pussies who didn't love their children enough

It is axiomatic that becoming separated from reality is a fate suffered by many of those who become rich and famous for singing songs, playing games or pretending to be somebody else. You do something essentially quite simple, albeit fairly well, perhaps. People tell you that you're wonderful. Over and over again. You don't have to choose your own clothes, do your own shopping, pay your own bills or wipe your own backside. You get paid to wear a watch. You get paid to drive a car smaller and less ostentatious than anything you'd actually keep in your own garage. So you morph into a creature made up of hubris and delusions of meaningful importance.

All of this is well understood. So when a 'celebrity' says something crass, insensitive and remarkably stupid, little surprise is felt.

Every now and then, however, one of the beautiful people really goes the extra mile when it comes to producing an arrogant remark of truly depressing idiocy.

Step forward, Mr. Mark Wahlberg. Known for awful topless rapping, modelling pants, playing the part of a deluded thicko in a fairly good movie, and carrying out racially aggravated assaults on Vietnamese men when he was in his teens, Wahlberg has now decided to berate victims of the 9-11 attacks for lacking his own brand of heroism.

Interviewed in the February issue of the preeners' style guide Men's Health, the pretend movie hard man, who was apparently scheduled to be aboard one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center in September 2001, says:

"If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn't have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, 'OK, we're going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.'" 

The poor sods on those flights had no idea that the planes were going to be smashed into tall buildings at high speed. Anyone with the average layman's background knowledge of previous aircraft hijackings was doubtless expecting to end up enduring a few tense hours or days on the runway of some airport somewhere, perhaps with a minority of passengers getting injured or killed. It's understandable, then, that no resistance was offered. Contrast this response to that of some of the passengers of United flight 93, which crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Via mobile phones, some passengers learned of the earlier incidents in New York City, reasoned that they were facing the same fate and decided to fight back.

Former underwear model and teenage tearaway Wahlberg, however, would have been the only man swinging fists and raising hell on one of the New York flights.

For him, the people who died as their planes smashed into the twin towers were weak little pussies who did not love their kids enough to put up a fight. The folks on Flight 93? Incompetent fools lacking the badass skills of a trained movie actor.

What a fucking tool.