Celebrities or Cretins?

Continuing my anti-celebrity theme, I’ll briefly tell you another thing about the bastards that really gets my goat. Remember when you were a child, and there was always that other kid in your class who get away with blue murder? Or that sibling who could apparently do no wrong? You know what I’m talking about – if you played some sort of harmless prank, like setting fire to the school bike sheds, it was treated as a crime, if they did it, then it was praised to the skies as some masterpiece of installation art. It would be just the same if you finally achieved some goal. They’d always trump it somehow with some act of exhibitionism and steal the limelight. Well, that’s the way I feel about celebrities – I just hate the way large sections of the media and public are always rushing to proclaim them as some kind of genius whenever they do something that is actually stupid. Just about any kind of moronic behaviour on their part is forgiven on the basis that they’re somehow ‘special’.

You know the sort of thing – if you or I wrecked an hotel suite, blowing up the toilets and marching through reception dressed in Nazi uniform, we’d be charged with criminal damage and denounced as fascist thugs. However, when Keith Moon did that sort of thing it was hailed as the work of an eccentric comic genius. Only today, alleged musician and self-styled rapper Mike ‘The Streets’ Skinner was showing off the crop circle he’d created in a field in Glastonbury. If a non-celebrity had done that they’d be dismissed as some kind of crank, not to mention a vandal. But, of course, Skinner is feted as a ‘cheeky celebrity’ having a ‘bit of fun’. The vainglorious bastard has even made the crop circle in the image of his own face. Jesus, what an ego! But, hey, that level of what would be called arrogance in anyone else is OK – he’s a celebrity!