Jon Hamm Was Wrong … and Right about Kim Kardashian -The iPINIONS Journal

Whether it’s Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian or whoever, stupidity is certainly celebrated. Being a fucking idiot is a valuable commodity in this culture because you’re rewarded significantly… It’s celebrated. It doesn’t make sense to me.

This was Mad Men star Jon Hamm playing social critic in an interview in the current edition of Elle (UK) magazine.

Interestingly enough, it’s a reflection of the superficial groupthink that passes for public opinion these days that so many people are treating him like Rush Limbaugh’s mini-me. Specifically, they are drawing a moral and intellectual equivalence between Rush calling Sandra Fluke a “slut [and] a prostitute” and Jon implying that Kim Kardashian is “a fucking idiot.”

No doubt they were both wrong: not necessarily for calling women vile names (after all, some women invite and deserve them), but for using vile names for these women that were so plainly unwarranted … in each case. If Jon had chosen Rush’s word “slut” to describe Kim, for example, he would not have been all that wrong.

Instead, Jon was wrong for calling Kim an “idiot” because nobody can deny that it took considerable intelligence to parlay her slutty behavior into a multi-million dollar (family) business.

I remind you that the only thing anybody knew about the Kardashians (i.e., before Kim used a sex tape as seed money to launch the Kardashian brand in the parallel universe of reality-TV and faux celebrity) was that her father Robert was one of the legal shysters who got O.J. off. Now, while you’re sitting like a couch potato and laughing at what so-called idiots they are, Kim and the Kardashians are laughing all the way to the bank.

What’s more, Kim even demonstrated that a slut can have some class too when she responded to Jon’s diss on Monday (via her very lucrative, thousands-per-tweet Twitter page) as follows:

I just heard about the comment Jon Hamm made about me in an interview. I respect Jon and I am a firm believer that everyone is entitled to their own opinion and that not everyone takes the same path in life. We’re all working hard and we all have to respect one another. Calling someone who runs their own businesses, is a part of a successful TV show, produces, writes, designs, and creates, ‘stupid,’ is in my opinion careless.

By contrast, if Jon had any class he would have either let his interview speak for itself or apologize for the obvious offense his words caused her. Instead, he came across as a little too full of himself when he offered this glib (Rush-like) non-apology apology:

I don’t know Ms. Kardashian, I know her public persona. What I said was meant to be more on pervasiveness of something in our culture, not personal, but she took offense to it and that is her right.

(EW, March 14, 2012)

Frankly, based on their exchange, he seems a bigger idiot than he thinks she is.

On the other hand, Jon was right about the way reality-TV is dumbing down our culture. And it’s clear that he only cited Kim for the same reason one might only cite Lady Gaga to make a point about the way singers are becoming more famous for the distractions they create off stage than for the songs they sing on stage. (Thank God for Adele!) Jon could very easily have cited, for example, the celebutarts (Snooki) and celebuturds (The Situation) of The Jersey Shore.

Ironically, that people are only talking about his incidental insult of Kim and not about this more salient point reflects the cultural stupidity he decried. But Jon is by no means alone in decrying the popularity and influence of people like Kim. For here is what yours truly wrote in this respect years ago:

[T]he Salahis’ perverse celebrity explains why a father would risk his 16-year-old daughter’s life by having her sail around the world alone, or why another would blow hot air to the police about his 6-year-old son flying off in a homemade balloon, all just to appear on reality-TV. In fact, reality-TV has made celebrity so commonplace that the proverbial 15 minutes of fame only serves as an audition now for the season or two of fame these common folk now covet.

(“White House Gate-Crashers Now Stars of Reality-TV,” The iPINIONS Journal, June 21, 2010)

And again here:

[O]ne of the two Lakers ejected for committing a flagrant foul was Lamar Odom. But, unlike the other player, he probably did it as much out of frustration as out of some perverse attempt to create more ratings-grabbing fodder for Keeping Up With The Kardashians, the reality-TV show on which he appears as a two-bit player alongside his wife Khloe Kardashian.

Yes folks, our social values have become so screwed up that it’s entirely credible to assert that a multimillionaire basketball player would willfully demean himself and undermine his team on the court just to boost ratings for his reality TV show.

(“Jackson Resigns After Lakers Swept…,” The iPINIONS Journal, May 10, 2011)

Beyond this, though, that the ratio of people who know all about this spat between a “clown for hire” and a celebutart but nothing about this week’s state visit of British Prime Minister David Cameron is 1000 to 1 speaks volumes about the extent to which the cult of celebrity has so twisted our national interests. (FYI, Leonardo DiCaprio endeared himself to critics of our celebrity-obsessed world when he was quoted in the March 12, 2012 edition of The Sun saying that “Actors are really just clowns for hire.”)

All the same, it’s a reflection of how fleeting faux celebrity is that nobody seems to have noticed that Jon also damned Paris Hilton. And considering that Paris is probably seething with combustible envy over Kim getting all of this attention, this flashback is for her:

It’s a sad commentary on the state of world affairs that the diplomatic initiatives of a rock star or Hollywood actress are taken more seriously than those of a seasoned statesman. But that is the perverse reality… Alas, worshiping celebrities is not merely the avocation of giddy teenage girls; because world leaders seem equally enthralled by these latter-day performing saints…

Now if we can only get Paris Hilton to take-up the cause of nuclear non-proliferation.

(“Celebrity-Obsessed World Has Made Actors and Rock Stars the Statesmen of Our Time,” The iPINIONS Journal, May 23, 2005)

That’s a wrap.