taken from the weekly standard article culture of celebrity:

How pleasing to learn that our own simpler, less moneyed, unglamorous lives are, in the end, much to be preferred to those of these beautiful, rich, and powerful people, whose vast publicity has diverted us for so long and whose fall proves even more diverting now. “As would become a lifelong habit for most of us,” Thomas McGuane writes in a recent short story in the New Yorker called “Ice,” “we longed to witness spectacular achievement and mortifying failure. Neither of these things, we were discreetly certain, would ever come to us; we would instead be granted the frictionless lives of the meek.”

celebrities are useful when they distract us from bad things happening in the world around us. movies, music, and sports serve this purpose well. we forget our prosaic lives and the occasional world chaos to rally behind our favorite teams and players, and to track the curious relationship with tom and katie. being celeb-obsessed is not all bad, just as long we realize that we are the lucky ones.

it’s hard for us, i think, to grasp the concept that we have the charmed lives. no, we don’t have the limos, shopping sprees on rodeo drive, or a reserved VIP table at an exclusive restaurant. we also don’t have the paparazzi snapping bad pictures of us for the next US weekly spread. if we have secrets to keep, the rest of America won’t know and won’t care. we also have the satisfaction of knowing that we have stable relationships we can count on, unlike many of the people whose faces are on magazine covers.

i would like to have a limo and a chauffeur. i hate driving. i’m not opposed to the acquisition of wealth and fame, as long as it’s attained honestly. i just think that the “frictionless life of the meek” sounds like a life i would be more likely to enjoy.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

-Thoreau

simplify, says thoreau. it’s good advice.

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