Thanks, AOL

I was reading news headlines on AOL, such as AOL news headlines are - lots of gushy nonsense about stars that I don't care about, let alone have ever heard of. Somewhere along the line I slipped and accidentally clicked on a Justin Bieber link.

Now I need ritual cleansing and purification by a team of tonsured monks. Maybe even make a huge donation, crawl on my knees like a pilgrim, drag something heavy across the desert in a gesture of hair-shirted penitence. It isn't just because Justin Bieber is pretty much a train wreck (though he is - and they laugh at my music!). It's more the comments appended to the news stories that made me feel defiled and unholy - annoying gibberish "written" by people who can't spell the word "you" and who can't think their way out of the simplest of logical traps. Ugh. How horrible.

My favorite comment was something about how "all u haters think he can't sing shud shut up cuz he's HOTTTT." One hates to argue with geniuses of this ilk, but "hot" and "able to sing" are two different things, and neither one implies the other (just consider Neil Young, who is uglier than twenty miles of washboarded road but has a certain facility with music). This leaves entirely unasked the question of whether he's actually hot or not, but I'm inclined to believe that anyone not old enough to get a driver's license, register for the draft, or buy a beer legally is unhot by definition.

Another comment I greatly enjoyed (in a perverse, self-hating kind of way) was something like "All U HATERS stop hatin". Once again, one hates to argue with such a mental heavyweight, but thinking that someone's pop music drivel is drivel isn't the same as "hatin". And besides, if I stopped "hatin" I would no longer be a "HATER", and who am I to deny my own essence? If I'm a HATER, I hate, it's what I do.

All of this leads one to the inevitable and unhappy conclusion that something has gone haywire somewhere along the line. Not so much with J.B. himself, who seems pretty laughable, and the less energy I expend on him, the happier I am. No, mostly it makes my flesh crawl to witness anew just how low our standards of writing and critical thought have gotten. What must it be like to inhabit the minds of these comment-writers?

Ugh. Send for the priests, I require purification in the worst way imaginable.