Somewhere over the last 25 years, the idea of what constitutes a “celebrity” changed from a person with some kind of history of achievement to pretty much anyone with a pulse who manages to get his, her or its mug splashed across a TV screen.  Actually, as the wailing and gnashing of teeth surrounding the death of Michael Jackson demonstrated last year, the pulse is now optional.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the ridiculous, cynical remake of “We are the World,” an exercise that according to news accounts seemed less focused on assisting the people of Haiti than on stroking the egos of the pseudo-stars and future nobodies who did the yodeling.

The tiresome video (directed by the tiresome Paul Haggis) raises an important question – who the hell are these people?  I think one of them – the dude with the expensive clothes and dull stare – was Puff Diddley or P. Daddy or whatever idiotic moniker he’s using this week.  You know, there was a time when grown men used their given names instead of childish nicknames that are just emblems of the eternal adolescence that modern pop culture worships. 

Now, the original “We are the World” was itself nearly unlistenable, but that’s a matter of taste and reasonable people can disagree (I thought the British supergroup Band-Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was a much better song, though it shared “World’s” inexcusable refusal to confront the reason the Ethiopian drought turned into the Ethiopian famine – the cruelty and stupidity of its left wing government ).  However, at least most of the participants were people with track records of success.  You had Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Diana Ross, Bob Dylan, Dionne Warwick and a bunch of others.  Now, not all of them might have been your cup of tea – I’d rather pass a kidney stone made of broken glass than listen to the Boss – but you had at least heard of them. (more…)

So yet another illegal alien has been found stowed away in the cargo area of a plane. He endured a hellish trip to get here, and will be returned to his heinous craphole of a country after being treated for dehydration.

Yeah, I know what he did was “illegal” and all that – but whenever I read about a dude pulling off something like this, I keep thinking an exception needs to be made. Whenever the amount of risk taken to come here far exceeds anything most Yankee chuckleheads would do to stay, then that risk taker deserves citizenship. I mean this guy risked his life so he could work as a cashier at Arby`s. Would Jon Cusack do the same?

Fact is, our country is crammed full with children who think they`re adults, and adults pretending to be children – all handed endless opportunities simply because they were born here. Millions of these Americans squander, mock and abuse the country that other folks would die to get into – and for this reason it`s time to enact a solution I’ve mentioned previously: a human trading system. Mind you: this is not human trafficking. It`s human trading. It`s different. There is no cash or sex involved (yet). (more…)