Found at bookforum.com, linking to TomDispatch.com, is this entertaining but caustic look at humanity’s long obsession with celebrity, written by Lewis Lapham:
Domesticated Deities
About Messiahs Come to Redeem Our Country, Not Govern It (and Don’t Forget Marilyn and Elvis and Jackie O and Diana and Oprah and Brangelina and David Hasselhoff) By Lewis Lapham
Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.
– William Shakespeare
Label celebrity a consumer society’s most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society’s art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion. Such a society is the one that America has been attempting to make for itself since John F. Kennedy was king in Camelot, and the collective effort — nearly 50 years of dancing with the stars under the disco balls in Hollywood, Washington, and Wall Street — deserves an appreciation of the historical antecedents.
