Why Does Glitz and Glamour Work?

Just because you were born in Babylon, doesn't mean you have to die in Babylon.

As I get older, and take a look at the pop culture of today, especially the pop music, I can't help wonder how "it" works. As a kid, I was immersed in corporate produced, mass produced culture. Even though we spent lots of time running around outside back then, and I spent a lot of time reading books, the TV culture was still really important.

Today, for example, women buy and drive around in Jeeps, which are an impractical form of transportation for urban/suburbanites. I think it's plausible they buy them because Daisy Duke on the trashy Dukes of Hazzard drove one back in the 70s.

The "stars" and "glitz and glamour" life ends up being a dream life for little boys and girls somehow. The reality of the Hollywood life, however, seems to be the inverse of that dream. The "stars" are just employees in a gross corporate enterprise that uses them up and exploits their most banal and fleeting characteristics.

What's "glitz and glamour"?  Glitz is some old German via Yiddish word, probably, for star shine. Glamour is from a word that is associated with magic spells, which is pretty interesting.

The sort of formless desire to make and build a family and life that children have can be exploited for banal purposes by directing it at the images and idols that externalize their sexuality. I don't think many parents can even explain or comprehend why it's bad to expose their children to those images, even though they might feel shame and wrong about it. Externalized sexuality is a little like a coil spring that popped out of a mechanism. Other appetites that are externalized, even just hunger that's externalized as candy and sweets, is similar. The truth of that appetite and its real purpose is broken.

The practice of "virtue" is really an attempt to keep a person whole and fully powered up through their life. By externalizing the objects of virtue via images and the psychological tricks of Hollywood and other propaganda, it breaks people up and makes them partial and weaker. It's really a form of "grooming" for exploitation.

The people who are really important and heroic are basically anonymous--the good moms and dads, farmers, productive people, etc... The people on pedestals, or who are on TV all the time, or who are idolized are often trash and frauds.