From: mzraly@ra.cs.umb.edu (Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Annoying Celebrity Causes (Was Sinead, Was MacD's)
Summary: Don Henley is a putz; Thoreau was overrated
Date: 7 Oct 92 06:42:54 GMT
Organization: UMass/Boston Dept. of Math & CS

padutton@wpi.WPI.EDU (Peter Alan Dutton) writes:

	[ Sinead on SNL stuff deleted... ]

>Peeve: "Stars" who look at their "stardom" as a license to be experienced
>	political pundits. Their social causes are often self-congratulatory
>	and brainwashing enough. Just because they're lucky enough to have
>	gotten a record deal or to have slept with the right people to get
>	in a movie doesn't make them any more astute and knowledgeable about
>	politics than the average Joe.
>
>Peeve: Some people probably listen to them.

Let us speak of examples.  Let us speak of Don ("Le'Eagles c'est moi!")
Henley and the Walden Woods.

Background:  Henry David Herbert Walker Thoreau was a writer who lived
in Concord Massachusetts 130 years ago.  Among other things, he wrote a
book called "Walden", about the year he lived in a house he built in
the woods on land owned by a friend, costing about $22, mostly because
he conned locals into helping him build it.  (They figured it kept him
out of their hair.)  He wrote about how he wanted to "live
deliberately", and one gets the impression from all the stories about
him, that during the entire year he never left the spot.  No.
Apparently he used to sponge meals off his mother the whole year
through.

Some years ago, Don reads "Walden" and says to hisself: "Now hears a
guy with a great mystique about him, but who in reality is as much a
charlatan as I am.  I LOVE THIS GUY!"  Then Don finds out that land
around Walden is going to be sold for housing.  "I must stop this", he
says to hisself.  He visits Massachusetts.  "I must stop this", he says
to anyone who'll listen, including many the radio station.  "Here's
what I'll do.  I'll play a concert where we can raise money to buy the
land from the landgrubbers (and promote my new album)."  So he does.
Then he gets a bunch of other celebrity-folk to write something about
"What Walden Means to Me" and he & Dave Marsh publish the collection
for Yuppies to buy and put on their coffee-tables to impress their
friends with their PC-ness.  And on, and on.

I've been to Walden Pond.  It's a nice little pond, suitable for
swimming, with a few stones to mark the foundation of Thoreau's cabin,
not too far from the pond.  There's a road to one side, railroad tracks
on the other.  It's doesn't take a great deal of land to encompass the
pond and the foundation.  There's no reason housing couldn't coexist
with the pond and the Thoreau site.  But DH seems to think otherwise.

Peeve:  Building mountains out of molehills.

Peeve:  "Celebrities" who do the same with much fanfare.

Peeve:  Radio stations and other media that cater to these guys.

Peeve:  People who fall for this crap.

Enough.  Rant off.  Time to buy a Cat Stevens' record for Salman
Rushdie.

-- 
Mike Zraly	mzraly@cs.umb.edu
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
For there is no doubt at all but that the Model A stands at the apex of
the evolution of the wheel.  And it is a matter of sorrow to me -- as
it should be to all men -- that this magnificent climax should have
been followed by the rapid and terrible degeneration of the automotive
species into the effete mechanical incubi which batten off human flesh
on every highway of the world today.		-- Farley Mowatt
Newsgroups: alt.peeves