A Parade Nobody Wants to Watch

Stop coming out. Everybody go back in. No one wants to know.

Recently Rickie Martin and Anna Paquin, two people who were famous a dozen years ago, joined the endless parade of semi-famous semi-celebrities who held a press conference to declare their sexual orientation. Every few weeks someome straggles forward, including another singer who finished second in American Idol and the mom from "Family Ties," a TV show that was cancelled when my daughter was still in high school.

It's tiresome. No one wants to know. No one needs to know. When you close your bedroom door, what happens there is your own business. We don't need to know every fart and belch of your personal life, especially when that life is some warped Hollywood cliche of what's trendy and cutting edge. You're gay? You're "bi"? You have an inappropriately warm relationship with small animals? No one cares. Take your dwindling Q-rating and dangerous preoccupation with yourself and go back to your home and have a nice life. Whether you spend it alone or with some other troll with the same singular fascination is nobody's business. The positions and manueverings of your sexual gratifications are meaningless to anyone else, and inappropriate for public conversation. Just go home, and be sure to close the bedroom door behind you.

What is it about people who make large sums of money being semi-entertaining that makes them think we need to know who they sleep with or how they grope each other? Why is a whole industry devoted to these revelations? People, Extra and OMG! breathlessly revealing these startling confessions in 50-point type, yet it's rarely a surprise and hardly significant. Does it change my life in any way to know Rickie Martin is gay? Women once swooned over him and his smoldering Latin sensuality. I suppose the most essential lesson is how easily we are all fooled and how pathetically our attentions can be swayed.

We're force fed tidbits of the lives of celebrities for no apparent reason. Brad and Angelina are on the rocks. No wait, they've adopted another child. The vampire boy is sleeping with his emaciated costar. John Mayer is inexplicably linked to another attention-starved fool. Who choreographs this mad dance? And why do we set it to music and call it a symphony? I think ultimately the purpose is to distract us, and for some reason it works every time.

The merry-go-round of the low standard of public information and entertainment is poisoning our brains. We are made dizzy with claptrap, sick with the empty cotton candy artificial flavor of a thousand scoops, fat and bloated and rotted in our souls. The web has accelerated our foolish fascinations and feeds them like an iv drip to our squishy shrinking dinosaur brains.

There was a children's movie Wall-E, with a subtle message for the adults watching. The earth had become uninhabitable and its people were marooned in space. They had lost the ability to move much. They had misplaced the ability to think for themselves or act independently. They lounged on massaging lounge chairs and feasted endlessly on super big gulps, their every need met by the giant faceless corporation that owned everything. But it was a children's movie. Nothing like that could really happen, right? Who's coming out today?