Celebrity

This time last year Noi and I were engaged in preparations for a visit to England, and a rather jolly time we had there. This year we'll be travelling only as far as Malaysia. However, I have to admit to feeling some small relief at escaping being deluged for a month by the so-called 'celebrity culture' which in recent years has swamped the land of my birth. I was reminded of this the other day by a couple of items in the paper about famous young ladies (famous to others, I'd hardly heard of them) who it seems are messing up their lives by ingesting a number of substances that wiser heads might recommend flushing down the toilet, and being involved with gentlemen who would be better positioned at the end of an extremely long barge-pole. I'm afraid media coverage of this kind of thing is pretty much wall to wall in the UK to the point of inescapability. It's difficult to understand why anyone might find it interesting, except for the sad realisation that rubbernecking wrecks on the highway is obviously something of a primal instinct.

I suppose the most disturbing feature of all this is the almost complete absence of compassion towards the foolish but unfortunate young people who find their miserable lives gleefully dissected and rubbished here, there and pretty much everywhere. Yet despite all this I'm told that a lot of people actually aspire to lives of celebrity. Why? It surely can't be for the readies. You can make your fortune without it becoming a matter of public interest.

My guess is that for many people the idea of living in public is tied in with a notion that such a life is somehow more valid, more vital, more real, than the inadequacy of ordinary being. At one time I suppose we got by on the idea that God was watching us. Now we need an audience of millions.