William and Kate are getting hitched on Friday. They seem like perfectly lovely young people and I wish them well. I just don't want to see them on my TV every five seconds.
After all, we're Americans. We cast off the yoke of royalty in 1776! Or did we?
Recently Encino's Charlie Sheen enjoyed a presidential-style motorcade courtesy of the Washington D.C. police department.
In New York, rapper Sean "Diddy" Combs was given an NYPD escort through traffic so he would wouldn't miss a concert appearance in New Jersey.
Last night in Burbank, the audience for "The Tonight Show" gave a long, wildly enthusiastic standing ovation to Lindsay Lohan.
We go gaga over Gaga and the Brits are crazy for going gaga over William and Kate?
America doesn't have a hereditary aristocracy with kings and queens imposed upon us. What we have instead is a pseudo class system, the Cult of Celebrity, whose defining characteristic appears to be a distinct lack of class.
While the peasants absorb everything from double-digit unemployment to underwater home mortgages to four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline, the celebrated sail above their Twitter followers in G4's, immune to life's slings and arrows.
Charlie, Diddy and LiLo have at various times actually racked up accomplishments, but talent is now optional when it comes to fame. The Celebrity Mill spits out a glut of genetically or surgically perfected bodies and faces to meet the inexhaustible
consumer demand, talent be damned.If we had as much crude oil as we do crude celebrities gas would be 30 cents a gallon.
The Cult of Celebrity whips up a vortex of moral confusion in its wake.
Scolds like myself are forever pooh-poohing the nitwit parade on "Entertainment Tonight", "Extra" and those magazine covers at the gym. Who are these people? What are they celebrated for? Yet we continue to watch, read, follow and wallow in it.
In tough times, Hollywood always dishes up nonsensical escapism. In the Great Depression of the 1930's it was Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers gliding across ballroom floors in top hat and tails.
Today Hollywood gives us Bristol Palin and Snookie.
An unrepentant drug addled shoplifter gets a standing O on national television.
One of L.A.'s most prestigious museums, MOCA, enshrines gang graffiti as fine art.
The former Movie Star-Governor of California commutes the sentence of the Assembly Speaker's son after he participated in a murder and then tells Newsweek, "Hello! Of course you help a friend!"
It turns out membership does have its privileges, and obviously, we're not on the list.
Doug McIntyre's column appears in the Los Angeles Daily News on Wednesdays and Sundays. You can reach him at dncolumnist@dailynews.com.
Sienna Guillory Alicia Keys Michelle Behennah Busy Philipps Lindsay Lohan
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