This post brings with it a bit of pop culture social commentary and I’m curious as to your opinion of the following: USA Today and usatoday.com should launch the Celebrity Love Index.
What?
Well, for quite a while now, USA Today and usatoday.com have run something called the “Celebrity Heat Index,” which, it claims, tracks “the movers and shakers in pop culture.”
This week, the #1 “mover and shaker” is Brittney Spears, due to her “bikini sightings and filming an episode of ‘Glee,” …persistent marriage rumors and being on the cover of “OK Weekly.” Wow, that sure moved and shook my world!
#2 and moving up the charts is Anna Paquin for her wedding to “True Blood” co-star Stephen Moyer and an “US Weekly” cover story.
Moyer himself is #3 for the same reason, followed by that ultimate mover and shaker, Lindsay Lohan and then Angelina Jolle, Kourtney Kardashian, Heidi Montag, Elin Nordegren and Tiger Woods, her ex-. Also on the list Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi for her weight gain.
Is this really who we are? Is our pop culture that thin? We should be measuring something other than the incestuous nonsense that helps magazines sell website traffic which gets reported on TV shows which creates stories for…magazines!
Hence my suggestion: the Celebrity Love Index, and if usatoday.com won’t do it I think somebody should. Why not? Let’s measure the acts of kindness, unselfishness, love and generosity of pop culture stars. Let’s make it hip to give, to love, to tell the truth, to care, to take personal responsibility for wrongs done, to make good decisions.
What if a generation of young people–and those of us who are young at heart–could regularly be encouraged by those who bring out the highest and best in ourselves and in our culture, rather than the worst, the shadiest, the sleaziest or maybe just the most paparazzi-friendly. It’d be good for us. It’d be good for the celebs. It’d be good for our culture. And you know what, I believe it’d be good for the outfit that launched it as well.