Perspective

If the death of Michael Jackson taught me one thing, it's that people will feel sentimental for some of the dopiest things. Okay, Michael Jackson made some hit records and made friends with the local children, but he also more or less represented a gross commercialization of the music industry that made the majority of mainstream music about as thrilling and exciting as the weak tea they serve at the nursing home on Sunday afternoons. It was only then that hordes of his "fans" came out of the woodwork, most of whom would've easily cracked the K-Mart joke a week earlier.

Billy Mays death further reinforced that notion. It's sad that he died (I mean, it's sad when anyone passes), but seriously folks: he was an INFOMERCIAL "STAR." Star of infomercials you probably barely watched or cared about.

And now we have the ultimate point-counterpoint in notable deaths today. On one hand, we have Patrick Swayze, star of Dirty Dancing and...um...well, I'm sure he did some other things too other than getting "Hungry Eyes" stuck in my head. Oh, and Ghost. Yeah...some contribution to mankind. I'm pretty sure we can all get by in our pitiful lives if either of those two movies weren't made. Oh, and that crappy Wong Foo movie, the trailers of which left several questions for anyone my age at that time. Talk about unnecessary "cultural" "contributions." Thank god for kitsch, huh?

And then you have some dude named Norman Borlaug, possibly one of the most important men in the last fifty years to grace the earth. Um...wait...who?

Norman Borlaug. You know, the guy who saved nearly a billion lives with new strains of wheat that helped lift countries in the Third World out of starvation and misery. You know, actually important stuff that people should care about (at least more so than bubblegum pop, annoying infomercials, and dancing in a dirty fashion).

Whoa whoa whoa...this guy did? Why haven't we heard about him?

Well, maybe if you turn off VH1's "I Love this Decade for Really Insignificant Reasons due to Kitsch," you'll learn that he earned one of those neat Nobel Peace Prize things in 1970 -- you know, that thing that Martin Luther King Jr., Woodrow Wilson, Mother Teresa, and Dag Hammarskjöld have won. He also won the Congressional Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. India (one of the nations he essentially saved) honored him with their second highest civilian honor. How many people do you know that can claim all of those awards?

And yet, he still remains a mystery to most Americans. Why? Beats me. I suspect it might have something to do with the fact that we've all remained blissfully ignorant about the plight of much of the world while we force developing nations to adhere to standards that shackle them in poverty in the pretentious, full-bellied name of "environmentalism."

But that's another post for another day. I'd rather not tarnish the memory of Mr. Borlaug with that sort of diatribe. But I'll leave you with a quote.

“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”