Your 15 Minutes Are Up. . . Now Get Out

I guess we should hit this topic since everyone is still talking about it, loathe though I am to even mention it. Charlie Sheen is an almost perfect example of what is wrong with celebrity culture.

Let me start with a disclaimer. Unlike most Americans (disturbingly), I am not in love with celebrity. I don’t tune into a worn out sitcom just because some plastic chick who is famous for a sex tape or some disgraced politician who is famous for a different kind of sex tape will be on tonight. I don’t care. I don’t tune into Celebrity Apprentice, Celebrity Rehab, or Pimp My Celebrity.

At one point, celebrity had to be earned. You had to invent something useful, create something beautiful, or achieve something monumental. Heck, half our Presidents weren't even celebrities because they didn’t do anything worth mentioning. But that changed and now celebrity requires no achievements -- in fact, it disdains achievement.

I lay the blame for this firmly at the feet of that most evil generation: the 60’s hippie/self-love.... er, free-love generation. That’s the generation that created Andy Warhol and his crew, who were famous for being famous. That’s the generation that made celebrities of specific hippies for no other reason than they were there. . . Wavy Gravy? Are you idiots serious? That’s the generation that glorified serial killers (see e.g. Charlie Manson and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood) and professors who liked drugs (Timothy Leary). They even gloried the failed presidency of JFK and tried to turn the whole family into American-princelings for no reason that I can possibly see. This is the generation that divorced achievement from celebrity.

And because of their egotism and narcissism, we are now cursed with the likes of Britney Spears, who is famous for gyrating to a song someone else wrote and then imploding on youtube; Lindsay Lohan who is famous for being drug-addicted white trash and her parents, who are famous for being white trash with a famous daughter; Paris Hilton, who is famous for a sex tape and making out with girls at ritzy parties; Perez Hilton who is famous for being an obnoxious homosexual; Bristol Palin who is famous because the left hates her mother obsessively and because she got herself knocked up; Snookie who is famous for having a bad tan; "The Situation" who is famous for being an obnoxious unaware-metrosexual; and the King of Them All. . . Charlie Sheen.

Sheen gained some fame for being an actor who looked like his father. But he became a celebrity when he started doing so many drugs that he lost touch with reality and began ranting like a lunatic. Sheen is the poster child for everything that’s wrong with celebrities. He’s stupid. He’s harmful to everyone around him, including his kids and multiple wives. He thinks he’s entitled to do whatever he wants. And not only is he allowed to get away with being an obnoxious turd, but people go out of their way to coddle him. Indeed, despite the fact he should be locked up and medicate somewhere. . . possibly lobotomized, Hollyweird is falling all over itself to exploit and enable his implosion.

Come on people, let this sad chapter in American culture end. Their fifteen minutes has run 50 years too long now. Stop paying attention to people who have nothing to offer other than being trainwrecks of human beings. The damage these people are doing to our culture is immense, and we need to stop making heroes out of them.

And if we're going to insist on making these idiots heroes, then I say we start a new program. . . a live action, not-faked version of Celebrity Death Match. Now that I would pay to see.