keeping-up with the kardashians – take #2
I don’t often allow guest posts as it’s my ball and if you don’t let me play then I’m taking it home! But full-time secondary school teacher CW’s response to the post below is so pertinent it deserves both airtime and your undivided attention.
“It so happens that, when I taught my Year 10 English class yesterday, they all had 30 mins to write an opinion piece on the Kardashians and their place in the media, as a practice run for the sort of writing they (the students, not the Kardashians, you understand) might have to do in one of their English Language exams.
As ‘live modelling’ is something teachers are encouraged to do, I also wrote, in parallel with my students, for 30 minutes. Here’s what I wrote:
“Too Much Already!”
Have we reached ‘peak Kardashian’?
OMG! I have had it with the Kardashians.
It isn’t them, as people; at least, I suppose it isn’t. It is surely possible that they are, in private, warm, wonderful, caring, sincere human beings, kind to each other and all they meet, respectful of the planet and all the good things in it. Although, it’s equally possible that this is not so.
Indeed, it’s hard to know what privacy might actually mean for the Kardashians. I will confess that I don’t actually watch “Keeping up with the Kardashians” if I can help it, that much is true, but I have a daughter who, while claiming not to be that bothered about them, often seems to find herself in front of a television screen while I am sharing the same living room and, there they are, their wasteful inanity paraded before our eyes and ears and somehow reducing my psychic well-being in a relentless process of erosion. And there is virtually nothing that appears ‘private’ at all; no issue that will not be discussed, in tones of condescension or bitterness; no acquaintance whose personality will not be rancorously savaged; no aspect of life that might be regarded by those whom we might – for the sake of convenience – call ‘normal’ people that is not thrust into our faces like so much soiled and fetid laundry.
Can this be right? How does it come about that television time is taken up with this fatuous display of frivolity? Indeed, not only is time being taken in our viewing schedules but the Kardashians have become thieves of our time and attention across all media, it seems.
And yet, if I take a moment to calm down, I wonder if this is actually their fault, as such. After all, Khloe, Kourtney, Karabina and Katzenjammer – I think those are their names, anyway – can’t help being born into a rich family any more than they can help being born into a poor one, can they? Of course, when I say a ‘rich’ family, I do mean the kind of family that’s so spectacularly, extravagantly, nauseatingly rich it makes them so completely unconnected with the real world that they might as well be from one of Saturn’s moons: so entirely divorced from reality, in fact that there’s something beyond irony in “Keeping up with the Kardashians” being labelled as ‘reality’ television.
Accidents of birth aside, though, I cannot help but wonder – and I realise that there is no way back for me, now; I absolutely am a “Grumpy Old Man” – what is the social cost of their seemingly interminable reign over television, news and internet media?
I fear that the world is not a better place for their presence. I fear that children are growing up with the idea that what ‘success’ looks like is a constant round of shopping with no regard for where the money came from or where it goes. I fear we are building a society where all that matters is possession (and, perhaps, partying) and no one needs to care about the suffering of people on the other side of the planet.
I do not like it. It’s ‘lame’. And so are the Kardashians.”
Enough said.
