Check out the cool and creative stuff going on at Showbiz Tonight! (My excuse for watching? I was in a nitrous daze, my teeth and mouth hurt – really! And I couldn’t go to sleep.)

The anchor and two commentators were discussing Sarah Palin. Well, not actually Sarah herself, but Sarah’s hairdo. And the producer must have had a truly fantastic idea, incredible really!

Listen team – it’s our duty as broadcasters to clear up everything about Sarah’s up-do once and for all. Get it all out on the table. Let’s play the change the hairdo game!

To elucidate all these important hairdo points, they pulled out some photos of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. And yep, you guessed it! Oh, they’re brilliant over at Showbiz Tonight! They ingeniously stuck Sarah’s up-do on the lucky heads of Paris and Britney.

Did our unsuspecting models look fetching? Nope, not a chance. Time to play the next game called pile on the insults.

You may think the hairdo game is silly, but what strikes me as supremely silly is a grown man getting paid to insult Britney Spears. I think his name was Carlos Diaz. (The possibility exists that it was someone else).  He looks to be at least 40. He’s all grown up! A man! Is this a manly job? Insulting a young woman because she doesn’t look her best after the vice-presidential nominee’s up-do has been photo-shopped on her head? Imagine the courage, the skill, the manly qualities it must take to do this job.

If this were a comedy show, and if the commentary were actually funny, then I’d guess we’d have to give them some license. But this was just inane blather.

Did Britney deserve this? I don’t think so.  But here’s the real kicker: When was the last time the media took the hairdo of a male of significant stature – say for example, a vice presidential nominee — and stuck said hairdo on the head of a Backstreet Boy?

Misogynistic? You think? (Ashleigh Banfield, the show’s other hairdo commentator, wisely refused to comment. Ashleigh  – what’s a smart gal like you doing on a show like this?)

The media has become dumb and dumber and the rest of us will continue following suit if we don’t wake up.  Idiotic, mean-spirited blather is taking over. Yes, I know you can turn it off, change the channel, tune it out. But I don’t think you can deny that this superficial, unkind, dim-witted and crass way of relating to our fellow citizens has rubbed off on many Americans of all ages.  And that ultimately hinders our communication and progress as a people in a big way. And presenting superficialities as important, deserving-of-attention realities is harmful to our spirit, and especially damaging to our youth. That’s why it’s time for Wise Women to stop putting up with the baloney. Step up to plate – wield your power!  This is all-hands on deck moment on Planet Earth. We need you! We need your intelligence and experience! Get Real!

Thanks for reading this!
– JSK

Some wisdom from our Wise Women:

Tenzin Palmo:
The feminine quality is that of the nurturing, and this is something, which is desperately needed at this time in the world.

Sylvia Earle:
I think we’re finally beginning to understand that we are a part of nature, not apart from it, and that what we do to the natural world we do to ourselves.

Della Reese:
I’ve never been selling beauty. I’ve never been selling youth. I’ve been selling my talent, which will never grow old no matter how many years I walk on the planet.

Martha Jackson Jarvis:
Life happens in a flash, and what will you do?

Virginia Satir:
We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define us.

Hi! Let the blogging commence for Cowgirl Films….

Why blog? Why create a website? And why produce a documentary entitled Get Real! Wise Women Speak in the first place?

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of living in a country populated with sleepwalking citizens trapped in a silly excuse for reality, where a nasty and demanding child named pop culture holds the common discourse hostage.

The media may have birthed this child, but we are the ones who clothe, feed, and nurtureit at great cost to ourselves.

It’s high noon in the cultural war and vapid idiocy is winning.

This pathetic state of affairs hit me harder than usual the other day –

in the dentist chair of all places.

Turns out I had to be there for three-plus hours (don’t ask) and as I’m a pathetic coward when it comes to dental pain, my kindly dentist pacifies me with significant doses of nitrous oxide. (Listen, I’m not usually a coward; I’d choose labor pains over the dentist’s drill any day).

As I became increasingly stupefied by the nitrous oxide, a strange and horrifying understanding began to dawn with eerie clarity in my brain.

Strange juxtaposition, but a nitrous oxide high may just be the perfect state of consciousness for truly deciphering 24-hour cable news programming. And that is what I watched for the next three hours.

(At my dentist’s office, not only are you given a constant flow of nitrous oxide, they also let you hold the TV’s remote control so you can better distract yourself from the drilling in your mouth. Changing the station turns out to be problematic however, because you can’t see the remote control – your nitrous oxide mask and hose are in the way. So is the dentist’s large hand, which is holding the large drill. And due to the effect of the nitrous gas, you lack sufficient mind/body coordination to operate the remote with any degree of success, anyway.)

That’s why I was stuck watching cable news for the next three hours. Welcoming any distraction from the energetic drilling in my mouth, I focused heroically on the TV with every last smidgeon of my declining brainpower.

Horror!

My dental nightmare was engulfed by something worse — a terrible revelation. The news media has gone mad!

Completely insane. Total nut jobs. It would be funny except what does that make the rest of us – enabling nut jobs? And what is happening to our brain cells? I’m not sure, but it can’t be good.

In the course of more than three hours, I’m pretty certain that there were only three rotating stories on this cable network and here they are:

Story Number 1. Clay Aiken is …. GAY!

Oh boy, you think? This was a recurring leitmotif for the media that day, and boy, were those professional news people proud of it. They must have been because they trotted out this vital piece of information every few minutes. They’d given birth to fire, discovered fiber optics, saved all the starving children, created chocolate!

Story Number 2. The Blue Ghost

Apparently some kind of ghostly blue mass — dubbed the blue orb – has been making a recurring appearance in a health club. This is known because the orb trips a motion detector, setting off an alarm. I guess some orbs will do anything to get attention. There also seems to be a security camera capturing the orb’s high jinks on video, because if I’m not mistaken (and admittedly I could have been), there on the TV screen was the orb hovering cheekily above the treadmills. This delightful little anecdote practically owned the airwaves during my dental sojourn.

Story Number 3. The Financial Mess

Aha! Something substantial! My intrepid newscasters offered up a consideration of the current financial mess facing the country. The gist of their coverage was… people are squabbling! Everyone is squabbling – conservative Republicans squabble with Bush, who has somehow morphed into a socialist, McCain and Obama squabble with each other – to debate or not to debate, Nancy Pelosi squabbles with the titans of the complicated mortgage/ real-estate/ derivates /futures /shorts/amazingly incomprehensible investment schemes what have brought Wall Street to its knees, and the Democrats squabble with everybody.

Hmm, I may have been under the influence of nitrous, but I still feebly wondered if we might yet learn something from the news media, who are after all making their living on the public airwaves. Perhaps they’d chase down reasoned comment on a few subjects that I find of interest – things like personal and corporate responsibility, accountability and how we got in this mess in the first place.

Nope, back to the cuddly blue orb. Wait, back to gay Clay. He’s cuddly, too. After all, he’s a new daddy.

I admit I was fuzzy from the nitrous, but I was crystal clear on one thing – what I was watching on TV had absolutely nothing to do with anything remotely real, anything of actual substance or true meaning to our lives, our real lives.

TV land has gone insane. Stark raving mad. Utterly demented. Why should we care?

As a nation, we are facing a staggering financial crisis, the biggest any American under the age of 80 has ever seen, and newscasters – who are supposed to be journalists – present us with a pop singer’s coming out party and a cute ghost story.

Wouldn’t you agree, it’s time to Get Real?

To Be Continued…

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