Cat Stevens and National Enquirer at a Land Park Nail Salon

The Land Park nail salon offers a place of solitude, relaxation and National Enquirer.

The stuff you can learn by going to a Land Park nail salon is incredible, or any place with a mounted TV, trashy magazines and no alcohol. I had my last nail appointment of the year with my manicurist yesterday, and she was running a bit behind. Rather than stare at my cell, which is what most other people do today, I glanced up at the TV and flipped through magazines sitting on the chair. My ears caught strains of the last song from my favorite movie Harold and Maude. What? I could not believe my eyes.

It was not Harold playing a banjo and skipping through the hillside to the music. Nope. Yet, there it was. A Jeep Cherokee commercial featuring the Cat Stevens Song: If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out. The words I heard were: If you want to sellout, sellout. You would like to believe that some things are not for sale. Like integrity. Time-honored traditions. Ethics. People. Institutions. The Statue of Liberty. But it’s all for sale at a price. That’s the disturbing reality of life, like finding out there is no Easter Bunny when you forgot to wear underwear to church so you should not be sitting on the top of the stairs where parishioners walk by.

Yet, not surprising, selling out is not what has bunched people’s knickers in a twist. Perhaps they got over that with Bob Dylan and Cadillac. What people are screaming about over this commercial is utter and complete nonsense, yet it exists just the same. There is all that garbage about Cat Stevens being a terrorist, which is about true as Hillary running a secret child abuse center inside a pizza parlor. All of which you can read about at a Land Park nail salon because right next to you on the chair lies the National Enquirer.

I don’t know why I thought the National Enquirer was sued out of its existence. This is not a publication I often see anywhere. It’s a magazine because it has pages with words printed on it, but that’s about as far as reality goes. It’s astonishing how they get away with making up the kind of fake news that appears in the rag. They seem to pick up a picture and then make up stories about it. So the picture is real but the story is not. The horrifying part is many people believe it. People are gullible and naive and, well, just picture the bell curve.

It’s fake news perpetrated by the National Enquirer that now plays out all over social media and Facebook, because the National Enquirer set the standard. Groups are quickly divided into the educated people who can smell a hoax a mile away and the others who fear secret government plots, aliens, while harboring disturbing thoughts their own gardeners might stab them to death when they sleep if given half a chance. ‘Twas a sad day at the Land Park nail salon for me to realize that the National Enquirer mentality owns such a big part of our otherwise normal world.

John Oliver is right. This is not normal.