Yet Another Palin Gets A Reality Show

By Michael Rosenblum | Published August 10th, 2010

The idiot in chief…

Andy Warhol famously said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes.

How right he was.

Everyone... apparently.

And all it takes is a video camera and some spare time on your hands.

One of the most influential books I ever read was Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

Published in 1984, it was seminal in shaping my thinking about the impact of television on our culture.

Fittingly subtitled “Public Discourse In The Age of Showbusiness”, Postman predicted that as television become more and more powerful and began to convey not just entertainment, but politics and religion to us as well; that those disciplines would have to become as entertaining as television sitcoms or they would lose their audiences.

How right he was.

Now we have a culture that spends 4.5 hours a day watching TV, and 8.5 hours a day staring at screens.

We have not only lost the ability to differentiate between reality and fiction, we no longer even care.

People Magazine this week announced that Levi Johnston, the on again, off again paramour of the daughter of Sarah Palin, yet another product of the ‘reality’ entertainment culture – a woman who resigned her position as elected Governor of Alaska to host her own reality show on LC – (take a deep breath here because this stuff is complicated)… Oh yeah… Levi Johnston is now running for Mayor of Wasilla, the place where is on again, off again mother in law sort of got her start.

What makes this particularly interesting, besides the fact that Levi has the IQ of a tomato, is that he is not only running for real, but doing it as part of a pitch for a new reality show: Loving Levi: The Road To The Mayor’s Office.

And why not?

Did we not just have Michaele and Tariq Sahali arrested for crashing a White House Dinner only to find that Michaele was in fact cast as part of the Real Housewives of DC?

Politics and ‘reality’ now are totally indistinguishable. And does it matter anyway?  All television is entertainment, and if its not entertaining, no one wants to know anyway.

Look at the Moon Landings.

We landed a man on the moon in 1969, probably one of the greatest achievements in human history.

The last time a man walked on the moon was 1972, 38 years ago.

No one has gone back to the moon in 38 years!

And why is that?

We certainly have the technology to do it.  That technology is as old as my father’s Buick Futura.

What we lack is the will.

We will gladly spend billions to make and then to see Avatar, a movie about space travel – in 3D!

What we won’t do is spend a penny to do it for real.

And why do we love Avatar and hate NASA?

It’s because Moon Landings are BORING!

They are boring.

They make bad TV.

Who wants to watch some guy jump around on the lunar surface (in black and white no less!), when we can travel to planets yet undiscovered at the speed of light. Whether it is real or not is, to us, immaterial. So long as it’s exciting.

Which brings us back to Levi Johnston and his Reality Run for Mayor of Wasilla.

Whether he is qualified or not is immaterial.

Was Sarah Palin qualified?

Was George W. Bush qualified?

We don’t rate qualified very high, so long as it’s entertaining.