We've Got a Situation Here

I was in Penn Station with an hour to kill for a train, so I decided to go upstairs to Borders Bookstore to browse some non-fiction. The front of the store was more crowded than usual, and I must not have noticed until I walked out that there were throngs of people trying to get a glimpse or photo of someone (or something) behind an opaque partition. From the people snaked through the aisles on the ground floor all clutching a copy of some thin book I did not recognize, I deduced that this must be a book signing. I wonder who it could be? I thought with a little excitement as I considered Malcolm Gladwell's latest offering. Very few authors inspire the kind of rock-star adulation that supports these kinds of numbers. The largest line I ever saw was when Rudy Giuliani did a signing of his "book" at the Prudential Center Barnes and Noble in Boston, but I think this one was larger. I made my way up to the counter and asked the clerk who was doing a signing.

"Oh, it's the Situation," he said, and from his inflection I couldn't tell if he was mildly annoyed or if he was having trouble disguising his delight. Delight, by the way, which was shared by probably a thousand women roughly aged 22-50 who were practically vibrating with the prospect of actually being in close proximity to a pseudo-celebrity whose greatest assets are abdominal muscles and the reasoning power of a cantaloupe.

I think I was mostly annoyed that the Situation had created this situation in my Borders. All right, it's not MY Borders but bookstores and record stores and things like that are my sanctuaries and I could really do without The Jersey Shore forcibly invading them. I don't hate The Situation or Snookie (although I did once tell a fifteen year old student of mine that I thought Snookie should be publicly executed). I think that they represent dangerous and unhealthy trends in American society but they themselves are not the cause of that, they are just symptoms. And if the American consumer is willing to pay their hard earned dollars for the products endorsed by these two half-brained monkeys then Snookie and The Situation deserve every penny of the $5-10 M they each got paid last year. We, as a country, have to say NO. Otherwise we've no right to complain.

But it's hard to avoid ranting because it really did get under my skin that there is now a BOOK available that was "written" by a human adult who I'm fairly certain is mentally retarded and who calls himself a noun whose primary definition is "the state of affairs; the combination of circumstances". And people were lined up to purchase his "writings". That the Jersey Shore exists in a world parallel to mine is not the problem. When I haplessly find myself standing in the world of the Jersey Shore I feel dirty. And stupid.