It's difficult to argue a case for celebrities: why we need them, what good they do, and why we shouldn't rummage through their bins and sniff their dirty underwear. It seems that most people seem to loathe celebrities, when asked. Everyone has their own makeshift dartboard with some grinning bastard's photo covering the bull. Not a specific celebrity as such, but rather the very concept of celebrity is enough to get most people into a flying, shit-smearing, bullock-dangling rage.
Fucking overpaid hacks! How could any one person justify making that much money just from getting their chunky ass on some magazine cover, crying in an interview, and playing the world's most wooden and emotionless film role? How could they do it?? How?! The filthy low lives, taking the chance to enjoy a bountiful career doing something enjoyable, the cunts.
And that, I suppose is where the fundamental split comes into play, the difference between celebrity and fame—and it is a serious one. Is Robert De Niro is a celebrity? No, probably not. Is he famous? Fucking right he is. The famous seem to have gotten attention from things they've done, by starring in great films—or, well, films at any rate—or TV or writing or music. They're public figures as a result of some sort of achievement. You may well think what it was they did was utter shit, but at least they did something.
A celebrity on the other hand, is famous for just being famous. One of those people who turn up at red carpet events with a hungry look in their eye like they'd tear your face off if it meant they could be on the front pages next week. This time last month they were flipping burgers, poorly, and now they're being fawned over. Everyone wants a piece of them. Nevermind they still don't know what it was they offer, whatever it is, people seem to want it. And so they begin thinking that it must be themselves, for the sake of themselves, that people want. And thus the celebrity ego is born, mewling and covered in ego-juice.
Objects in mirror may appear happier than they are.
I'm not so sure though, that they deserve all the hate they get. I mean, it always strikes me as a very hard, soulless life they lead. Yes, they're getting well paid for it, for now, but, considering the intense psychological trauma they endure, is it really that much? Comparatively speaking? It seems to me like they're still getting a raw deal, but the even worse thing about it is that, like most of society, they're allowed to think they're something special, that they're better than most (if not all) others, and that their turds are now celebrity turds, unable to stink.
But let's deal with the whole H-bomb of hatred they encounter. Celebrities wouldn't exist at all if we didn't really want them. If we really chose not to indulge in it, then the whole concept of celebrity would vanish, much like my penis around a siren in public. They're there because we demand them to be there. They're the acceptable face of hatred and loathing—of course we want them there. And we don't want to hate people who we might feel bad for doing so, we want to hate the vapid cunts grinning on the magazine covers and TV ads like empty-headed spectres of death, the Grim Reaper after a lobotomy, and a visit to the set of the Oprah Winfrey Show.
Certainly, celebs do themselves no favors. With the absolutely ridiculous shit they say, the egos they grow, and the astonishingly powerful "dickhead" pills they seem to take every morning, they make themselves difficult to like. I'm not suggesting anyone start liking them, rather, start feeling sympathy for them. They're a public experiment, a test of how much shit can be flung publicly at a person before they start falling to the floor and screaming like a cat with its paw in a bear trap.
For that brief period when they're on top of the world, everyone wants them to show up at their event, just to say a few words, just to be there, even pay them to do so. But that honeymoon period is a short one; soon the real work of being a celebrity begins. As a celebrity, you've got a whole maelstrom of shit to weather, and you might want to get a thick coat on.
It'll start pretty innocuously at first. You'll be interviewed and suddenly spout off an opinion a bunch of people don't like, accidentally giving away part of your personality, rather than the usual bland and empty facade. You'll reveal the fact that you're not a Celebtron-4000, but a real human flesh bag, and as such, liable to think or say or do stupid things every now and again, or all the time.
You may not even notice it as it creeps out, as you admit that you were once in the KKK, or that you just plain don't like South Africans, or that you occasionally have your dog to lick Nutella off your balls, or that you've been having an affair with your next door neighbor's gardener for the last six months, abusing his trust by shoving his leaf blower up your butt when nobody else is around. Let loose any one of these things, that in practice any one of us might be guilty of, and watch the wolves attack. Where once the papers were full of your grinning face, fake teeth shining like starlight, now there are only pictures of you looking rougher and more haggard than a donkey's ball sack.
You're a bleary-eyed, saggy-cheeked unshaven mess. And the men are even worse. You're now reduced to running everywhere you go, chased by a small army of pseudo-journalists and part-time wedding photographers moonlighting as paparazzi, hoping you'll say or do something stupid at every turn. And if you happen to, in anger, say that you're running late for your anal bleaching, or that the Fuhrer will live on in your heart, then things will only get worse. Eventually you'll slip on some dog shit and go flying head first into the nearest bin. Oh what a paragon of style and virtue to the masses you really are.
After a little while of home imprisonment, the heat will likely die down and the masses will find another poor bastard to bully into an early grave, and you'll be free to tentatively step through the door once more. But by that time it's too late. You now loathe yourself and the business you've been sucked into, wishing with every ounce of your being that you'd the sense to continue flipping burgers, instead of being reduced to daytime television and endorsing self-inflating strawberry-flavored dildos for a living. They allowed you to think you were something special, and you believed it; then they slapped you across the face with the big stinking fish of reality, and your cheeks will stink of cod forever more as a result.
So I'd ask you, dear reader, to take a moment to indulge in a bit of sympathy for our celebrity pets, to allow them to think they're special for a little while, as before you or they know it, they'll be reduced to opening local convenience stores and weeping into pickle jars. They never even had grace to fall from; they've just been pawed at by us for a little while before being tossed to the wall. That massive wage they make? For a life completely ruined? It doesn't seem that much to me.