The celebrated prostitute risks cholera and ridicule for beachside photo ops with fans that live on $1.71 per day. Her bodyguards will eat enough to feed 300 of the children who might otherwise touch the reality television star without warning.
I know, I know – why start a conversation about Kim Kardashian at all? Hey, I go where the B.S. takes me.
Kardashian is a myopically self-obsessed individual with a grossly deformed ego and a missing moral compass, and in fact there is currently no better example of a person who’s become a character at the expense of actually earning any.
But don’t tell your daughter that. Instead, ask her if she’s ever seen Kim – or any Kardashian – read a book, or if she thinks Kim likes photography or politics or whale watching. Not opening the exchange pigheadedly – as adults tend to do when they’re opposed to the attentions of the young – is a good way to inconspicuously point out the lack of dimension or substance. And who knows? You might just plant a seed.
I remember appreciating and later admiring teachers and peer-parents who gave me the opportunity to sell the merits of my various cultural fixations rather than defend them, as I was forced to do at home. Doing so caused me to place my idols, infatuations, and causes under my own microscope, which nine times out of ten hastened their shelf life. The biggest adolescent debt of gratitude I owe is to those adults who helped me outgrow something faster.
Too bad so little of that strategy is being used to deter teen celebrants (and adult propagators) of Kardashian & Co. Kim Kardashian is a one-woman Holocaust whose television show would more aptly be titled Planet of the Rapes for all the damage it inflicts on the expectations and the self-image of young girls. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not like this keeps me up at night as it does some others; I think Kim Kardashian is little more than a moronic marionette, dancing and groping for whatever its greedy owner wants. But that doesn’t make her influence any more worthwhile, and it’s still no excuse for perpetuating her standards and principles without question.
As for Haiti, Kardashian’s visit to the impoverished Republic is such a grotesque falsification of empathy that you’d think it was a reality show plot…God help us.