Where things are hollow

Every era can be defined, quite succinctly, by who it deifies. Prophets. Politicians. Powerbrokers. Poets. Us, well, we worship at an entirely different altar: celebrities. I say this knowing full well that I am among the ranks of huddled masses laying sacrificial offerings at the feet of the famous. I love pop culture, I steep in its bubbly froth daily. But that doesn’t mean I always drink to intoxication. And it doesn’t mean it can’t worry about where our addiction will ultimately lead us.

I say this as news of another high-profile death surfaced yesterday. Casey Johnson – heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, daughter of the New York Jets owner, lesbian socialite, Tila Tequila fiancée, mother to a 2-year-old daughter and a 30-year-old young woman – was found dead in her L.A. home. Other than those well-publicized profile points, I don’t really know anything about Casey. Most people probably don’t. I didn’t follow her life or exploits in anything more than the most peripheral way. But now, less than a month after she made a seemingly unavoidable splash on the red carpet with Tila, talking about their engagement and landing on gossip pages everywhere, she is gone.

Fame can’t save the famous, and it certainly can’t save the rest of us unknowns either.

But what this sad situation really reveals is our evolving esteem for celebrity. Sure, we all still worship there, but we don’t necessarily like the demigods we created in the first place. How else can you explain the vitriol that followed Casey’s death toward her self-proclaimed fiancée? Of course, much of it unfolded on what has become our new town square: Twitter. This is, after all, the age of the 140-character eulogy. Tila tweeted her grief, then tweeted that Casey was actually in a coma, then tweeted she wasn’t in a coma while confirming the worse, then tweeted for privacy. It was a mess and it was unseemly and that’s life sometimes.

Granted, defending her is not my mission here. If you want to distill that relentless drive for fame down to its most concentrated form, I think what would come out of the spigot would look remarkably like Tila Tequila. I’m not a fan, but I wish her no ill will. I certainly wouldn’t, as some in the professional asshole business have done, call her a “vile subhuman” or chastise her for “clawing your way from the F list to the D list of fame” within the same hour she found out that the person she was at the very least friends with had died.

But then, that’s the flip side of our obsession. We’ve become contemptuous of our own creations. Because it wasn’t just Perez offering up harsh condolences, but so many anonymous others lambasting and lashing out, cackling and crowing. Which is just so strange to me. What would drive a perfect stranger to write someone at a traumatic time and tell her she sucks? What glee can be gained from such shaming? Is it simply revenge against those who have – even in the most superficial way – made it to that mountaintop?

I don’t know; I’m not sure I want to know. But I do know that death, no matter the person, is terrible and sad. And fame, no matter the kind, doesn’t change that. Not one bit.