephanie?

What now?

Apparently these people are the winners of "The Bachelorette" which is apparently some sort of reality show. Where the winner finds true love and C-list celebrity.

It was fascinating that these people are famous, but then, when trying to find out who they were, it became more frightening for me.

People are obsessed with this coupling. (And by people, I mean the thousands of posts, and comments that a quick Googling of "JP Ashley" pulled up.) I read for a while and with each next and each post I felt more and more sad for the Republic.

I know people who have multiple cats, an old collection of "Cathy" memorabilia, and a belief that they will find "the one", are good people in their hearts, and are probably good with children, but...and this is a problem with celebrity culture to begin with, are showing an unhealthy fascination with someone else's relationship.

Courtesy of Guyism.com

A brief survey of some of the comments (People.com seems to be Ground Zero for this meme (who reads People.com anyway?))showed a level of knowledge and intimacy with these "characters" that I found creepy (in the Batesian sense) in a very real way. Maybe it is because I a becoming (or I already am) an "old" or maybe it is because it is NOMB, but I do not understand the fascination with other people's relationships. Sure, I will make a joke about someone famous (all I can think about is Brad and Angelina...are they still an item?) but I have no more knowledge than it being a bit that some hack stand-up uses to get a cheap laugh and to show that he is just like us. But the comments from people showed a level of knowledge about strangers (and characters) that I do not have about some (all) of my best friends. I have a for instance here, but it really does not matter, and after typing it out it read as being mean spirited (and I did make a joke about Cathy fans earlier that I thought was just fine, so...yeah, it made me feel not-so-good). The converse to this is that people who talk with me every day do not have the knowledge of my romantic entanglements either.

I know that this is not a new development, and that people were reading "Look" back in the Fifties about Rock Hudson and his lovely wife, (Yeah, how about that for digging a little deeper for a celebrity story.) but the difference is that there is now a large group of forums for people to redirect the flow of their angst and anxieties about their own moribund relationships into the public sphere and that is a very bad thing.

Maybe I am too late to the party on this one, and maybe other people have offered better thought out thesis about why this happens (Maybe? Yes to both.) however, it struck me differently than any other pop thing has in a long time. I had no clue who these people were and when I found out about them, I became concerned about "the kids these days".

I do not know what that says about me (actually, I have a really good idea about what it says but that is for me and my therapist) but I think that I am a better person for not knowing who JP and Ashley are...but I wish them luck, apparently the whole world is watching.

Edit at 11:54 am: WTF? Vulture has a piece about this show? (which just posted and links to a longer Slate piece.) I thought it was fringy or for people in flyover country or women with a) multiple cats or b) a lot of good guy friends but are just searching for the "one". Argh. The Slate post may have blown my entire thesis, if I could figure one out.