Who Cares About Lindsay Lohan?

Who Cares About Lindsay Lohan? I don’t.
But then I’m not a typical American, I suppose.
My wife and I have a joke between us. When I get home after a long day on the road and find her watching TV, I always ask: “So what’s the latest with Lindsay Lohan?” The origin of this little bit of humor has to do with television news in general, and the attention span of the American mind in particular.
I rarely watch television news – I get my news from newspapers and from the internet – so I am less susceptible (although not invulnerable) to the media’s role in determining exactly what is news both by coming up with the list of stories and deciding how much time will be devoted to each. When I do find myself in front of a TV news show – my eyes and ears and brain darting around between the current story and the relentless crawl at the bottom of the screen – it never ceases to amaze me how little time is devoted to the really important news – Iraq, Afghanistan, Sharon’s stroke, Iran’s nuclear research, Russian threats to cut off natural gas to the Ukraine, the Alito hearings – and the news the media thinks the public really cares about: Brad and Angelina, Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes, drunken ski champions, sports stars on drugs and, of course, Lindsay Lohan.
For those of you who are not familiar with Lindsay Lohan, she is a teen starlet & pop singer who is forever being captured by the paparazzi at her worst, or she is collapsing somewhere, or she is unable to make a scheduled appearance because of “sudden illness”, “exhaustion” or “asthma”. People, US Magazine, Teen People and a host of other entertainment magazines decorate their covers with Lindsay, and it seems that everyone’s favorite game is trying to determine if she has an eating disorder or not, whether she’s on drugs, and just how much she drinks on a typical night on the town. Lindsay is pretty – but not beautiful; and she has some talent – but not too much. She is one of those celebrities who are most famous for just being…. well, famous!
While the Bush Administration is winding up the engine that is the United States for what could be World War III and the potential annihilation of our civilization, people don’t really want to know what it is really all about. Most Americans still don’t really know anything about Iraq or what we are doing there. A three minute clip on the news seems to satisfy them and reinforces their deep-seated belief that the US must have the best of intentions in mind. And now let’s hear about what Lindsay Lohan did last night, or what she said on MTV, or how skinny she looks in that bathing suit: poor thing, she really is wasting away.
That the television news is dominated by such tripe is sad but no longer surprising, and at least I could joke about it. But when I picked up this month’s issue of my favorite magazine – Vanity Fair – and discovered that the smiling freckled face on the cover belonged to Lindsay Lohan, I must admit I almost freaked out. I walked in the door fuming and confronted my wife with the cover just to underscore my point and how it tied into our longstanding joke, but she just shook her head at me and explained that the TV news has been focused on this story all week. Hadn’t I heard that Lindsay admitted to Vanity Fair that she was bulimic and was now denying the story to the rest of the press? We both laughed of course, but it is really no more funny today than it has been all along.