I can't stand the Kardashians

I can no longer keep silent: I can’t stand the Kardashians. I have been living with this feeling for too long and it has metastasized inside me. And so I must come clean. For many people, the statement “I can’t stand the Kardashians” is blindingly obvious. Nobody can stand these people. But I had seen one too many tabloid covers in the supermarket with Kim Kardashian bemoaning her pregnancy weight gain or whether or not Kanye West is gay and I decided that this family is a drain on our resources and they cannot suffer too much spirited invective. “But why do you hate these people, Brian?” you might ask. “What did they ever do to you?” Nothing direct, to be sure. But the metaphysical bandwidth that these people suck up with their insipid exploits offends me. These people take up too much space in our collective brain and that is space better served by remembering things that might actually have some scintilla of value in our lives. The Kardashians are worthless. They produce nothing of any value. They exist only to endorse other people’s products. They are so talent-free that they make Zsa Zsa Gabor look like Leonardo Da Vinci. Their only discernible talent seems to be the ability to maintain a heartbeat while the cameras are rolling and it is truly a pathetic commentary about all of us that doing something as effort-free as that could be considered a talent, let alone a cause for celebrity. I do not care about the exploits of any member of this family. I do not care if Kim Kardashian marries someone else. I do not care about the terms of her divorce from the basketball player. I do not care about her baby except in the abstract sense that one might care about a child’s welfare. I do not care if she gains 20 or 200 pounds during her pregnancy. I do not care what she looks like in her maternity clothes. I do not care about any of the commentary on what she looks like in her maternity clothes. I do not care about any of the analysis of the commentary on what she looks like in her maternity clothes. I do not care about Kim Kardashian’s ass. I resent the fact that I know any of these details about this woman’s life, as I stumble over them by the simple virtue of being socially engaged and maybe wanting gossip about a celebrity who actually has something more substantive on her resume than the pathetic declaration of “I am a brand.” She and her family might be a brand but they are a hollow brand that stands for nothing. Brands are made by people or companies that actually create things. At least from a brand like, say, Mercedes, you could divine something of substance about the quality of the car or the socioeconomic status of the people who buy it. You know what I think of when I think of the Kardashian brand? I think of people who will endorse anything their agents put in front of them and then they call that a talent. I think of people who endorsed debit cards for kids that had usury levels of fees tacked onto them. I think of people who achieved fame via the most bottom-feeding method possible: Reality TV. It wasn’t even good reality TV, like American Idol or Dancing With the Stars, where at least people need to do something or have some ability to get on. No, the Kardashians achieved fame by the worst kind of reality TV: being rich people who got even richer by being filmed doing nothing more challenging than being sentient life forms and displaying a lack of ability of anything other than making money through some perversion of a perpetual motion machine. Consider: Kim Kardashian’s first notoriety came as a friend of Paris Hilton. If people rightfully declared that Paris Hilton contributed nothing of value, how much less value would her sidekick have? Kim attained fame by being a footnote to a footnote. Yet through some infernal social alchemy, these people live on in the public eye, rather than fading like any obedient mayfly should. The Kardashians are bottomless, eternal, soul-shredding vapidity in the shape of Botoxed, over-tanned humans. They represent all that is godawful and contemptible in American celebrity culture.