If you watch “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” you already know what a tale of racist horror show their European vacation turned out to be.
I generally do not write in the first person. I find it to be lazy, narcissistic and stupid. Despite its uselessness, however, first-person narrative is popular and widespread. Also, I believe it may be contributing to the dumbing down of America.
Because I am writing about the Kardashians and for all of the reasons I just named, first person feels germane to this exercise.
An anecdote to illustrate my relationship to the Kardashians seems appropriate: Three years ago, I found myself in a Spanish-speaking country in South America. By some chance, “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” came on television in my hotel room, which only had about 12 channels. Only one of those dozen was in English.
I had just finished about 20 hours of air travel, and I was not about to venture out into the questionable night air in an effort to secure victuals for the evening. Instead, I readily decided that room service and trash TV were very much the order of the day. I decided it was a perfect time for me to sit back and get better acquainted with the Kardashian phenomena. During a commercial break, I found out that the episode was simply one part of an ongoing Kardashian weekend marathon. Determined to fully embrace my inner ugly American traveling in a foreign land, I settled in for an evening with the Kardashians.
In the end, it was too much. I made it through 11 minutes of one episode before switching over to what I think was the Spanish-speaking Weather Channel. I proceeded to get very drunk off Bailey’s Irish Cream — which is a very hard thing to do — and watched satellite images of storm clouds as they made their way across local weather maps.
I got drunk for me that night, but also, I got a little drunk for America because I was sad for it.
What I am saying is that I do not watch “Keeping Up with the Kardashians.” My curiosity does not ebb and flow with the changes of the season or a lunar cycle. Instead, I remain at a constant level of disinterest, but what chipped away at the ice surrounding my cold, dark unloving Kardashian heart was this most recent episode of “KUWTK” (as the kids abbreviate it).
Reports surfaced back in late February that Kim and her mother, Kris, had a terrible time while abroad. This night’s episode was to be the unveiling of the footage from that ill-fated trip.
Let us first become better acquainted their reason for travel: The Vienna Opera Ball, or Wiener Opernball as it is known, has been held regularly since 1935, with the exception of World War II, and is one of the highlights of the social calendar for the city’s upper crust. The event marks the beginning of ball season for the citizens of Vienna. Held in the opera house itself, building crews take the seats out of the auditorium and build a new level floor on top of the existing one, because the existing one slopes. Needless to say, the whole thing is pretty awesome.
Kim was the ball guest of Richard Lugner, an Austrian billionaire now in his 80s who made his money in real estate. Each year, Lugner hires a celebrity to visit his shopping mall, which is called Lugner City. He then brings the celebrity as his guest to the Vienna Opera Ball. Though he has been doing it since 1991, this move has been criticized as being too nouveau riche for the ball. In the past, his escorts have included Dita Von Teese and Carmen Electra.
Billionaire building magnate? Guy who likes to name stuff after himself? Nouveau riche? Does every country have its own Donald Trump?
Kim Kardashian’s attendance would not be wildly out of the ordinary at such an event. However, showing up with a reality-TV camera crew in tow and a whole bevy of press would certainly be enough to disturb the regular partygoers and create a carnival-like atmosphere at this formal occasion.
So, I wondered, would Viennese society shun the Harlot of Glendale and her mother, or would they rise to the challenge of that evening’s spectacle and deliver on the crazy?
I promise that I would would not be writing this article, if they had not fully delivered a racist hat-trick of insanity upon the unsuspecting Kardashians:
To start things off in a move that falls somewhere between collusion and prostitution, Kim was reportedly paid $500,000 to be Lugner’s guest at the ball. This did not make its way into the episode, but it sets the tone for their entire trip.
The evening of the ball, Kardashian was accosted by a man in full black face, wearing a white tuxedo and gold chains, calling out to her, “Kim, it’s me. It’s me, Kanye,” in a thick German accent.
You can see her kind of lose her shit over it in the video below.
The world’s worst Kanye impersonator later apologized on Facebook in an entry in which he kind of made it sound as though Kim’s date for the evening, Lugner, had actually planned it as a sort of weird surprise for Kim and alluded to the fact that he had gotten into the ball for free because of an agreement he had with ball organizers.
Later on during the evening, an Austrian TV host interviewing a random party guest, who is thanking Kim for coming to the ball, asks the excited partygoer if he is going to dance later, he excitedly replies, “We’re going to dance … we’re going to wait for Niggas In Vienna.”
The interviewer quickly slips into German, but you can see the reaction from Kim was not good.
The coup d’grace of the whole episode was unfortunately not caught on camera. It came at the end and was really a bit of a shock. Kim recounts being accosted on the plane ride back to the States. Holding her child, North West, in her arms, the progeny of Kanye was reportedly acting fussy, so a fellow passenger went on a tirade.
According to Kim, the crazy woman yelled, “She’s with a black guy and that baby is black, and you need to shut that black baby up,” adding that she had a “sex video with a black guy.”
Kris Jenner, from whose vagina Kim was birthed, told viewers during the episode that of their trip she had “never been so disrespected.”
I think that taken at face value that seems like a pretty honest answer, but I also have to consider that she is a fairly terrible person, so it is hard to tell. I bet that she probably gets disrespected alot.
So thank you, Austria. With all of your folksy racism and horny octogenarian billionaires, you were well represented in this episode. You make America seem not so bad, and you proved that if a whole nation joins together, it is possible to drive the Kardashians out of your land, never to darken your doorstep again. Your method of eradication was questionable, but precise.
The Kardashians likely will not be returning to Vienna anytime soon, but I can promise that if they do, they can count on at least one more viewer for that night’s episode.
Joel Mazmanian is a contributing journalist for TheBlot Magazine. He is also a second-year graduate student at the VCU Brandcenter. Follow him on Twitter @joelmazmanian.
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