Hero Worship

As you stroll though your local grocery store with your gallon (or multiple gallons if you are me) of milk and your loaf of bread, and deposit them on to the conveyer belt to be purchased, the images of celebrities are impossible to be missed but never particularly caught my eye. We see it everyday, a new embarrassing picture of a half naked celebrity on some beach we have never seen with some new lover that we have never met, and we read it. We see it so often that it has faded into the background of our daily life. Hours of television and radio, thousands of pages of print, and countless web addresses to learn what our betters are up to. We do not even question why it all exists because it just does. I want to ask that question of why we all care so much, why we must worship the famous. The religion of the media has us all following blindly what we could see in the people around us. Adultery, fluctuating weight, surgery, injury, babies, and any other occurrences that happen to these celebrities are happening to someone you know right now. I had this discussion with my friend Kathleen the other day, and it has really started my brain grappling with an explanation for this.
I think that these people we know are too real and already damaged in our minds. We see these stars on the silver screen at the peak of their attractiveness and flawless in motion and speech. America loves to see train wrecks. We love to see you at your worst, and this is amplified by the perfection that is in the people involved in entertainment. It is not exciting to know that your neighbor has gained weight because they were never that attractive to begin with. The pedestal to fall from for your average man or woman is a truncated version of the height of the platform for the famous. The higher you are the more spectacular the fall and the more people are drawn to see the spiral into immense pain. There is still a piece lacking from this explanation. How do we feel connected enough with these stars to talk about their lives over the lives of those around us?
I see us as Americans having more connection with our television than we do with the people that surround us in our jobs, at our schools, and in our homes. This is a huge change in people’s attitudes toward their neighbors that resulted from the population shift into the suburbs and out of the cities. There is no sense of community. As a college student I know this very well. Even if I walk up the stairs right behind the person who lives across the hall I will not make a sound or an effort to engage them. Back home in Milwaukie I knew none of my neighbors except for the ones which I attended school with, and neither of my parents knew any of their neighbors except if they had a quarrel that pops up when living near eccentrics (the neighbors of my parents, take your pick). We are becoming more and more secluded from our communities so it seems that our only acquaintances are with those people that flash across our TV screen. They replace the whispers of the neighborhood with the pages of the tabloids because that is who we feel comfortable with. All the people around us have just become the unimportant extras that crowd the scene of the busy street to hardly conceal the star of the film and their interesting life that we have paid to see.
I am a cynical person this I know. Many people feel that this hero worship is a waste of time, and this give me hope. Still, everyday I hear one person talk about Brad and Christina I die a little on the inside, or it just makes me want to projective vomit all over them. The funny thing is that if I did spew all over them, the next story they would tell might involve me and their friends who were there to see the pyrotechnics. So if you know someone who needs help back to reality just blow chunks all over them and nudge them back into the real world, for all our sakes. Comment on this, I want to hear what people think about it.