Howard Stern is Paris Hilton’s daddy
Bernie Goldberg, author of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America : (and Al Franken Is #37) was ambushed on the Donnie Deutsch show Wednesday. He was invited on the show to discuss his best-selling book (it’s number two on Amazon, behind Harry Potter), and was told there would be a panel of people on both sides of the issue (the culture war), and that the host is a “purple-stater” with no strong partisan views. So many lies, it’s hard to know where to start.
Deutsch himself is some sort of advertising guy with a vanity show in CNBC that nobody watches (share is 0.1, about 70,000 viewers) who says FDR was his favorite president, George W. is his least favorite, and he’s nostalgic for Clinton.) He’s best known for his appearances on the Donald Trump reality show. He was hostile to Bernie, saying “who are we to judge?” who’s helping and who’s hurting America these days. He hasn’t read the book.
The panel consisted of other four people who haven’t read the book, but their ignorance didn’t keep them from being surly and hostile: Linda Stasi, a TV critic; One-name Toure, a pop culture fan of no renown; Radar magazine dolt Maer Roshan, a tedious soul who spends his time counting Fox News appearances, and Jeff Jarvis, the power blogger who goes gooey for Howard Stern. These people can all fairly be called “tastemakers” and “trendsetters”.
The show was heavily edited, which is unusual for low-budget cable news shows. It’s so unusual that even the largest-audience cable news show, O’Reilly, isn’t edited except for legal requirements (slander, obscenity, etc.)
Bernie’s premise is that American culture is becoming more coarse and shallow than it used to be, and his list comprises the people he holds responsible, such as Paris Hilton’s parents. Most of his list are “liberal elites”, but such conservative luminaries as Judge Roy Moore and Michael Savage make the list as well.
Oddly, the panel tended to agree that Paris Hilton’s popularity is not healthy for the culture, but they were all hostile to Goldberg’s inclusion of Howard Stern on the list. Now anybody who reads Buzzmachine knows that Jeff is in some sort of second adolescence right now, and is therefore very fond of Stern’s fart jokes, porn stars, and angry dwarves. It probably helps him relate to his teenage sons.
But you can’t give Stern a free pass and go cluck-cluck over Hilton. She is, face it, a porn skank who’s gone mainstream on the back of her performance in a self-made porno she sold on the Internet. Her ad for Carl’s Jr. is soft-core porn, and her TV show is strictly rich-skank-meets-trailerpark. Every father of daughters cringes at the mention of her name, because she’s such a skanky, trashy, whore.
Paris Hilton wouldn’t exist, however, if it weren’t for the pioneering efforts of Stern to mainstream porn sluts. He has a role in shaping the values of adolescent boys, and they in turn shape the values of adolescent girls. Boys want to be cool, and girls want to be loved, after all. And Stern has packaged a set of values that start where the Playboy Philosophy left off and go six steps closer to the septic tank. This has had an effect on our girls.
So you can’t idolize Stern and demonize Hilton. One leads to the other as surely as the Grateful Dead leads to patchouli.
The angry mob that attacked Bernie was trying to kill the messenger because they don’t want to take responsibility for the culture they’ve created.
For another take, see Captain’s Quarters or Buzzmachine.
By the way, Bernie didn’t scream or “go bonkers”, but some of the panel certainly did.
One more thing: elites and wannabes sometimes say that the US is a Puritan country that should adopt more of a European openness to sex. The small problem with this analysis is that America’s more a Youth Culture than a Puritan one, so being more open about sex means teen porn skanks and pedophilia. Why do you think the Catholic pedophile scandal took place here rather than in Europe? Europeans don’t let their daughters emulate Paris Hilton and the Jerry Springer trailerpark skanks.
Filed under: Culture
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