Why All the Hatin': A Defense of the Kardashians

            Maybe we should all just lay off the Kardashians. I know it sounds stupid. That particular family appears to be a great lightning rod for whatever malice people have towards the superficial, stupid, and privileged. However, I wonder what it is exactly that makes everyone so mad. If you really cornered someone who was mad at the very existence of the Kardashians in our popular culture I assume you would hear a lot of the very same things. Why are they famous? Why do I have to hear about them? They have so much and have done so little to get it. All of these appear to be salient points that most people who are detractors of their many shows could agree on, but I still wonder why everyone is so mad.

            The Kardashian Empire, to the best of my knowledge, began because Kim Kardashian filmed her sexual encounter with Ray J, singer Brandy’s brother. The tape was released, she was hot, he was a minor celebrity, and she was from a family with some fame. Her father, Robert Kardashian, was OJ Simpson’s friend. He was seen quite a bit during the OJ Simpson trial. Her mother is now married to former Olympian Bruce Jenner who has morphed his appearance into a peculiar mask with plastic surgery. So there you go. There are a lot of intriguing elements to the story, first and foremost, sex appeal. My guess is that none of the Kardashian fame would be possible if Kim was a six. It’s even possible that none of the fame would be possible if Kim just had a normal sized ass. The novelty of her butt appears to be a sizeable portion of her appeal. After sex appeal it’s really just down to name recognition. We as a people are vaguely aware of the characters involved in this story. Basically, the same circumstances that led to a movie about the board game Battleship and a reboot of Charlie’s Angels brought us the prominence of the Kardashians.

            Are they bad people? To the best of my knowledge the worst thing that the family has done is exploit themselves. They are willing to trade privacy, dignity, and modesty for fame and fortune. Does that make someone a bad person? Personally, don’t really think so. If you condemn the Kardashians then by proxy you would have to condemn every stripper, porn star, reality star, and parent of a child actor. To me, that just seems like to wide a net of judgment to cast for people who essentially only hurt themselves. Among the people that I just listed the only one who I would begin to call a bad person is the parent of a child actor, but you don’t hear the same anger directed towards Dakota Fanning’s parents. With that said, Kris Kardashian, the mother, does seem a tad on the despicable side, but I really can’t say that I have any anger towards her and her family.

            So, why are people so mad? If they are only hurting themselves, why is there so much anger directed at them? Their show is on a network dedicated to the type of celebrity driven vacuous nonsense that the Kardashians represent. They aren’t taking time away from better things. If anything they are taking time away from an in depth look into the life of Carney Wilson or repeats of the soup. My thought is that at least they are fun to look at. I think that a lot of what angers people is the fact that there are a lot of people who love them. They are wildly popular. There are a great many people who do want to be like them, act like them, and dress like them. However, my guess is that the people who love them would never be well liked by the people who hate them so what’s the problem? Liking the Kardashians is shorthand by which a person can be avoided. No longer do you have to have a relationship with someone to determine their ilk, now you can just ask them their opinion of Kim and you have a pretty good idea who you’re dealing with. That makes me happy, but I appear to be in the minority.

            All in all I think it comes down to people being jealous. I think that in a lot of ways people rarely progress past high school. Kim is the beautiful rich girl who was never going to date you or be your friend. You wanted nothing more than for her to be discovered as a fraud and for you to be popular in her stead. People will always be jealous of the beautiful, dumb, and successful because it is a caste that we feel we cannot achieve. I say, sit back, relax, enjoy what they look like or change the channel, but don’t get me started on Ellen.

Chuck Norris in The Expendables 2: An Emotional Breakdown

            So Chuck Norris is in the new Expendables. Are you happy hipsters? Are you happy? Now, because of your constant internet memes and stupid jokes about fists being inside beards, we now apparently consider Chuck Norris a big time action hero despite the fact that I far as I can tell his two most popular endeavors were Walker Texas Ranger and Sidekicks. He is the Zsa Zsa Gabor of actions stars. We all agree he’s famous, but nobody really knows why. This to me is the exact reason he is popular at all. I’ve been under a suspicion for many years now that hipsters and pretentious intellectuals scour the earth’s landscape seeking the most wildly unpopular things, everything from movies to food to music to clothing. They seek out these terrible, unpalatable entities and tout them as the best our society has to offer. This of course makes them seem brilliant and part of some exclusive club. Their theory being that exclusivity in and of itself denotes quality when in reality conventional wisdom would dictate that the opposite is true. Chuck Norris fits snugly into that role, he sucks. I personally believe that most things that are unpopular are that way for a reason. To think the opposite is to subscribe to the theory that either the vast majority of people are stupid and wrong or that there are forces in the world that keep these wonderful things from the mainstream some sort of omnipotent presence that doesn’t want most people to appreciate the brilliance of Bruce Campbell or the early work of John Carpenter, you know before he because all commercial. I personally, believe that neither of those things is true. I believe that if something is good it will find an audience, I believe that most people are lazy not stupid and I believe that Bruce Campbell is stupid. So, now the same people that brought you the popularity of Bruce Campbell and the Tron sequel now have shoe horned Chuck Norris into The Expendable 2 and I’m irritated.

           

Now, for the rebuttals to all of my wildly impulsive and opinionated conjecture:

Chuck Norris as a meme and fodder for humor is not really a hipster thing, he’s an internet thing and by those standards he is not unpopular.

-         I am basically speaking to the terrible nature of Chuck Norris and my assumption that the vast majority of people that make Chuck Norris jokes have never seen any of his movies. I am arguing that it is a hipster thing because if I were to complain about him being in The Expendables 2, the only people that would tell me how good he really is would have a beard, be wearing skinny jeans, and they would doing so in between sips of an IPA or a PBR.

I’m sure there are many people who know why Zsa Zsa is famous, but I’m pretty well versed in the entertainment industry and all I know is that she was in Green Acres, but for some reason I think she was famous before that.

I’m sure that there are also plenty of people that know why Chuck Norris is famous too, but my assumption is that if given the opportunity to name 5 of the man’s movies the vast majority of people would name at least one of Steven Segal’s.

These are of course wildly broad generalizations that I’ve built by living in Brooklyn and working in a creative field. I know that hipsters and pretentious individuals must like some popular things or rather the things they like become popular. Also, when someone touts something that irritates me I will regularly label them a hipster. This could be a chicken and the egg situation. With that said IPA tastes terrible and Sophia Coppola movies are boring.

I understand that it is entirely possible that most people are stupid and wrong, but call me optimistic, I don’t agree. Of course, saying this might mean that I’m stupid and wrong.

I don’t really hate Bruce Campbell, I just don’t think he’s funny. I don’t get him, you know why? Because there’s nothing to get. He’s not funny, he’s over acting, that’s his thing, and I’m not impressed. This outburst is brought to you by everyone in

Union Square

who laughed wildly when he appeared on screen in Spiderman.

I am fully aware that being upset over the lineup of a sequel to The Expendables is stupid. It’s stupid for many reasons. It’s stupid because the concept of the movie is almost rooted in hipster nostalgic irony to begin with. It’s stupid because Norris has just as much a place in the movie as Terry Crews if not more so. It’s stupid because while I am not familiar with the man’s catalog maybe he’s more popular than I think. While Chuck Norris triggered my vitriol, he is not the cause of it. I spent too many years attempting to be smart and have good taste, but falling short. I’ve been made fun of too many times for liking Linkin Park. I’ve had eyes roll at me too often for liking The Real World/Road Rules Challenge. So while I agree with all of the points made in this article, please understand that they are emotional reactions to feeling rejected for too many years. So in closing, sorry Mr. Norris, you were great in Side Kicks.