David McElroy

The teen-ager’s tone suggested he was sharing really big news.

“Did you hear that Bob Saget died?!” he asked me breathlessly.

I told him I’d heard that, but he apparently didn’t think I was suitably impressed. He added something about who Saget had been — that he had been a comedian and a big television star.

“And he died,” he said again, as though giving me another chance to be shocked or upset.

“Almost 8,000 people die in this country every day,” I said. “I didn’t know Saget, so his death doesn’t really affect me any more than the deaths of those other people.”

“But he was famous,” the teen repeated, confused. “He was on television.”

I’ve had variations of this conversation with many people over the years, and it still confuses me. I feel the same way almost every time a “celebrity” dies. I experienced the same thing last week when former actress Betty White died.

I don’t typically have negative feelings about such people, but their deaths rarely mean anything special to me. And every time I hear the loud outpouring from those around me — people who also didn’t know these celebrities — I’m baffled that our culture has trained us to feel something special about random celebrities.

We’ve been subtly brainwashed into believing people are special if they’re famous.

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I’ve allowed myself to be seduced by the desire to be popular.

I’ve fallen into a trap which makes me crave the attention which would tell me that people like me. That some of them love me and adore me.

I’ve been struggling for months to figure out why a little voice inside me kept saying that I’d gone completely off course with my media efforts. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had some insights that shook me up. It’s complicated and I don’t know that I can really explain it well enough. It’s the interplay of a lot of things.

It’s about the narcissistic father I grew up with. It’s about the mother who abandoned me and left me scared about whether I’m really worthy of love. It’s also about changes in technology and society. It’s about how all of that intersected with a media culture that values nothing other than popularity. Those are the things that allowed me to pursue the new cultural equivalent of love — which is a shallow counterfeit of the real thing.

I lost sight of the intellectual and psychological and creative values which are important to me. I didn’t realize that while it was happening, of course. But I let myself be seduced into trying to fight a dysfunctional culture by becoming part of the monster I wanted to kill. That can’t work. And it’s been destroying me.

Tap or click below if you’d like to hear more of my struggle to explain how I allowed myself to get so badly off course. I have to warn you, though, that it’s long — and it’s not entertaining. Most of you shouldn’t waste your time with it. Honest. Keep Reading

The rioting at the U.S. Capitol a year ago is an ink blot. Most people look at it and see what they expect to see — and what they see seems to line up with their political views. Shocking, huh?

The mainstream progressive left seems to think there was a serious attempt at a coup launched by conservatives. Many of them seem to believe that we came just a whisker from having the federal government overthrown by this motley collection of misfits.

Those in the populist Trump camp believe the rioters were simply “patriots” who were protesting against what they were told was a stolen election. Many of them might agree today that the protest got a little out of control, but they’re convinced it was nothing. (And some genuine conservatives take this view, too, not because they love Trump, but simply because they hate the left.)

The truth is simpler but less dramatic. A pathetic bunch of misguided losers believed a pack of political lies from a narcissist who lost an election. They went to a protest that was a bit like a Trumpified version of Woodstock without the music. A mob of about 10,000 then entered the Capitol grounds and around 2,000 of them broke into the building.

The rioters apparently saw themselves as Mel Gibson in “Braveheart,” but they were really more like the losers from “Revenge of the Nerds” — but without the fantasy Hollywood ending.

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