Smile! You are Not on TV!

by Madeleine Kando

One of the most cherished American values is ‘equality’. After all, people came to this country mainly to get away from a stratified, gentrified, classified European society. Here, in America, we are all supposed to be equal.

That is why I find it so difficult to understand our national obsession with celebrities. The word ‘royalty’ might not be an inappropriate term for what we have created here, a replacement for the Louis of France, with their lavish palaces like Versailles, their courtiers, their gardens, dinners, balls, hunting parties etc. Instead, we now have the Oscars, the Hollywood parties, the nominations, the gossip columns, the incessant focus on a group of people that no one knows personally but everyone wants to know intimately. This obsession with celebrities has caused new words to appear in the English vocabulary. Words like ‘Celebrititis’ (an obsession with people that are famous), ‘Celebriphilia’ (an abnormally intense desire to have a romantic relationship with a celebrity), ‘Celebrophobia’ (it either means the fear that celebrities have or the fear of meeting a celebrity. I am not sure). There must be more that I am not aware of.

The origin of the word ‘celebrity’ comes from the Latin ‘celebro’ which means: ‘to go to a frequently visited, populous place.’ In short, a person becomes a celebrity when enough people have paid attention to them. The first celebrities were the Greek Gods. Since the Greeks believed that their Gods had great influence on their lives they wanted to know more about them. This became the origin of Greek Mythology. If you read Homer, you can see how obsessed the Greeks were with their Gods. They gossiped and told the latest juicy stories about them. It was the Greek equivalent of the National Inquirer. I can imagine Greek teenage girls getting together and gossiping about Zeus’ latest affairs or whether Athena wore her toga shorter than the year before.

The next generation of celebrities were the Royalty of the European monarchies. If you didn’t know so and so at court, you were a nobody. The latest fashion trends, styles of dancing, music.. those were all set by the courts. Then, during the Renaissance, artists, writers and musicians became the celebrities. Actors were the last group to claim the title of celebrity. Believe it or not, until not too long ago, actors were slaves, and acting was considered a very lowly and undesirable profession. Robert Mitchum (one of the best Hollywood actors in my opinion), when interviewed about his career, said that he didn’t consider acting as a real profession: “you don’t make anything” he said. He had a lot more respect for carpenters than actors.

There is a group of celebrities that I call the ‘Celebretards’. These are celebrities that either host shows or appear on shows that are hosted by a ‘celebretard’. This group is under the delusion that being in front of a camera makes them somehow sprout new brain cells. They assume to be experts in such diverse fields as politics, the environment, third world countries, the economy, and what have you. I just wish that an actor-celebrity would stick to advising us on acting, or a sports-celebrities would enlighten us with their wisdom about sports. I mean, you don’t call up your plumber when you have a broken leg and ask him to put it in a cast, do you? But the ‘Celebretards’ are more than eager to magnanimously share their limited and flawed insight with us poor commoners.

I confess that I, myself, suffer from Celebrophobia. Only because the more time the media spend on celebrities, the less time they spend on something with more substance. I am a snob, I know. Besides, who is stopping me from changing the channel, you might argue? But let’s face it, there is an incessant intrusion in our lives by the media reporting on the minutest details of our celebrities’ lives. What do I care if Tom Cruise picked his nose during a reception? I don’t know the man from Adam.

I have tried to figure out how people can keep track of the ever increasing number of celebrities. I mean there are so many of them. I am not even including the fly-by night celebrities on the Jerry Springer show, the reality shows, the ‘even though I am a celebrity, I am just an ordinary person shows’, the ‘make-over shows’, the ‘biggest loser show’ and so on. Andy Warhol was a visionary when he said: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."

I consider Einstein a celebrity, someone who has had a positive effect on the world. Has Anna Nicole Smith had a positive effect on humanity? You tell me.

In a way the more celebrities there are, the happier it makes me. Eventually, there will be so many of them that not being a celebrity will become a unique phenomenon. You will need to pay a talent hunter to find out strategies for not being famous.
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