Wrestling With Politics

So, I turned on the computer this morning and was greeted by this among my homepage full of headlines:

"Hulk Hogan tells Fox he recants former support for Obama"

Great, my life is complete.

An over-the-hill entertainer who's spent the last ten years grasping at his former fame, trying to keep his body upright after years of abuse and shilling for whomever will pay him (seriously, have you seen all the cruddy commercials he's in) told everyone who'd listen (on Fox News, no less, cause they woulda booked him if he was for Obama) that he's upset with the President.

Someone want to tell me why we needed to know this?

This whole "lets-turn-to-celebrities-for-political-opinion" meme is so soul-crushingly frustrating because, let's face it, who needs to know what any random attention whore cares about, least of all politics.

And I'm not just saying this because it happened to be on Fox, and it happened to be against the President. Nope, not at all. Don't care what left-wing luminaries such as Sean Penn, George Clooney or Alec Baldwin have to say either.

Because, let's face it, they're just one person like you or I. And who likes hearing the opinion of someone whose job it is to entertain us for a living?

Oh yeah, more attention whores.

It harkens back to the whole Hank Williams Jr. brouhaha from a couple of weeks ago. Really, if Hank had just kept his mouth shut, his little song would still be ignored by the millions of people watching Monday Night Football at sports bars across the country.

But no, he had to pull out a Hitler reference. Trying to sound political because he was on a political network. It does nothing for him to be political. It's not going to sell him more albums. It's not going to gain him any more fans. It's just going to confirm to people that he's the redneck they already believe him to be.

Same goes for any of the more liberal folks I mentioned above. All they do when they open their mouth about politics, it just confirms people's preconceived notions of who they are.

That's actually something I give credit to Jon Stewart for. He wears his political ideology on his sleeve during his show, but when it comes time to have a celebrity on, the interview hardly, if ever, veers off into politics.

The unfortunate thing about it all is that while the Internet has made the sharing of ideas easier than ever before, it works both ways. It means that opinions that would have never been seen or heard before are now out for full public consumption. And that means for every political heavyweight such as Karl Rove or James Carville giving their opinion, we have to hear the opinions of ... Hulk Hogan.

Of course, that includes this one. I mean, who am I? Just another voice in the blogosphere. 

I just hope that that I'll have the dignity not to sell out like Hogan.