So you do the flaneur's wander round the internet and via a hyperlink at one of your haunts, you settle yourself down at a post. Modern life. . .
And this is what you find:-
Simon Cowell has only one true love - himself
Why does the hollow, narcissistic king of karaoke have such a hold over our lives?
One of those "we" "our" references - speak for yourself and your loser mates, Mr Paid-Blogger. So Mr P-B goes on to write his 1000 words about the mental energy he has spent on Simon Cowell is mental energy that only a society in the state of decline would thus have him spend:-
Perhaps the end approaches for the Cowell Dominion, as it did for Mr Blair once he decided that Britain was too insignificant and tried to crack the US. The Cowellite stranglehold on TV audiences, on both sides of the Atlantic, appears to be weakening. Yet it is folly to write him off while he still fascinates so deeply that one cannot read about his preference for black toilet paper – a peculiar choice of hue for reasons plainly unsuited to your breakfast table – without borrowing Metternich’s question about Talleyrand’s death to ask: “Now what did he mean by that?” There is no answer. The only lesson taught by examining the intimate life of Simon Cowell is the hackneyed old one about ourselves. We remain marooned in a time of such gruesome fin de siècle decadence that Mr Cowell’s perplexing taste in loo rolls must, like everything else about him, be analysed for clues to its wider implications as if it were a Supreme Soviet pronouncement at the height of the Cold War.
If this is the fin de siecle decadence, "we" are for horrors to come, and "we" will look back on "our" time when we analysed Cowell's anal-wipes with the same nostalgia as the post-World War I generation for the golden summer of England, 1914. Also, isn't it grand to be out of the Cold War, and in more frivolous times? Mr Paid-Blogger will soon be evoking rationing and the blitz as being better for our characters than gaming and Madonna's stage costumes.
Paid-Blogger hasn't got the honesty to say, "I am really interested in Simon Cowell and so are a lot of my readers." No, he's writing serious analysis on what it means to be interested in Simon Cowell, putting it in a cultural context. He's not a writer for Heat, but a sociologist. That is a trick that The Guardian pulls and now it has spread to the Daily Telegraph. I wish it stuck to its old Tory guns and went on about cuckoos and herbaceous borders.
I can't be bothered reading the thread - "we" have such short attention spans - but I do hope some High Court Judge is there asking, "Who is Simon Cowell?"
If you are idiot enough to want to read more, here's the link.
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