[Blarg]

Humans are basically herd animals. We need leaders to do our thinking for us and embody all virtues, and it's rare even in the smallest settings that someone doesn't get de facto elected even if no one is competing.

Unfortunately, that leads to being uncritical of leaders and well known people on the one hand and idolizing them, and on the other hand to tearing them to pieces if their fame or popularity loses any momentum or if a chink of humanity shows through their armor. It's precisely for their inhumaneness, a quality we are the first to ascribe to them and which many never ascribe to themselves at all, that we adore them. And yet that is the reason we also sometimes come to hate them, as if in their ordinary humanity they have broken an implicit contract with us and let us down, hoodwinked us into trusting and worshipping them and their perfection, when really no one could assign that to anyone except by a perverse act of will.

This is why we have maniacs walking through Central Park in NYC retracing Holden Caulfield's route in Catcher in the Rye. This is actually quite common among celebrity stalkers, by the way. A great number of the really nutty ones are actually supposedly captured with the book actually on them at the time, and often with multiple copies in their possession, one back at their hotel room and such, too. Mark David Chapman, Lennon's murderer, wasn't the only one. His murder of Lennon was because he felt Lennon was a phoney and sometimes did things only for money. Lennon's celebrity was simply mere celebrity rather than some sort of personal perfection or godhood, which was necessary for the vaccuum of the centerless void of a personality like Chapman's to coalesce around. Without an embodied perfection, Chapman was hapless in the world, and an idol's mere humanity was taken as a profound betrayal and a signal reversal of good into evil, a cuckolding of the human spirit. Lennon's death was a sort of reverse crucifixion, a purifying act ridding the world involuntarily of a paramount sinner, rather than saint, to help cleanse the sins of us all -- this time, bestowing the mantle of righteousness back onto the killer, who never should have assigned it to anyone else in the first place.

Where was Lennon in the midst of all this? Living life, often stupidly, but happily coming out with his first interersting album in a long time. He was some dude living in a building who got assigned both godhood and deviltry at random by someone who could have put any celebrity in the pivotal role.

We need leaders and celebrities to worship and destroy rather than merely lead or perform. The rapt attention paid to their every move often seems to put them all on an equal plane, so The Condition of the President's Dog is as worthy of front page news coverage as his nuclear policy, or a star's walking through a hotel lobby gets as much coverage as if he had just released a movie. No human condition can healthily sustain that much undue attention and reverence.

No matter how many celebrities the world is populated with, none of them will live our lives for us or solve our problems. Many do a pretty poor job of handling their own. At any rate, basking in their glory or assigning them undue significance or expectations is a poorly chosen palliative that says more about the person indulging in it than about the public figure stuck without their consent with the responsibility of keeping it going. And an expiration date is inevitable with that kind of medicine.