Beukey on Pop Culture

This blog will focus on pop culture, with an emphasis on views outside, overlooked, or ignored by the mainstream. I may veer off-topic. We are all grown-ups, so don't act shocked at occasional bad language. This blog is not the place for those of you who stood in line to see "The Lake House".

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Emotional Freeloaders

It would be a full-time job to keep track of all the stupid things that TV talk show hosts say in a day, but Rosie O'Donnell's comments today really show how much she (and so many other "sensitive" people ) have lost touch with reality.

I find Rosie mildly annoying. She entertains me when she keeps that chirpy red-state Christian on "The View" in check. But R loses points for her acting job playing a retarded person in a movie whose name I can't remember. I don't know why so many actors want to take the role of a retarded person. Nobody ever does a good job, and often times they come off as someone mocking mental retardation. Instead of acting, they come across as someone mimicing a stereotyped version of what a retarded person is assumed to act like. Which is what Rosie did. Her character talked real loud, and wore two different colored shoes. In real life, I have never seen a retarded person walk around wearing two different colored shoes. Yet Rosie thought it was a good acting choice, and no one ever called her on it.

But today, Rosie decided to reveal to the world that she suffers from depression. And of course, like any Hollywood personality, she can't have ordinary depression. She has depression, and seasonal affective disorder, and an unorthodox and in no way medically proven way to treat the depression (hang upside-down like a bat for a half-hour a day). I guess it doesn't cure obesity.

But even that wasn't enough to cross the border into a totally stupid comment. What crosses the border is the source of her depression. She claims she became depressed because of the killings at Columbine High School, and how she felt like her own children were killed.

Rosie, here is the realiy check you desparately need, and I hope the chirpy Christian reads this to you on the air: 13 people were killed at Columbine. Parents lost children. Siblings lost siblings.

Of the 13 people that were killed at Columbine, Rosie, NONE OF THEM WERE YOUR CHILDREN! If you don't realize how irrational your statement was, go straight to the sanitarium.

I have no doubt people who lost loved ones experienced overpowering and painful emotions over an extended period of time. That is their pain, Rosie. It is not yours. Let them get through it in the manner they need. Do not be an emotional freeloader and hitch your common situation to something you did not, and never will experience.

But of course Rosie (Oprah, countless others) always need to hitch their common experience to something uncommon and extreme because they're...sensitive! And we always have to know how sensitive they are, because what's the use in being sensitive if you can't demonstate that sensitivity in the most "Look at me!" way possible. That's why every celebrity death (Anna Nicole) has moist-eyed anchors calling it "sad' and "a tragedy". You would have thought Anna was 24 hours away from curing cancer and carrying all her research around in her head the way people reacted to her death. In reality, it was a very predictable thing for someone who lived like she did.

I don't know exactly when people decided they needed to cry over things that have no direct impact on them just to show they're "human", but I can't wait for the pendulum to swing back.