Eight percent of registered Augusta voters turned out recently to vote on the special-purpose local option sales tax that will help chart the future of the city's civic and economic infrastructure.

But have you heard the big news? Jon and Kate are getting a divorce!

Snag 10 people off the Augusta streets at any given time, and it's likely you'll get more people who can give you the latest update of the reality show Jon & Kate Plus 8 than people who could tell you what hinged on the SPLOST vote.

That speaks volumes. Sad, sad volumes.

Pennsylvania couple Jon and Kate Gosselin, parents to sextuplets and twins, agreed about two years ago to have their lives placed under the reality-show microscope to show the unconventional family's ups and downs.

A cute concept, perhaps - but, in the end, poorly executed. The show portrayed the family warts and all, alright, showing the increasingly fractious relationship between the shouting, demanding Kate and the sheepish, hapless Jon.

More than 10 million people tuned in to the show's most recent episode, in which the Gosselins announced that they were separating.

Did the pressure cooker of being on a reality show lead to the split? Are these eight innocent children being exploited, and their privacy being sacrificed, by their parents for financial gain?

Those questions are being debated still. But the bottom line is that it's wrong for so many Americans to obsess over this. In a way, reality shows are training a camera on America's decline.

All this arguably started with a grandfather of the modern reality show, An American Family, the famously controversial 1973 PBS documentary that followed a year in the life of the Loud family of Santa Barbara, Calif. The 12-hour program cast an unblinking eye upon the Louds' crumbling marriage and the emerging homosexuality of one of their sons, Lance.

Back then, it was groundbreaking, compelling viewing. Today, amid the glut of reality television shows, we instead are subjected to such programs as Brooke Knows Best, which follows the day-to-day banalities of the 21-year-old daughter of former professional wrestler "Hulk" Hogan.

Reality shows lay bare the difference between fame and celebrity. Fame is earned. Celebrity is vapid. It's increasingly becoming the booby prize a person gets for stumbling, intentionally or not, into the media spotlight.

So, yes, the Gosselins are celebrities - and they're paying the price.

And so are TV viewers.

That's because reality television basically is voyeurism, and voyeurism is unhealthy both for the ones being watched and the people who are watching. Maybe the Gosselins would've divorced anyway had they not been under the unblinking eyes of television cameras. But those cameras certainly haven't made their lives easier.

And the show itself hasn't made anyone's lives any better - unless you count the people profiting from it.

Don't think divorce will kill this cash cow. Episodes still are being filmed, and new broadcasts will resume in August after a short summer hiatus.

"How does the show go on?" Kate Gosselin asked. "The show must go on."

Must it really?