Who's Brett Favre? He's an athlete. Who's Lily Allen? She's a musician. Who's Stephen King? Right, he's a writer. How about Kyra Sedgwick? Yup, an actress. Who's Kim Kardashian? Oh, she's a ... well ... aw, crap, what is she? Oh, and Perez Hilton? Uh, yeah, he's ... hmmm.... By now I'm assuming you see where this is going, and what my peeve is today.
You see, there's a difference between the first four people I named, and the last two. The former are celebrities, and the latter are not. Twenty-First-Century America may think otherwise, but as far as I'm concerned, in order to be classified as a "celebrity", you have to have an actual talent -- some skill that earns you notoriety in some (preferably positive) way. At least, that's what I was brought up to believe: you have to have some kind of aptitude in order to earn the attention and adoration of the public. The fact that all these so-called "personalities" are getting so much attention can only mean that America's standards have gone way, way, WAY downhill in recent years.
Kicking or throwing a ball, singing and playing an instrument, writing enthralling prose, and giving an engaging dramatic performance are skills. Sashaying around like it's a privilege for other people just to lay eyes on you, being self-absorbed as though you're God's gift to the world, and buying expensive shit that you don't even need are not skills ... and neither is taking paparazzi photos (not even your own, but other people's, for cripe's sake!) and scrawling clumsy doodles and dumb-ass remarks on them in white pixels with knockoff PhotoShop software. No, I don't know Perez Hilton at all, and I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's a perfectly nice guy underneath ... my only problem with him is that he hasn't earned all the damned attention he's been showered with. (The fact that he's a gossip has a lot to do with it ... I consider gossips to be neck-and-neck on the integrity scale with TV evangelists.)
Some people who have become these non-specific pop-culture "personalities" actually gained their notoriety earlier in their lives in other ways -- pro athletes being the most obvious example -- and I have no problems with that at all, because their core following is based on that previously excelled-at talent. But I hate when these upstart, attention-grubbing, no-talent nincompoops that are the subject of my ire use their dubiously-achieved 15 minutes of fame to get a foothold into an entertainment arena that honestly talented people have been struggling to make it in for years. (What were they smoking when they let Paris Hilton record an album?) The only saving grace in all this is the short attention spans of the American public, which result in the vast majority of these crossover attempts being met with a deafening lack of interest. (How many schmucks from "Survivor", "Big Brother", ad nauseam, have written "memoirs" that schmuck publishers actually thought would sell?)
I guess one thing -- amongst many, believe me -- that we can blame for this "celebrit-itis", as I like to call it, is how the lines between media are blurring, or in some cases all but disappearing: TV, radio, the Internet, music, and movies all used to be firmly separate domains, but it's getting increasingly difficult to tell them apart as they continue to merge into a single, all-encompassing thing. And, unfortunately, as media continues on this kind of controlled collision course, I fear that we'll continue to hear more and more about all these somebodies that I'd rather hear less and less about.
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