By Joe Brown

Published Friday, June 6, 2008 | 10:36 p.m.

Updated Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2008 | 10:15 a.m.

It's part of my job to read Entertainment Weekly and US magazine, and watch reality TV and "The Soup" and "Best Week Ever" and every VH1 clip compilation show. And even if it wasn't, I'd read and watch them anyway.

But even I have trouble figuring out why I should care about Lauren and Audrina and Lo and Spencer and Heidi (and Ashlee and Jamie Lynn and Zac and Vanessa...)

It's in these hours that I turn to those far wiser than me in the ways of pop culture. I've been re-reading Cintra Wilson's unparalleled (and bitterly hilarious) essay collection "A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease, and Other Cultural Revelations," which has provided some much-needed perspective, especially here in Las Vegas, which seems to be surpassing even Los Angeles as a petri dish for celebrity sickness and red-carpet rugburn.

A particularly pertinent excerpt:

If it seems like you're seeing the same people at your awards ceremony year in and year out, well, you are. I was confused about it for a while, but then the truth hit me like a sack of fan mail: America, as a whole, can only be truly aware of a limited number of personalities outside of their own lives. The shuffling deck of celebrity has about 52 heads, and we are served "hands" of about seven or less at a time, and these appear on every book and magazine cover in the world for a little while, and then they go back to the bottom of the deck again, only to resurface several months later.

This is the course of things. Those whom we are seeing now, we will continue to see in heavy rotation for the next two or three years, like ubiquitous pop songs. Those who were models become actresses, those who where actors become directors; but the face cards are all the same, and everybody in that deck is only there because they are somehow masturbation fodder to big cross sections of ignorant, bacon-eating, maladjusted rural folk, who are dazzled by the whole spectacle like infants before jangling house keys...

And for some reason, Cher is the joker, and no matter how many cards get bumped or rotated, Cher is always there, getting played out again and again.

Cintra's new book, "Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny," will be published in September.