I've never seen a movie with Lindsay Lohan in it. I hear that when she wasn't strung out on drugs that she was actually a pretty good actress. I've only ever heard one of her songs, and though it was not my cup of tea, I could certainly see her appeal. Before the drugs and lip plumping, Lindsay Lohan was also a refreshing change from the typical starlet - bleached blonde or moody brunette. She was a cute freckly redhead that seemed to have a lot of potential.
We all know how this has panned out. Drugs, toxic relationships, the worst parents in the world, and Twitter rants that make Courtney Love look sane have culminated into a Mickey Mouse prison sentence that will teach her nothing and set a bad example for every loose cannon idiot that emulates her. If only she had been busted in Texas, where the law is taken more seriously... but I digress.
The fact is, all the information I have on Lindsay Lohan comes not from her body of work, but from the tabloids. I admit it, I read the Hollywood gossip sites (not Perez Hilton - I hate him), eating up these stories as much as the next person, even though it sometimes makes me feel dirty inside. I cannot hold myself above anyone in this because I feed into this machine every time I click on a link leading to a story about Lohan or any of the other idiots out there that are famous for no good reason.
In another era, Lohan would have been forgotten - a has been chewed up and spit out by Hollywood, making tabloid headlines for only her arrests instead of for every single time she's stumbled out of a club at 4am, her underage sister in tow. She would have been a Where Are They Now? curiosity, not unlike the Diff'rent Strokes kids after their stars faded and their tragedies played out. This is actually what should have happened. She would have been more interesting that way.
The problem is that we have entered the internet era, where nothing is sacred, and these celebrities keep themselves marginally relevant with stupid Twitter posts, phone calls to TMZ letting them know they are out and about, other extreme forms of attention whoring, and fanboy/girl bloggers with unhealthy obsessions with these people. Why do we give the attention whores attention? This is the reason we are subjected to people like Heidi "99.9% Recyclable Parts" Montag and Spencer
I've admitted that I feed into this when I go to Hollywood gossip sites, but at the same time, I must add that when I do go to these sites, I generally go for the more legitimate stories about relevant celebrities, or for the comedy stylings of people like Michael K, who runs DListed. The guy is a laugh riot. I read about people I wouldn't even normally know anything about because he is just that funny. I am also aware that if I boycott such sites, it's not going to make a lick of difference to what gets posted. So what do we, as the general public, do about this idiocy? I don't have any answers, by the way. I am asking.
Getting back to Lohan - she's only going to serve a small fraction of her sentence, then get released into the wild, where she will continue to get into trouble. I wouldn't have a problem with this if she kept that trouble to herself, but the reason she is in jail now is because she posed a huge danger to the general public. Anyone else that had done what she had would have been rotting in prison from day one, damn overcrowding. Celebrities get off too easily, yet they still whine when they are forced to face consequences, no matter how minor. It's the whining, delusion, and special treatment that make me put not only Linsday Lohan into the asshole spotlight, but also what passes for justice in California, the cult of celebrity and what gets glorified instead of talent, and even myself for reading it.
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