J-14

Editor's note: I don't usually use this space for rants, but today I'm making an exception.

I flew into Utah last night and my flight was nondescript, which is what a good flight should be. I had a one hour layover in Chicago, during which I killed time by popping into one of those souvenir/magazine shops. I'm the type person who is usually aware of big current events but doesn't always bother to keep up with all of the extended coverage in the aftermath - I don't watch the news (unless you count SportsCenter), I don't look at newspapers (except to read Utah Jazz coverage and film reviews), and at the grocery store I never pay any attention to the People and Us Weekly-style magazines at the checkout. So yesterday at the magazine shop was quite a shock.

Of course I'm aware of the unfolding Tiger Woods saga - they cover it on SportsCenter, after all. But I have to admit that I was surprised that every single magazine in every genre, from the most respected magazines on down to the worst rags, had Tiger plastered all over the cover with the latest sordid headlines. Looking at the magazine rack was like looking at an Andy Warhol painting of celebrities that are reprinted so many times and painted over so artificially that they stop being human beings and they just turn into a blur. Whether it's Marilyn Monroe, Tiger Woods, or the celebrity of the week, these magazines turn human beings into mere page-filling content and America laps up every single drop of it. Makes me sick.

However, when I returned to the gate before boarding I saw something even more sickening. A girl who looked about 10 years old was sitting next to me reading a magazine I'd never seen before called J-14. It looked exactly like the trash magazines I had just seen in the stores, except for the stories were all about Miley Cyrus and the cast of Twilight. The magazine looked innocuous enough (I glanced over and saw one headline - Miley had an imaginary friend as a kid?! LOL!), but in reality it's a trashy magazine training course. It's preparing youngsters so that in a few years they'll be perfectly primed for grown-up celebrity scandals like Tiger.

There is a small moment in Tina Fey's Mean Girls that brilliantly captures how anxious the media is to give innocent young kids an apprenticeship in trashiness. They all go over to Regina's house and in the background we see her un-parentally supervised little sister in the background copying the skanky dance moves on the TV. That girl will grow up to be another Regina, perpetuating the cycle. Trashiness usually doesn't just happen - you have to be carefully taught. And that's why J-14* upset me so much.

* This post would have been so much cooler if my plane had left from Gate J-14. I think it was B-2 or something boring like that. But then again, Vitamin B2 is Riboflavin, the coolest of the B Vitamins. I always thought Riboflavin would be a cool band name. Thoughts?

Editor's note: Amy Jeppsen offers her retort to this post here.