Polimom’s family has one of those fun legends detailing a distant, tenuous connection to a celebrity.
My mother’s father’s uncle’s second wife was an aunt to two sisters who were second cousins to Greta Garbo.
Each ensuing generation gets to add a link, and the longer one can draw out the details, the more ridiculously funny it is. I’m not even sure it’s true, since I can’t find the link in spite of being a genealogist, but it hardly matters to any of us. It’s just a game…right?
Ummm…. sort of. What my family is doing here is trying to build a bridge to somebody “important”… meaning, somebody you’ve heard of — somebody famous — and thus bestow upon ourselves a tiny sliver of reflected glory.
“Fame! I want to live forever. I want to learn how to fly!”
Because we’re average; ordinary; nondescript. (*yawn*) And nobody wants to think of themselves that way. Instead, we all want a piece of the sky.
Unfortunately, the Greta Garbo days have given way to something darker, and as I watched American Idol last night with Adorable Child, I couldn’t help but pity those contestants reaching for the brass ring that will almost certainly destroy them… because fame comes at a very steep price: the glorious, mortal soul.
Even the most stable psyche warps and twists when subjected to endless sycophancy and drooling, gibbering worship… and Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, and Britney Spears hardly appear(ed) to be stable. For that matter, they’re not particularly talented, either — yet they’re literally worshipped, with every word repeated, every poot and indelicate belch reported, and every trashy behavior detailed.
Michael van der Galien wrote about Britney this morning at TMV:
She became famous, incredibly famous when she was still very young. Believe it or not, fame changes people. It’s not easy to be famous, especially not in America (when celebrities are considered to be some kind of gods) and especially not when one is young.
Gods. Sigh… I wish I could disagree with that, but it’s exactly the right word.
Yesterday, I wrote about an APA report that was concerned about the influences of various media on young girls, and its bizarre focus on dolls. Dolls aren’t a problem; they’re not overdosing, or shaving their heads or leaving a public plethora of multiple (and apparently concurrent) sex partners.
Dolls, in fact, don’t manifest behaviors at all. People do.
And people are not — cannot be — gods. We are, at the end of the day, every bit as ordinary and boring as we started out — and that’s true for even the most famous of us. Even those very rare great talents are mortal, no matter how much our society tells them otherwise (and they wish to believe it).
No wonder these artificial gods look so pathetic. They are.
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