Hidden Costs of America's Celebrity Obsession

Anyone who shops at a supermarket ends up in "celebrity alley" — a checkout lane that's lined with magazines fixated on the famous. In America, celebrities take up a lot of space … on newsstands, coffee tables and TV screens, and in our minds.

People magazine first appeared in the mid-1970s. Today, it's one of many slick, fame-crazed periodicals with sales in the millions. Meanwhile, television is so — transfixed with celebrities that news programs often resemble "tabloid TV."

There's nothing wrong with keeping track of events in the lives of celebrities. Occasional diversion is one thing — but perpetual distraction is another.

Reverence for celebrities is the flip side of tacit contempt for "average" people. It can be an insidious process: As we focus on the famous, other people fade into our peripheral vision. By an unspoken and unconscious logic, the world becomes populated with a few somebodies and a glut of near-nobodies.

The slippery slope of fame-fixation puts our sense of human proportion on the skids. The danger is that when celebrities matter more, the rest of us matter less.

With wealth and fame going hand-in-hand, the modern equivalent of the golden calf occupies center stage. And, in practice, worship of the rich has a way of accompanying denigration of the poor. If having plenty of money makes one — person important, then having no money makes another person unimportant.

For media conglomerates, the point is to post big profits. Along the way, it's just fine if the products encourage us to look down our noses at "ordinary" people while gazing up the social ladder for inspiration.

Yet, truth be told, beyond their performances and public- relations glitz, most celebs aren't all that interesting. On television, when a renowned actor or singer chats with Jay Leno or David Letterman, frequently the conversation is lame.

Without a script, many celebrities have little to say and take a long time saying it.

While celebrity-mania runs amuck, "common" people are likely to be ignored or disparaged. Thinking back on a journalistic career spanning several decades, Ben Bagdikian said, "it always put my teeth on edge when I would hear certain kinds of academics or intellectuals or others talk about 'the great unwashed.'"

Bagdikian, a former high-ranking editor at The Washington Post, told me that he loathed portrayals of working-class Americans "as one great homogenized body of people who aren't very smart and who are sort of like cattle." So-called average men and women "are real people, and they have all the attributes of any human beings. Some of them are rotten and some of them are heroes, and most of them are interesting, complex beings."

On a daily basis, however, we get scant illumination of the human complexities of the unrich and unfamous. While the spotlight remains on the glamorous and the powerful, common courage gets only a faint glimmer of the attention it deserves.

Imagine standing in a checkout line and seeing magazine stands filled with stories about individuals who've been doing laudable things routinely — caring for an elderly parent or struggling to raise children with meager resources or walking a lonely picket line in defense of the right to decent employment.

The truth is that our country is teeming with heroes, never to be famous, quietly striving to live with kindness, dignity and integrity. They don't step out of limousines; they won't ever be on a "best dressed list" or become familiar images on national television.

Most people we know are light years away from celebrity status. Even the most fleeting fame will never be theirs. And it's all too easy for us to forget, day to day, just how admirable and inspiring they can be.

Norman Solomon's books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." A documentary film of the same name, based on the book, has just been released on DVD nationwide. To find out more about Norman Solomon and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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