Now You Know How Celebrities Feel!

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For several years now, I’ve been talking about our society’s absurdly inconsiderate and inhuman treatment of celebrities. This is a major topic in my maybe-upcoming book. Our inability to afford celebrities the respect and privacy that ordinary people enjoy has made many of them virtual prisoners in their own homes, unable to go to restaurants, stores, parks, beaches or virtually any public space without being harassed.  Well, there are some places they can go—we can go—only because you don’t know about them. But that isn’t enough. Social media has actually helped somewhat to humanize them, but it still isn’t enough. 

People often wonder why the rich spend preposterous amounts of money on seemingly silly things. Has the thought ever occurred to you that perhaps they do this because you won’t let them do ordinary everyday things?  They can’t go the park, go the movies, go to a cheap restaurant, because if you recognize them, you’ll bother them. You wonder why their kids grow up to be a little different. Well, they can’t bring them to Chuck E Cheese and let them run around with yours. On top of people acting stupid, somebody might try to kidnap them because their parents are worth a billion dollars.  I remember an eye-opening moment when I was working for a multi-millionaire in my early twenties. He was on a business trip and I told someone at another company that we worked closely with that he was out of town. When he came back, he told me never to do that. Clueless, I asked him why not. He said, “I have to think about the security of my family.”

We treat celebrities as if they are inhuman, and then criticize them for retreating from society.  I wrote a while ago that even in the midst of his extraordinarily controversial presidency, Donald Trump should be able to take his family out to dinner in Manhattan and be treated like an ordinary citizen. Not every night. But once in a while. People often accuse the so-called “elites” of being inhuman, but how are they supposed to remember what being human feels like if they can’t walk unmolested amongst us?

Aside from my view of whether shutting down the world makes sense or not, during this time, millions of Americans are getting a taste of the burden of celebrity and public life (much the same burdens apply to politicians). The public spaces that are closed to them because of our lunacy are now closed to everyone. It’s not a lot of fun, is it?  It changes how you think and how you feel, doesn’t it?

“Alone Together” sounds an awful lot like “Freedom is Slavery” or “War is Peace”. But Orwellian though this moment may feel to me, I hope that it can provoke a turning point in the way we treat each other when we all return to the world. I hope that we can finally make civil society civilized to those at the bottom AND at the top. 

Throughout my life, I have at times been accused of being an elitist. What is true is that I realize that all social relationships and political relationships have two sides. For all the reasons those in the masses have to feel that those at the top mistreat us, we play our part in mistreating them as well. We’ll never be able to overcome our differences and come together until this fact is acknowledged. Our refusal to acknowledge it is why there are so many amongst the elite who won’t lift a finger to help us. In fact, given how we talk about them, and how we treat them, it’s quite remarkable how many of them remain committed to trying to help others. And the sad part is, it is to our own detriment more than theirs. Believe me, they’ll be fine.  But it does hurt...

There is a reason why celebrities and rich people have such high rates of substance addiction, depression and suicide. Part of it is the enormous pressure and enormous responsibility that goes along with their work. But another part is that our society’s attitudes toward fame and wealth bring about a sort of death that comes along with stardom. It becomes almost impossible to form new social relationships in a normal way. We don’t realize how small a world celebrity is, how few of them there are. Entertainment is really sort of like one big company. Imagine if your co-workers were the only people you could safely socialize with. Your circle shrinks and shrinks as more and more of the everyday areas of society become off limits as your career ascends. 

I’ve come to think that vampire and zombie movies are analogies for how celebrities feel. They’ve made a choice, or sometimes not made a choice, that has in a sense made them immortal and given them extraordinary powers, but it all requires the constant blood infusion of our attention and money. But then, as a consequence, they are mobbed by zombies every time they leave their home, hunted by a brain-dead society that has an insatiable hunger to dissect them. 

It isn’t that bad for everyone. There are some celebrities who can move about in public relatively freely, depending on a combination of their public persona, who their core fans are, and how recognizable they are. Athletes tend to be able to do it more than other entertainers, probably because they are more accessible as you can buy a ticket and get fairly close to them on a regular basis. There are others who have been able to maintain social circles from their youth. Still others, mostly from smaller towns and cities, who can still live normal lives in those places. And I’ve discovered some funny clever tricks that some celebrities can use to disguise themselves and walk around unnoticed within certain limits. But this isn’t real life. It’s like walking through the world as a ghost. For some people, despite all that wealth can do, it is a life of hellish isolation. 

It’s the worst for these smoking hot girls that are the subject of this blog. They can’t go ANYWHERE. You’ll act stupid. They have to worry not only about the issues that come with celebrity, but the security issues that unfortunately every woman has to worry about in our society. And God forbid she’s been marketed as a sex symbol!  It’s one thing for the president to need bodyguards. They make decisions that affect the lives of millions of people, so it is understandable that some people might get murderously passionate about that, even though that shouldn’t be either. But a girl who has spent her life working to ENTERTAIN us, it is intolerable that she shouldn’t be able to go anywhere she wishes and treated with respect. 

In scrupulously avoiding fame as I have, I’ve been like Wesley Snipes in Blade—The Daywalker, free to go wherever I want and do whatever I want while my friends in Hollywood are prisoners in their mansions. Perhaps it is a fair trade-off for the fact that I’ve always had to worry about money and never been able to do the work I really want to do. I was never willing to accept the consequences that come with the job...until everything was taken away from me as it has been now. 

But perhaps I walked this road to unlock the gates of their mansions and let all of the imprisoned stars come back to the world. It will mean even more for us than it does for them. What we’ve done in effect is to exile some of the coolest, smartest and most vibrant people in our society. It wasn’t always this way. 

There was a time when actors, musicians and athletes were a part of our community. They lived on the same blocks, shopped in the same stores, their kids went to school with ours. What changed it, I believe, is electronic media. Electronic media allowed entertainers to share their talent with a much wider audience, and this is why their incomes began to grow astronomically. But because of the economic pressures being placed on the rest of us, not by rich entertainers but by the corporations and billionaires that they too worked for, we resented their wealth even as we worshipped them, and we drove them out of our communities into gated enclaves, hunted and harassed by photographic snipers and obsessed zombie fans. We must change this. 

I’ve spent a lot of time around the kinds of places celebrities go, and there is something I’ve always done—I pretend I don’t know who they are. Well, not exactly. I just treat them like any other person. Because they are. You hear all these stories about celebrities being rude or arrogant or entitled, and a few are, just like some people who AREN’T famous are that way. But as a group, they are nicer than the average person, though they are more serious and less inclined to allow their time to be wasted with bullshit. Why should they? Their time is worth thousands of dollars an hour. 

Perhaps this sense of social decline that so many of us feel is because we’ve allowed our society to function in such a way that as soon as someone shows that they are special, we exile them to Malibu or The Hamptons...or Lake Como or the South of France. Let’s invite them all back. 

This is but one of the many ways that our society has become fractured. It isn’t an easy fix because it is a complex problem. The social unity that used to exist was based on forced conformity, and that was bad. Everyone was more or less the same, and there was enormous pressure to be like everyone else, and that is where the sense of community came from. But there was always the dark side to it that those who were not a part of the “in-group” were treated horribly. 

As we began to recognize diversity as a society, and began to pursue equality for those who were different, communities fractured. In some respects, we deliberately destroyed them because we saw those bastions of traditional values as a threat to a modern, inclusive world. And we weren’t wrong. We just threw the baby out with the bathwater in failing to recognize that SOME of those traditional values were good and worth saving, necessary to save even, if they could be disconnected from their discriminatory components. 

We have to find a new basis for community that works the same as those traditional values did, but that is based on a principle of inclusivity. I think John F. Kennedy (and Ted Sorenson) said it best—“We all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our childrens’ futures. And we are all mortal.”

But we’re hypocrites and idiots if we strive to include those at the bottom, but don’t think we need those at the top.  I’m a liberally oriented person, but I’ve always felt that this was a fair criticism of liberalism—a lot of liberals do hate the rich and powerful. Some talk about getting rid of them in the same tone Hitler talked about getting rid of the Jews. It’s not right. If we need everyone, we really need EVERYONE. 

It’s almost in a way like desegregation. Though for very different reasons, celebrities are exiled from public spaces in much the same way Black people were. Yes, they are exiled in mansions instead of shacks and tenements, but I’ve spent time in all kinds if environments from the poorest to the most luxurious, and after a while, your surroundings fade into the background. But isolation is still isolation. 

When the Great COVID-19 Panic of 2020 is over, and the Great Panic-Induced Depression of 2020 begins, restaurants and stores should hang up signs in their windows that say “Celebrities Welcome”. We’ll need their dollars in the economy, and perhaps that will bring a few other people out as well. And when you see a superstar standing in line next to you at the grocery store, laughing at their own face on their cover of People, just act natural and don’t freak out. It will be a little strange at first, but in time, you’ll realize that they are just ordinary people, and they’ll be able to remember what it feels like to live a normal life. And  if there should be an earthquake or tsunami, alien invasion or zombie apocalypse, you’ll want these people around—they’ve been practicing for things like that all their lives. You can’t act something out without learning how to deal with it, practically and emotionally. 

And then, slowly but surely, what will begin to happen is what our society so desperately needs: social relationships will begin to form between people from different walks of life, different strata of society, and in that way our community is strengthened. These won’t be forced relationships. They will form organically when we discover that we share interests in common. We’ll get to know each other, and soon the big wide world will be just a small neighborhood we all share. 

It will be a new world, with all kinds of interesting people in it. Maybe you’ll be at an obscure store you love that sells antique model trains and your favorite TV star who has been wanting to come there for years walks in. Or you’ll be at your favorite out of the way dive restaurant, and your favorite rock star will come up and ask, “So what’s good here?”. Maybe you’ll sign up for an art class at the local community college, and your team’s star player will be sitting in the desk next to you. Or one night you’ll be walking around Las Vegas and...

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