What is wrong with the world?

I'll tell you!

Little do you know the sinister reality lying underneath the seemingly harmless phenomenon which underlies the tragically evil truth.

Back in high school, they used to tell us that popularity wasn't everything. They being stupid people and us being equally stupid people who listened to other stupid people. Of course, I am not one of us, because I was never stupid enough to listen to them and did not really care about any of this in the first place, but I digress. At any rate, the powers that be said that popularity is a frivolous, useless thing and there was no sense in prostituting oneself and risking serious physical and psychological trauma to become part of the "in crowd" just for the few fleeting thrills that popularity could buy. They would point to the fat, ugly, burnt out, drunk, stupid, pathetic, moronic, hopeless, waste-of-skin piles of excrement that popular people ended up being and say, "Hey, is that what you want? You want to be a fat, ugly, burnt out, drunk, stupid, pathetic, moronic, hopeless, waste-of-skin pile of excrement that sits around all day and thinks about the glory days when you were all that stuff we called you before but also popular? When people didn't complain about your stench and projectile vomiting because you were 'cool'? When you were especially cool because of your stench and projectile vomiting and incontinence? Because people in high school were too stupid to realize that you were screwed up royal?" And you would say, "Yeah, I want to be that popular pile of excrement!" And they would say, "That's too bad, you aren't very attractive." Regardless, the point is that everyone said that popularity isn't everything. But what they didn't tell you was that popularity is everything. There, I said it. Popularity is everything. I mean, sure it has no real, deep, inner meaning. But who cares about inner meaning? Nobody. Inner Meaning, Schminner Schmeaning. I can't remember the last time someone asked about inner meaning. Except for what I just did, which I do still remember. But the point of all this is, of course, what celebrity is and how to get it. Or barring that, how to become a celebrity killing recluse who hunts and kills the most deadly prey of all which is celebrities?
For anyone who has ever wondered what the differences are between celebrities and the "riff raff" as we like to be called, rest assured that there are far too many to list and they are far too complicated for you to even comprehend. Fortunately, all that is completely and utterly irrelevant. What is relevant is that everything that happens to celebrities is news. If Oprah developed chronic, thunderous, explosive diarrhea, people would eat it up. It would be front-page news the world round. Headlines would read, "Oprah fights debilitating illness", "Hero Oprah donates $12.95 to End Incontinence Now", "Talk Show Queen Soils Self as Millions Cheer". Stock in Oprah-endorsed adult diapers would blast off like a proverbial flatulence-propelled daytime television host and The Hershey Squirts Diet by Oprah would fill her colossal coffers just as she personally filled her disease diminished dockers. Then the lawsuits would begin, thereby ensuring that only Oprah and a handful of lawyers actually benefit. This is known as "The American Way". The mystery is how this cycle propagates itself. Until this very day, or more accurately until a week ago Thursday, it had been one of those questions that had no answer. Now it has one.
The cycle of Celebrity begins with popularity. Popularity is a hideous, all-consuming beast with honeyed breath and a superfluous nipple. It devours all those who seek it, then it gets a tummy-ache and has to take a nap, then it promises goodies to a whole new generation and starts chowing down again. As any celebrity will tell you, they were never popular growing up. They had acne and bad hair, and crippling emotional disorders. Lies, I tell you, all lies, except for the crippling emotional disorders. There are two types of popular people in high school, contrary to unpopular(ha ha) belief. The first type are the regular variety, who will be unable to cope with their mediocrity in real life and end up working at the Gas and Fuel Station, forced to subsist on cheese rinds and the dim memory of what was once a promising life. The second type are a special select breed: Future Celebrities. These people never get over their own hype. The masses are fooled by their confidence and come to believe the hype itself. Forget what you heard about complex nuclear reactions and superheated gases: ignorance is what really makes a star. Although I'm sure superheated gases do play their part. You may wonder who is so stupid and ignorant that they throw their hard-earned money away watching rejects from the game of life and thus support the lavish, pompous, dizzying, tribute to crapulence that is the celebrity lifestyle. Now, here's the part where where having read this paragraph all the way from the beginning starts to pay off. It is the former group of high school "populars" who throw away their welfare monies and hard-earned self-injury lawsuit settlement checks to allow these celebrities to own their own novelty restaurants and gold-plated chihuahuas. After all, they are all cut from the same cloth. And it is a gaudy, neon, leopard print lycra spandex. The celebrity enjoys many years (two) of trendy, high profile debauchery until plastic surgery can no longer hide the fact that they are well over twenty-seven years old(or as old as thirty for men). Some of these then has-been stars goes on to become living legends by buying studios and forcing their old, wrinkled carcasses into movies until everyone just gives up protesting and accepts it. The rest move in with their trailer park dwelling cousins(I mean literal cousins) and live "la vida loca" which means "a really bad song". This is actually much more intelligent than the has-been celebrities of ancient times(1990s), who just died off when people stopped throwing them food in the park. Not to abuse the use of quotes, but this phenomena is known as "The Circle of Almost Having a Life" by such famed wildlife experts as Marlin Perkins, Jacques Cousteau, and Marlon Brando. Or it would be, if they weren't all dead. Which is to say, living in a double wide with their cousins.
As I promised, I will now explain how all this relates to what we refer to as "Oprah". Come to think of it, there really is no explaining Oprah. As the living avatar of The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, Sycophance, Oprah stands alone as the most powerful force in the universe. Yes, even stronger than covalent bonds. The mighty Black Hole pales when compared with Oprah's power to suck... up. Coupled with the second most powerful force known to man, which is the gravitic pull of a celebrity's ego, a dangerous reaction occurs. All that the top scientists researching this bizarre quirk of nature know is that when Oprah and any celebrity are put in a room together, it generates a Brown-Nosian event that registers 12.0 on the Bootlichter scale. That equals the explosive power of seventeen trillion hydrogen bombs and more than fourteen billion sticks of dynamite, coupled with many other millions of things that are used to measure explosive force. It is believed that the Ancient Mayans knew of a way to harness this effect as electric energy and used it to light their late night human sacrifices. Scientists extrapolate that if Oprah had been used in this manner, most of the known universe would have been destroyed.