View From the Phlipside - Supermarket Blues

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.
I was standing in the checkout aisle at my favorite grocery store this past weekend taking a look at the various print offerings in the end of aisle displays.  I have to admit they made me rather despair for us all. 

There were plenty of cooking magazines and the usual "too-racy-to-be-displayed-but-we-still-keep-it-right-here" placement of Cosmopolitan but it was the other offerings that really ground me down.

You know the ones I'm talking about, they've been sitting in the same place for so long they even picked up their name from the location, yes I mean the "supermarket tabloids".  Staring at me I found headlines proclaiming the end of Chelsea Clinton's marriage, the star of the TV abomination "The Bachelor" was two timing the contestants with his girlfriend back home, three stars I guess you call them of the "Teen Mom" program have perfectly predictable problems and a photograph of the obviously very ill Elizabeth Taylor who begins this week in the hospital recovering from congestive heart failure.

Let's be honest here - I have no sympathy for what's his name on the Bachelor, I dislike the program and everything it represents.  This display of shallow hypocrisy if the perfect representation of the whole concept.  I have a little more sympathy for the Teen Mom girls.  The challenge of being a mom while you're still basically a child is hard enough.  Trying to do it while the nation watches is just a formula for problems.  I have a great deal of sympathy for Chelsea and wonder why her marriage woes are any of our business any more?  Finally you have Elizabeth Taylor who is shown on the cover with an oxygen tube in her nose, hollow cheeked and with largely empty eyes.  Why do I want to see this?  Let me remember the excruciatingly beautiful younger Taylor (remember her in the white dress in "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof"?) and let this poor woman deal with her health issues in peace and dignity.

But what really bothers me is that we buy this nonsense.  There is a concept called shadenfreude which basically translates as getting amusement out of the discomfort of others.  It's one thing when we know that it's just an act.  How do we justify it when it is the actual pain and suffering of real people?  The Bachelor and the Teen Moms probably want this kind of attention.  That's just one more piece of evidence for the sad and pitiable condition of their lives.  When our prurience pushes us into the apparently sad end of a marriage or the even sadder decline of a great actress it kind of turns my stomach.

It's a free country and folks can read what they like.  Just do me a favor.  Stick back out of sight so I can enjoy my groceries.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2011