We Need A Little Triteness, Right This Very Minute

by Lucianne Goldberg

Hundreds of people, some sobbing, filtered into a building on a Hudson River pier yesterday to begin the agonizing process of applying for death certificates for loved ones still missing in the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center. A young reporter watching them file by kept hitting herself on the head with her notebook and saying softly, "I hate this, I hate this, I hate this." Her assignment was ask the shell shocked and grieving , "How do you feel?" Her last big assignment had been covering the Lizzie Grubman story. That was the story of the spoiled New York flackess who backed her daddy's Mercedes into a group of party animals waiting outside a nightclub in the Hamptons.

A magazine writer friend spent yesterday focusing on those who worked for a single employer in the World Trade Center. They are all dead. Her assignment is to tell their story as an example of the pain. I speak to this writer several times a week. She has been crying into the phone since September 11. I asked her how the assignment was going. She said, "I hate this, I hate this, I hate this." Her last assignment had been an in depth look at Gary Condit's other girl friends.

For those whose livelihoods are tied inextricably to the fun and excitement of popular culture the world we giggled at has changed. For the millions of pop culture consumers who unashamedly read the Enquirer or the Star , the Globe, People magazine and Page Six of the New York Post, our cultural life is at a stand still. There are even those among us who read the Weekly World News. How else to get a quick and tranquilizing yuck at the adventures of Bat Boy (last seen stalking Gena Bush on campus) and the Family With the Longest Tongues (even the baby)? No one would have to threaten me to get me to admit that I love this stuff. I would rather curl up on a cold winter night with Vanity Fair than the Federalist Papers. Been there, done that with the Federalist Papers when there was a true need to know but that was years ago. Now I want mindless drivel. I still want to know what happened to Chandra Levy. I don't really care why Tom Cruise and Nicole split but given the choice of reading what it was like to see a couple, holding hands, jumping out of the fifty-seventh floor of the flaming Trade Center and an interview with the hairdresser Nicole confessed all to....gimme the hairdresser's dish and fast.

This doesn't mean one is heartless or insensitive. We are all heartbroken and permanently sad. This simply means we need to give ourselves a break from choking back tears. A respite from the memory and agony of what has happened.

Why can't there be some off beat TV station that would help us through these times. I want to see B-roll of Gary Condit, thrilled at being off the hook, dancing around his Adams-Morgan apartment in a scuba suit and swim fins, high fiving the lamp shades and shrieking, "Free at last."

I want to see Monica Lewinsky, grossly over hot fudge sundaed arriving at the opening of a new Thai-Mex Fusion bistro in Queens with Alex Baldwin on her arm. I want to see a sit-down with Barbara Walters in which Rosie O'Donnell and Ellen Degeneres announce their engagement. I'll tell you how bad I miss the old days. I would even watch the oleaginous Lanny Davis swearing on his children's lives that Clinton really was buying that Rio bikini for Chelsea. I want our junk culture back. I want news of who P. Diddy shot last night and whether that Skakel creep will be tried as a grown up or a kid. Wait....wait...here's how bad it is.....I miss O.J. and news of his search or Nicole's killer(s).

I want junk. I want trash. I want gossip. I want.....I want... God help me....Barbra Steisand's Peace Proposal to the Taliban. I want Chris Hitchins and Gore Vidal and the Naked Chef to get into some horrendous hissy fit food fight. I want blind items about Tina Brown leaving Harry Evans for Steven Brill. Anything, just anything to make us forget the pain of 300 crushed and burned up firemen and the 1500 daddyless kids left behind by dead Cantor Fitzgerald employees.

The pompous and intellectually superior (and I say, insecure, among us) will say junk news is for the brain dead, for the incurious and undereducated. To this I say, "Feh!" - Junk news is for those of us who know how to protect ourselves from total mental collapse when the real world is too much to bear.

Lastly, while I'm asking for the impossible. I want a little respect given and funds raised for statues in the park and certificates of appreciation from every mental health organization in the land to Richard Johnson and Jeanette Walls, to Liz Smith and Cindy Adams and Mitchell Fink and that married couple over at the Daily News - Rush and Malloy and Neal Travis and the memories of Hedda and Louella and all those who toil in that down market, slightly sleazing world of gossip. It doesn't seem so mindless any more when its the one thing we have that can save our sanity.

Two things I know for sure right now. There is going to be a war and Steadman is never going to marry Oprah.

-- Anonymous, September 27, 2001

Answers

I miss O.J. and news of his search or Nicole's killer(s).

Many people believe that Nicole's killer is hanging out at various S. Florida golf courses.

-- Anonymous, September 27, 2001