One news item that was mostly lost in the holiday weekend shuffle was that the Los Angeles Police Department has solicited celebrities to use twitter to spread the word about the closure of a prominent freeway. The story was already pretty funny, then Kim Kardashian tweeted the wrong information… twice. From Fox News:
What did California law enforcement expect when they enlisted celebrities to help warn the public of the impending closure of a major freeway?
Probably not this.
Kim Kardashian, one of several celebrities with Twitter followings in the millions, was asked by the L.A.P.D to warn her followers of the impending highway closure.
Kardashian complied, tweeting on Friday: “Remember this weekend the 405 Fwy is gonna be closed between the San Fernando Valley and the West Side!!”
Just one problem. The closure is in two weeks.
So the “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” star tried to correct her mistake, tweeting: “Remember next weekend the 405 Fwy is gonna be closed between the San Fernando Valley and the West Side!!”
Wrong again.
Kardashian erased both initial Twitter messages and finally got it right: “Stay away from the 405 Fwy the weekend of July 16 & 17, it will be closed btwn the 10 Fwy and 101 Fwy North & South!”
Oh. My. Gawd.
My data isn’t fresh on this, but there was a time not long ago where the stretch of 405 freeway between the 10 and 101 was the single most trafficked road in the United States. Shutting that down for a couple of days is like blocking off L.A.’s pulmonary artery; it just can’t function without it. So, if the city is going to try to temporarily block it off, they can’t afford any mistakes.
One of the main theses of Big Hollywood is that more often than not, pop culture trumps politics; in other words, Hollywood has as much, if not more influence over the way we live our lives than those who are literally in power. One of the best illustrations of this is twitter, where most of our country’s greatest thinkers are followed by a few thousand people while reality television stars and pop singers are followed by millions. Kardashian, for example, who was catapulted to fame when a bootleg sex tape she made with rapper Ray-J was leaked to the public, is followed by over eight million people. By virtue of that fact, the LA City government entrusted her to disseminate vital information to help keep one of the country’s largest municipalities moving at it’s already lumbering pace. Naturally, she wasn’t up to the task.
But I don’t blame Kim Kardashian; she makes a living having her butt x-rayed. I blame all of us who have been suckered into the cult of celebrity and vote for the people who run this city so horribly. The taxes are too high, our schools are unusable, and even the public restroom toilet seats have gang inscriptions carved into them. And don’t try and drive anywhere in L.A., either, because if you don’t pop a tire on one of the countless potholes, I can only conceptualize an L.A. traffic jam as the preview for Hell. The city is run by a goof-ball Mayor who changed his name from Tony Villar to Antonio Villaraigosa (no doubt to pander to the Latin community) and failed the Bar Exam all four times he took it. When he’s not on top of a Telemundo reporter (no wonder he’s happy to turn the key of the city over to an amateur porn star) he’s court-side at a Laker game or violating a local variance. This is the guy we democratically elected to be in charge, so we deserve whatever we get from him.
We now have a city that has been left to the most incompetent people in the country (reality television stars) by the second most incompetent people in the country (left-wing politicians).
Needless to say, it’s a bit of hyperbole to blame this twitter mishap on our failure of a Mayor; he may not have had much to do with any of this. But someone was elected to run this city–it ain’t one of the Kardashians–and the buck stops with him.
I love Los Angeles for a number of reasons, but the combination of Hollywood nonsense and a left-wing government can be a heavy burden to bear. If you want to understand why our John Nolte left L.A., look no further than Kim Kardashian’s twitter feed.
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