Keeping Up

Today I woke up from a two hour nap that I took one hour after waking, and turned on the E! network while eating my second breakfast (it was a chicken leg). I watched the last fifteen minutes of a reality television special featuring a young woman’s wedding, a young woman whom I know, being a citizen of the internet, to have filed for divorce yesterday, 72 days into her marriage. The fact that said special was produced in the first place is probably evidence of the decline of Western society or something, because gay marriage and the economy, I guess. In every single minute of the fifteen I watched, a diamond was shown sparkling on someone’s head or finger or wrist or ear. The young woman had given her mother a pair of earrings. “Say what you will about [the young woman],” said her mother to the camera at some later date in front of a green screen, “and her having such a huge extravagant wedding, but she really has the most generous heart.” The mother of the young woman was shown crying. She seemed to be crying about the earrings, but I don’t know, maybe it was just edited that way. A few seconds later, the young woman’s sister testified that the young woman insists on approving all gifts before they are given to her. I stopped watching when the young woman was being walked down the aisle by an Olympian, her stepfather, because I was like, “Ugh,” but also I was like, “Yawn.” To me the real question is not to what degree is the young woman symbolic of everything that is wrong with America we are the 99% but rather what does it mean that E! chose to rerun this wedding special today. Like, do they just not give a shit anymore? Or are they just pulling some kind of wacky postmodern prank on us. I don’t have the answer. I used the word “postmodern” there without thinking too hard about what I meant by it.