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I hope that one day, the people who believe dinosaurs roamed the earth five thousand years ago are placed in a museum. I hope that one day, people who try to ban books are not people who get employed by global news networks. The concept that an asteroid which put all of the dinosaurs into an eternal sleep managed to save the DNA which eventually found its way into the likes of Sarah Palin and Heidi Montag is [almost] the most absurd possibility, to me at least. Joe Smith and a T-Rex cohabiting, having lunch with a brontosaurus, or flying internationally on the back of a pterodactyl does seem fun. I wish it was real. But I also wish I could have sex with George Clooney on the back of a unicorn. I have just accepted that, sometimes, the things my imagination thinks up are, actually, completely impossible. Unicorns don’t exist. But other people choose to accept the absurdities their minds create and they get jobs as journalists. Or grace the cover of syndicated magazines in a form that even the most vivid imagination could not have possibly pictured.

The superficial aspects of life, such as celebrity worship or laughing at stupid things people say publicly, has always been a favorite past time of mine. I watch cartoons religiously, so getting more entertainment in its lowest common denominator has never been something I deem myself too evolved for. Until I realized, a while ago, that the things I was laughing at, actually, had serious implications for society on a whole. And that People magazine’s title became non sequitur to the augmented image posing under the banner because they chose to use an MTV character and claim it to be a person.
To start off an early work day, I got my superficiality out of the way by perusing the celebrity blogs before the sun had officially risen. Usually a free flowing process of Read, Disregard and Repeat was, on this particular day, stalled when I found myself watching a Good Morning America interview with Miss Montag on repeat for, lets see, sixty-five billion minutes. I laughed, I am not going to lie. But, sadly, I was laughing at something packaged as news and not entertainment in its lowest form. Had Sarah Palin been the reporter, I may have had to kill myself. Dino style.

There is silver lining in the fact that someone who wanted to ban books and firmly believes that the Garden of Eden was actually called Jurassic Park will never have access to the Nuclear codes. Her one glimmer of hope to getting a job that no hockey mom will ever be qualified for was killed, dino style, when an educated human being beat her in the race. A race that, in a way, seems to contradict what is currently meant by ‘survival of the fittest’. But she was given a job reading the news, a medium she has almost obtusely admitted to having no respect for, a job that millions of people actually work really, really hard to obtain by studying facts and avoiding conspiracy theory or popularity contests. A job that, once upon a time, held an earned amount of authority. Montag, meanwhile, sits in interview chairs blinking her lips while claiming to believe that beauty comes from the inside. I get the joke. I just hope that other people do to.

It seems that we are living in an age where intelligence and rational thinking cannot stand a chance against the asteroid that is make-believe and superficiality. People are believing anything they want to hear, with a total disregard for evidence, so long as it serves an immediate purpose or maintains a status quo. Self-validation achieved in its easiest form has replaced survival of the fittest. Insisting that life is a cartoon, rather than just accepting that cartoons depict life, is almost moments away from being a plausible argument if the direction of reality television has any forbearing. It seems like a ludicrous thing to even insinuate, because, who in their right mind would claim that We are actual cartoons? But, then again, a former vice-presidential candidate really does think that “The Land Before Time” was a documentary.

Before I moved to Los Angeles, I was always worried with how I would cope with the extreme superficiality the locale is famed with housing. Rather than take anyones word for it, I decided to find out for myself and was, admittedly, pleasantly surprised that the artificial was mostly contained to magazine covers, “reality” shows or cohabited in bars I could easily leave. Whenever feeling like my braincells are suffering the threat of extinction, loosing myself in a book that could have been banned saved my own thread of humanity.
“Why did you move to LA?” I have been asked at certain establishments.
“Because I graduated from university, needed a new challenge and so I decided to go to a place in the world where education and intellect would not be acknowledged let alone celebrated and see if I could sink or swim.”
But, the truth is, I could have gone anywhere. Because the likes of Palin and Montag are just figure heads, augmented images who wave the flag for ignorance while their followers go about life in relative obscurity. My experiment could have flourished in Athens where thought once strived or been celebrated in Syberia. Because, like the dinosaurs, ignorance is roaming the earth with no regard for human betterment. There wouldn’t be a problem if these two women were the only two women who thought with such a lack of brain power, nor would there be a problem is their images did not have the power to influence millions of people who prefer the comfort of make-believe rather than the harsh reality of fact that George Clooney probably wouldn’t want to sleep with me.

I never want to loose the ability to laugh, or take something at face value. Laughing at superficiality is fun and stressing about it can be as useful as DD boobs on Heidi Montag. But it would be different if we were all laughing at it. Rather than teenage girls seeing inflated lips tell an inflated lie, or grown adults insisting that “The Flintstones” was the beginning of family values. The contradictions that are displayed like images in a museum infiltrate all areas of our life without us even knowing it and, all of a sudden, we start believing anything anyone says just because we hope it were true.