Workplace Calisthenics: Public fiddles with 'reality' while America smolders

Cal LeMon, of Executive Enrichment Inc., solves organizational problems with customized training and consulting.

Do you smell smoke?

Can you hear the fiddling?

While Rome was burning, the Emperor Nero was reportedly strumming some serious chords on his fiddle. The juxtaposition of leaping flames on one side and the unplugged leader on the other side always siphons a smirk from us. How can anyone be so emotionally disengaged when his empire is being consumed around him?

Look around. How do you think our empire is doing?

We are about to pull the trigger on a war where a coalition is harder to find than a sale at Tiffany's. This republic, with all its might and minds, continues to be the major consumer nation for illegal drugs in the world. Our national debt is once again suffering weight control problems after bingeing at the table of deficit spending.

Anyone smell smoke?

And we fiddle.

Our favorite fiddling seems to be a mindless obsession with unreal people on reality television.

Why would Michael Jackson's sordid, distorted and thoroughly sad life captivate us? With parched throats panting for another drop of dribble from Jacko's NeverMind Land, we cozied up to our flat screen TV's to drink in another sighting of The Great One slithering from the leather sofa of a 48-foot white limo.

The Tinker Bell nose-job, moon-walking, made-for-TV marriages and obscene shopping sprees are nothing compared to the open simpering admission of a sick person.

But here is the bottom line of this column we are part of the trivializing of America when we stand, 100 deep, to take pictures and buy the products of these mutants. Within hours of this very sick person telling us his very sick life story, sales of his dated albums skyrocketed by 120 percent around the world!

Can anyone smell smoke?

And we fiddled when we clamored to watch Evan and Zora.

You have heard of them, right? Here are the chief protagonists of the worst gurgitation epic "Joe Millionaire" ever spun by a television producer. I don't know about you, but I smell smaltz and I want to throw up.

The tale is a beat-up script from Greek mythology: an impoverished Caterpillar operator, Evan, must lie to all of these gorgeous women so he can validate his true love. It is the unadulterated Cinderella complex that reveals, in the end, that the beefcake is really a cheese ball.

But, 34.6 million of us fiddled as we watched, with glazed, HGTV eyes, as Zora was "chosen."

What a waste! What an insult to our national greatness! Shouldn't we be using our time to put out the fire?

Having fun, in spite of the horror of our world, is not the issue; fiddling our future away with soppy sentimentalism about the life we never had is the issue.

I'm not sure if the crazed addiction this society has acquired to "reality TV" is a way we have of anesthetizing our national psyche. Maybe it just feels better between our ears if we can get lost in Ozzy's house or sink into a hot tub with the latest bachelorette. Maybe we cannot deal with $2 per gallon gasoline for our SUVs, a schizophrenic Wall Street or the fact that no one in our family shows up for our nightly evening meal catered, again, by Domino's.

Maybe Jacko, Zora, J. Lo, P. Diddy and the AFLAC duck are preferable to putting out the fires in our Rome.

It seems to me that the ultimate reality TV of this century was the fireball of Sept. 11.

Life does not get any clearer than the billows of smoke and ash that plunged their way through the streets of lower Manhattan.

What did we learn about ourselves and our dangerous world on the morning of Sept. 12, 2001? Have we forgotten?

Do we really have air time to be fiddling to the hum of hidden cameras capturing the banality of our bogus gods?

We have better things to do.

Does anyone smell smoke?