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Nadia Brickhouse

That’s It, I Like Kim Kardashian

A week has passed since Kim Kardashian left the Middle East, and we still haven’t talked about it. The time has come. I’ve reviewed the pictures. I’ve thought about it. I checked Instagram. I’ve weighed the pros and cons. And I’ve decided, that’s it: I like Kim Kardashian.

Perhaps “like” is too strong a word. I don’t know Kim Kardashian. I’ve only seen her reality show a couple of times. But Kim Kardashian is like the weather, or the traffic. You don’t need to know anything about Kim Kardashian to have an opinion on her. She just is. Dinner with grandma getting a little dull? Just bring up the Kardashian clan. “Why is she even famous?” The silence is broken for at least another ten minutes.

For years it’s been the only thing 99% of the world’s population could agree on: that Kim Kardashian simultaneously represented and was responsible for the downfall of mankind. If you went around and asked people “Who’s worse: Kim Kardashian or Hitler?” – they might pause to think before they answered. Go to any of Kim’s many, many social media feeds and the hate rains down like pestilence.

(I wonder if all the years of being on the receiving end of our collective social wrath/jealousy/evil eyeing has, in the end, made Kim the stronger. Some of us might have paranoid thoughts that everyone is thinking about how much they hate us, all of the time, but for Kim Kardashian this is no doubt true. At any given moment, someone, somewhere in the world is saying “I hate Kim Kardashian.”

But last week, Kim Kardashian did something new. She traveled to Armenia, where her ancestors are from, to commemorate the centennial of the Armenian genocide. Surely future generations will look back on Kim Kardashian’s contributions towards getting the world to acknowledge the Armenian genocide – which many scholars still use air quotes when describing. For what it’s worth, the Turkish media has complained of the “’genocide’ propaganda” and accused Kardashian of being of being a “’genocide’ ambassador.”

Here’s a picture of Kim’s paternal grandmother, Helen, whose own parents fled Turkey before the genocide.

Her famous husband, Kanye West, played a free concert there. And then she went to Jerusalem, where she had her unbelievably cute baby daughter baptized at the oldest Armenian church in the world. She took pictures in the church of the Holy Sepulchre.

US News Weekly observed that Kim’s bodyguard appeared to be “stressed, intense” during the trip.

Politicians and scholars may continue to argue about whether the Armenian genocide was really that. Everyone else may also argue about whether Kim Kardashian is responsible for everything that’s wrong in the world. But today, what seems indisputable is that Kim Kardashian, an extraordinarily famous person, is using her star power to shed light on an event that killed over a million people — ostensibly, so that it becomes less likely to happen again.

So why not retire the Kim bashing? Surely, the sooner we can put down our daggers the better off we’ll all be.

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