Celebrities Are A Sociocultural Disease

I swore that I would make no comments concerning Michael Jackson here, so I will keep this short and pointed. Apparently 12 people from Santa Barbara County, California think that this 46 year old man with drug and alcohol problems who admitted sleeping with minors and seems to love porn (and the two in some combination) is innocent on all charges. If I paid that much for a lawyer, I would hope that they were so convinced. I think that this just speaks to the damnable obssession that Americans have with celebrity. We need them to act in deplorable/depraved/violent/gut-wrenching ways and they need us to keep caring. It is a sick cycle of depencency.

They live in their own world with its own rules and consequences for bad behavior. There is no difference between fame and infamy, no divide between acceptable and condemnable behavior. They know damned well that they can do whatever the hell they want and never face the level of penalty or opprobium that one of us in the lower castes would for committing the same transgresssions. The mere fact that the adulation of the many and their tacit or direct financial support for the activities of this decadent class is the source of their exclusion from the justice for the lesser is absolutely sickening.

The American people are sick addicts for these sorts of people. They seem to thrive on their roller coasters of bad decisions, substance abuse and questionable sexual practices. It helps, in a twisted logic, to deplace the crushing malaise and soul-sapping drudgery that is life in the modern (postmodern?) world. Living vicariously through the sickening acts of these people is as good as being dead. I am not advocating suicide, but if you cannot see it, you have already killed some of the most important part of your character.

What is to be done? Can anything be done? Short of armed revolution, nothing will displace them, and then what? People get to look up to revolutionary leaders and their tawdry lives (remember Russia/USSR - Lenin was merely a tsar without a crown). What might help is ignorance. If people stop caring about the lives of people that they don't know and start caring more about community, family, things that can be changed and made for the better, they might shrivel from attrition. Ignore them and you take away that which creates and sustains them-attention. They are shells of real people with dead matter inside who live only on the attention and acclaim heaped on them by a non-specific ego mass. If this is taken away and, Heaven forfend, people care about things closer to their real lives and situations, these people will suffocate.

Well, now it's up to us. Where do we go?

SHOUT THEM DOWN WITH YOUR SILENCE!