Cloudy Trophies

With Madonna attempting to use her 'fame' to adopt yet another African child, and being aghast at the media coverage of this event, its time I climbed on to my soapbox once more, and have a rant about modern celebrity culture:

'Celebrity' is such an odious term, and a repellent idea, at least in its modern application. Everywhere I walk, its soulless stink surrounds me. All men are not equal - this I freely acknowledge - but the distinction is not a meritocratic one. Rather, it is arbitrary and demeaning. And what has caused this recent effusion of that prize oxymoron, celebrity culture? - I tell you it is godlessness!

In this "enlightened" age, science seeks to destroy God's mystery. Do they not realise the harm they do? That which is infinite and incomprehensible is a source of wonderment simply because it is so distant - the sublime majesty of the unknown is, by definition, destroyed if we understand it. There is indeed knowledge which makes us poorer by the possessing of it. Now that we live in a secular world, in which God is dead in the minds of so many people, we feel His loss. Man requires, in his essential nature, a God-image - and in his arrogance has cast it away! Devoid of a higher power, man has taken the final, inevitable, tragic step - man has raised himself to godhood, an idol in his own sight.

Far too many people, pargons of unthinking mindlessness, worship celebrities; they read about them on a daily basis, watch them constantly on television - laughably seeking to explore the heart of the mystery! How comic, how tragic - a shallow religion for a shallow age! And what are these celebrities, this pantheon of the new divinity? Their chief characteristic is blandness, and their only talent seems to be a distinct lack of that quality - theirs is a cult of mediocrity. Flawed people (as all people are flawed) praise, worship the flaws in others, in the sad hope that their own flaws shall come to be similarly extolled. This is an inverse religion indeed! To strive, not for divine perfection, but for wanton imperfection; to worsen, rather than to better, oneself. Indeed, it is something only human arrogance could truly manage - not to raise ourselves to godhood, but to drag godhood down to our level - rather than changing his essential nature, man strives to overturn the order of the universe itself.

Nietzsche was right - God is dead! And His corpse, ignobly, has become a wretched trophy in our halls - we have killed God, we are His assassins, and must not we become His equal to be worthy of such a title?