rfmcdonald | [LINK] First, distract the audience (Reply)

In this, the summer of the meltdowns of Paris HIlton and Lindsey Lohan and Nicole Richie and ..., I keep thinking of what David Walsh wrote in June 2006 ("The campaign to keep Paris Hilton in jail: nothing healthy about it") for the news site of the Trotskyite Fourth International.

There are many unhealthy aspects to this whole business. In the first place, the Paris Hilton celebrity phenomenon was a product of the foul media-entertainment apparatus in the US and a generally diseased social climate. Under healthier circumstances, Hilton’s “bad girl” antics would have been of concern only to her family and close friends.

As conditions have worsened in the US for millions, as social mobility has declined and as real-life opportunities have dried up, the need to live vicariously through celebrities—athletes, supermodels, film stars, etc.—has grown exponentially. Great numbers of Americans pursue imaginary lives through their idols and project their fantasies onto the objects of their fascination.

At the same time, this is a highly volatile and fluid relationship. The same processes breeding vicarious living, i.e., stunted real lives, also produce resentment, jealousy and even rage, of a generally unformed and even anti-social variety. This is not, for the most part, a class-conscious rejection of the celebrity’s status and the very need for celebrities. Hostility toward such figures is often linked with envy.

All of this is played upon by the media for its own cynical purposes, both to sell its products and to divert attention from genuinely pressing issues. The media plays on the public’s worship of celebrities and, when the latter stumble, leads the way in “teaching them a lesson” and “cutting them down to size.”

Googling reveals interesting secondary commentary on this article at the World Socialist Web Site.