America has lost its mind.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/30/AR2005053000780.html

Arthur Aufderheide is something relatively new under the sun -- a paleopatholgist. His specialty, a recent issue of the New Yorker tells us, is the dissection of mummies to study ancient diseases. I, too, have an odd specialty. It is the study of contemporary culture by carefully noting the number of citations in the computer database LexisNexis. For instance, I am here to tell you that when I searched in the category of major newspapers, John Bolton, the president's choice for U.N. ambassador, got 110 hits for the past week. In the same category, Paris Hilton got 158. As a LexisNexisologist I can only conclude that America has lost its mind.

Nonetheless, this triumph of the trivial is well worth studying. Anyone who watches any of the morning television shows, for instance, knows that celebrity has pushed out news. I think that even the start of a pretty big war would be the second item on the "Today" show if somehow an interview with Brad Pitt could be arranged. He is, as Ms. Hilton might say, hot, hot.

Of course, no one is hotter than Hilton herself. She has a fetching vapidity . . . . She is buoyed by our celebrity-obsessed culture, which in itself is just an adjunct of the need to sell.

~snip~ More at link above.

I agree. America has lost its mind.