A rant I have to share

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Of all places, this is from Gawker's Hills Recap this week. In the episode, three of the show's sleaziest "characters" visited their Grandmother. And the recap author, Richard Lawson, went off with a big dose of perspective that sums up just about everything that makes me feel horribly depressed about The Hills.

Here are Richard's thoughts:

This woman is 84-years-old. So she was probably born in 1924. She was 5 when the markets crashed hugely. She watched as Europe was overtaken by an army of darkness, as millions of people were killed, she watched that war end and the boys come home and booms begin. She saw the suburban 50's crystallize the American Dream into something far too fragile to ever hope to touch. She saw the Cold War terror, the first beating bits of revolution fomenting in the eyes of kids. She watched sit-ins and hosings and great, thundering speeches and witnessed Change, real change, the kind of change rarely seen since. She saw two terrifying jungle wars, a generation in full rise up and demand something different. The entire idea of Who We Are and Why We Are began to blur and change and certain old institutions disappeared forever. And people were scared and people were happy but most of all people felt different. And around her this new spirit bled and muddled into something about drugs and aimless rebellion. Around her that malaise hardened into the darkening, cynical, cocaine-bliss 70's. Which bumped up against the blockish 80's, the suits the money the drugs AIDS Reagan the fall of the economy the fall of the wall Desert Storm. Meanwhile her grandkids had come tumbling along at some point and Clinton came (and came) and a new fattiness spread across the country until that became too much for some people and buildings fell in Oklahoma and then buildings fell in New York and there we went, hurtling headlong back into the desert, our eyes fixed on black, oily windmills. And all of this, all of these years and all of this living and noise and light and hope and fear and change and stubborness and sadness and grit and boredom and brief transcendent moments of life when one fully knows, for a few fleeting seconds, that one is capital A Alive... Well, all of it jumbled together, quiet and loud at the same time, and... And it all amounted to this.

Some dumpy old woman forced to talk to her piece of shit granddaughter on a bench for the fucking Hills.