Celebrities are Tools in the Hands of Your Slave Master
by Sabrina Dawkins
In a dream, one of your favorite deceased NBA basketball stars had accepted a lot of applications for one job position he had available—only one. The other applications would be kept on file for possible later consideration. The applications were in a pile on the floor. They were strange, unlike any application I’ve ever seen: single-page applications on white tennis shoe-shaped sheets. There were only five or six questions on the form. Name and date of birth were questions #1 and #2. The third question asked for political party. Was this an application or a voting slip? The applicants left that section blank, so it was by default automatically counted as “autocrat.”
In the dream, I don’t remember the famous basketball player ever actually choosing a person for the position. But after he’d looked over the applications, I was with him on his small plane as he laughed and joked about the bad punctuation in an application. He was facing the front of the small plane and talking to someone closer to the front. I only saw his right profile and his big smile as he laughed at a job hopeful’s bad punctuation.
People pay a lot of money for sneakers attached to the names of star athletes. And I wonder if they are paying more for the dream, the fantasy world in which star athletes live, than anything else, that lottery ticket that promises that one day the buyer can become a Michael Jordan or a LeBron James, or at least for a moment feel as important as a star athlete by wearing expensive shoes, hoping others will see it as a sign of wealth.
As a consequence of the internet and television, it seems that people are reading less in depth. Instead of reading books, they are watching short YouTube clips or searching Google for a sentence or a paragraph, but no more than a short article on a given topic. On YouTube I read comments from adults who don’t know grammar or how to properly punctuate sentences so that they actually make sense. If you do a lot of reading, you will pick up on proper punctuation because you will see it frequently. But playing basketball and focusing on being entertained will not improve writing skills. Thus, the star athlete was part of the problem: He gave his fans and now applicants entertainment, not education; bread and circuses, not useful information. He was essentially making fun of a product he created: the fans he made useless in the real world by capturing them in his fantasy web.
You see, voting for athletes and celebrities as your role models, studying their careers and trying to imitate them will lead you to communism: total dependency on someone else. Your brain will literally be filled with junk information: sports stats, filthy rap lyrics, celebrity gossip, flashing images meant to thrill instead of teach. You won’t be taught how to write correctly, how to think correctly, how to survive in the world outside of the fantasy bubble that the lottery celebrity lives in.
In another dream, the same deceased NBA star drove me to a McDonald’s drive-thru window. I was in the front passenger seat. You know how athletes are always being paid a bunch of money to promote harmful and unhealthy products to their fans, such as soda and fast food? Out of the corner of my eye, I saw green grass growing out of the cracks of asphalt in the seemingly abandoned parking lot as he drove up to the order-retrieval window.
Why did I only see the grass growing between the asphalt in my peripheral vision? Because celebrities are created to be distractions, bread and circuses, so that we pay attention to them and never establish autonomy. I wasn’t supposed to be at a fast-food restaurant drive-thru, looking to a celebrity, I was supposed to be growing my own food. But my focus on the star athlete kept me from fully acknowledging the reality of the green grass pushing through and overpowering the smothering asphalt—nature pushing through the artificial convenience spot where people go to lose their dignity, where they go to depend on strangers for their basic need: food. And leading the way there was a celebrity, someone built up on the TV screen to capture the attention of many and lead them—thoroughly entertained—into slavery.
The brain is broken, filled with trivia and cheap entertainment until the living green grass starts to break through the false reality, the seemingly convenient fiction laid atop your mind, and shows you the pure and natural state in which we were supposed to live on earth: growing our own food and relying on God’s holy word for guidance, not the lips of Judases paid to lead us away from him. And your passive vote is for a cruel autocrat if you continue to put your time and money into modern-day bread and circuses and therefore continue to lay the asphalt on top of the budding garden to snuff out any chance of independence and instead hope that the convenience of a McDonald’s and feel-good entertainment will forever sustain you.