We Americans have a lot of national pastimes (baseball, pornography, tipping), but one of the more intriguing minor ones has got to be “watching people have tiresomely protracted arguments about matters of ‘respect’ or etiquette that have very little to do with us directly.” I’d estimate it constitutes at least a third of all television programming and has given us some of the greatest moments in the history of the medium: dudes like Buckley, Mailer, and Vidal braying on sixties chat shows; a million seasons of Real World showdowns; or the time one Real Housewife of New Jersey called another Real Housewife a “prostitution whore,” which to my ear is damn near a six-syllable poem. (The sixth syllable, if you’re counting, is the second half of a Jerseyfied “whore,” which makes the whole thing trochaic trimeter, I think.) There is something fundamentally captivating about watching strangers use mass media to have dismal ego-driven arguments that are not actually pertinent to our lives.
Via: Abebe: Nicki Minaj, Hot 97, and the Fight Over Real Hip-Hop
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