Thursday, June 19, 2008

R.I.P. Tim Russert, But Let's Get Ahold of Ourselves


Well, Tim Russert died. Apparently he was on some boring news show that I never watched, and either millions of Americans were watching it or people just get really corny and become unreasonably upset when quasi-celebrities die. Like I'm sad that Tim died, he seemed like a nice guy and I was also sad when Peter Jennings died, because he seemed like he was attractive during his youth. But things are slightly out of control when they're having 3 days of prime-time television tributes to Tim for getting paid to sit in a chair and asking people questions. One montage is enough of Tim in the field, Tim in a trenchcoat reporting live, fatter Tim sitting behind a desk, Tim pointing his pen at someone, Tim cracking up after fumbling some words on air, Tim moderating some sort of debate and Tim at a gala with his trophy wife, no need to switch Wife Swap to a different night to continue the coverage of Tim Russert: The People's Princess.

It's actually ridiculous - he had like 10 days of funeral so people could pay their respects. George Clooney sent flowers with a card that said "There are no words" because he had obviously never met Tim and had nothing to say about him. Bruce Springsteen SANG at the memorial service (unfortunately not "Born in the U.S.A." - HAHA) via satellite because apparently Tim Russert was a giant fan. The bottom line here is that people are acting like Jesus Christ himself was on Meet the Press and while I'm sure Tim was a decent guy, I can think of at least 7 other people who were awesome that didn't get 30 day funerals and 75 memorial montages, namely both of my grandfathers, my grandmother, my friends grandparents' and some other people, so people need to calm down with the Tim Russert memorialization because he'll be on reruns and you won't even know he's dead. And just FYI, if the Counting Crows don't perform at my funeral there are going to be some serious problems.

2 comments:

megan said...

um, it was actually even more ridiculous than you have described. i read on perez hilton, that just after someone at the funeral performed "somewhere over the rainbow," an ACTUAL rainbow appeared near the D.C. cemetary where the funeral occurred - which of course meant that CNN and other mainstream NEWS networks had to televise that rainbow in breaking update broadcasts. have we really gotten to the point where a rainbow is urgent news?!?

Milan said...

The media likes to fellate itself. Full stop.