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The Week Pop Culture Died

First Ed McMahon. Then Farrah Fawcett. And wham, before anyone really had time to react to that news, Michael Jackson.

Now Billy Mays. Cut down in his prime by a freak overhead luggage bin accident. Allegedly. The black-bearded pitchman has sold his last tub of OxyClean.

It felt like the week pop culture died. So much of our weird, cheesy folkways … gone.

But you know there’s another perfect straight man out there. Young lovelies who emerge to be both the embodiment of a generation’s spirit and object of its lust come along at least once every generation. Michael Jackson … it’ll be a long time before we see the likes of him again. The mass of pop weirdo wannabes pale — sorry, bad choice of words – before him. 

Billy Mays. Here’s Perez Hilton’s tribute, speaking of weird cheesy pop culture. If the Orange Glo people know what they’re doing, and they do, they’ll have Billy Mays hawking their anti-goo from the grave in mournful, stirring tribute ads for months, maybe even years.

Billy would have wanted it that way. Billy Mays probably wasn’t cold before, from the Atlantic City boardwalk to Venice Beach and every traveling fair in between, pitchmen started angling to be the next Informercial King. 

Someone should make a reality TV show out of that. I’m just glad that ShamWow guy took himself out of the running.

That guy creeped me out. Almost as much as Michael Jackson.

UPDATE: Big Hollywood, in a touching appreciation, reports Billy Mays was a Republican. Actually, “right of Attila the Hun,” according to Neil Cavuto. Not a big surprise. Self-made man, the embodiment of American free enterprise and homespun ingenuity. Not to mention traditional hucksterism. No cruel jokes about Bush-Cheney WMD infomercials, please. I don’t want to have to trot out any cheap “Hope and Change” shots at a time like this. Or bring up any “Inconvenient Truth.”

Here’s the must-see vid, Billy Mays and Sully on Cavuto, selling Obama’s Stimulus Plan … “For two easy payments of about 2 trillion dollars, we can get it done!”

Topics: America, money, sex, western civilization

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 7:58 am Comments (2) on Monday, June 29, 2009

2 Responses to “The Week Pop Culture Died”

1. Darcy Says:
   June 29th, 2009 at 9:47 am

   Aww. That was a very cute video. I didn’t know that he was so smart politically.

2. RebeccaH Says:
   June 30th, 2009 at 12:43 pm

   I’m going to miss Billy Mays. The others, not so much.

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