What Am I Missing?

For over a decade, I have carefully avoided any news stories about who's up and who's down in Washington, D.C.

The wisdom of that neglect has been confirmed many times simply because in most cases the press reports are inaccurate and in all cases they are meaningless. Who should care if Senator A is the hot commodity this week when he or she will have faded by next month?

Likewise with sports teams. I deeply admire the skills of many professional athletes but since the teams now treat players like so many interchangeable widgets, it is difficult to get too excited over which uniform they wear. When I was a kid, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, and Stan Musial stuck with their teams. Brand loyalty was much easier. Nowadays, who knows where a favorite player will be in a year? As a friend put it, "Team loyalty has become the equivalent of cheering for laundry."

The entire celebrity culture is a colossal time waster. Some cable channels have become time warps. O.J. Simpson is back, Paris Hilton is back, that Lohan person is still around, and some celeb or another is always going to court. It would be pleasant if they'd all leave.

As Joe Queenan noted, "This is one thing you really have to give Cat Stevens credit for. Once he went away, he stayed away. He left his career behind. True, he did poke his head out of the foxhole recently, but basically the rest of us haven't heard a peep out of him for twenty years."

Good for Cat.