Celebrity

It seems I find myself more and more frequently in places (such as when making visits to elderly friends or family) where the television is nearly always ‘on.’ And at the times I make my visits it always seems to be tuned in to some talk show or interactive show between the host and a guest.

 Inevitably I find myself then assaulted by programming, conversations, and commercial advertisements that are jarring, inane, banal, frequently crude, and often (a favorite legal phrase) ‘utterly without redeeming social value.’ 

What astonishes me most, though, is the almost reverential response the audience gives (maybe encouraged by the cue-boards, or maybe not) to the host of the program and any celebrity featured. The veneration is encouraged beyond the television studio as the sycophantic and parasitic ‘paparazzi’ do their work.  

 Especially was that the case in a couple of recent episodes of the Ellen DeGeneres Show that I politely and sufferingly sat through.    I felt embarrassed by the uninhibited screaming and squealing and excited antics of the audience but more so by the women/young women who were telephoned by the host as the recipients of a money gift she was giving them.  The celebrity was talking to them!  Another celebrity hostess, Oprah, previously did something similar, as I recall, as she deigned to ‘bless’ her admirers with her largess.   It was hard not to get the feeling that these celebrities were ‘buying’ the adulation of their audiences. It was pathetic.  

In my part of California, every year, is the AT&T National Pro-am Celebrity Golf Tournament.  It is the same thing here.  Thousands of spectators throng the venue so they can see, hear, maybe even touch (swoon) some celebrity—athlete, musician, actor, politician-- who is more likely than not vain, arrogant, rude and probably very rich.  For a spectator to get an autograph, make eye contact, or have a photograph taken with the celebrity is a great coup. 

Why?  Because the follower is somehow, for a moment, being recognized just as the celebrity is being recognized. They feed off each other.  People crave recognition. 

I wonder if there is not some commonality among these various audiences, spectators, admirerers, or camp-followers?  Are the celebrities, the object of the fans’ veneration, perhaps the incarnation of their highest values?  To be rich, to have one’s  name known by thousands, to have some surpassing skill or gift, or fortune, is it not perhaps the acquisition of a lifetime that some lesser-endowed commoner values above all things?  Psychologically does the common man/woman, boy or girl, subconsciously even think that mere proximity to or acknowledgment by one of the idols the sought-for qualities of the idol will rub off on them? 

No, it will not rub off.  And no, I do not see evidence that the admired one becomes even more worthy of their followings’ esteem by being fawned over.  To the contrary.  Where I work, a golf tournament is held annually featuring professional baseball players.  As a group, they are the most arrogant, foul-mouthed and obnoxious category of people I’ve ever been around.  And they are all millionaires. 

These people—these idols—become even more distorted in their self image and in their ‘need’ to gain more fame as they gain more fame.  It is unquenchable—it becomes an addiction.   I am not conversant with the moral cesspool of Hollywood (the newsstand tabloids that I pass in the supermarket checkout line constantly parades that), but I have been a follower of some personalities of the sports world and see what has happened there. Witness the sad fall in the last decade of some of the biggest icons in sports world: Barry Bonds, Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, and now Oscar Pistorius.  Besides baseball, golf, cycling, and track and field, as represented by these athletes, other sports have been seriously besmirched.  Decades ago boxing and now professional basketball as a whole, as far as I have been informed, are beyond the pale. Discredit seems to be descending upon the whole world of sport—a terrible shame in my view. 

Politics is increasingly being viewed through the same lens in the public eye as a president and some congressmen have had revealed their flawed character and moral bankruptcy over the past couple of decades.  We could go on to other celebrity groups, but to what avail? I hope the point is made.  

The long and short of it is that fame, money, and power corrupts.  

The warning to us—to the common man/woman—is that we are hard-wired to emulate what we worship.  If we worship the worldly, that is what we will get; the celestial will move beyond us and the worldly, in the end,  will become a pile of ashes.  The only way to stay uncontaminated if we get into the public arena, as a follower or a participant, in my opinion, is to “put on the whole armor of God,”—every day—and  become spiritually very well-grounded.   Short-circuits will inevitably follow if we do not.