Worst Sellers

Apparently book sales were down 5% over the last year.  Personally, I blame celebrity books. You can't go into any bookshop these days without being confronted by prominent displays of books written by celebrities. While celebrity fiction is bad enough, the ones I really object to are the celebrity non-fiction tomes, where even the vaguely famous grace us with their wit and wisdom on just about any subject that takes their fancy.  Never mind that it is a subject in which they have no qualifications or expertise: nowadays, just because you are, say, a glamour model, that shouldn't bar you from giving us the benefit of your views on, say, psychotherapy.  Now, most of this stuff is harmless fluff - you know the sort of things I mean: celebrity cook books or celebrity fitness guides - but there is an increasing number of these publications which are presenting themselves as serious commentaries on serious issues.  Their authors, (or, at the very least, the celebrities putting their names to them), seem to think that they are telling us something profound.  Ultimately, what they are promoting, regardless of subject matter, is that celebrity bestows wisdom and insight - never mind actually devoting years of study to political history, for instance: just become a celebrity radio phone in host and you can publish volumes telling us what is wrong with modern politics and how we can make everything right again.

Obviously, we shouldn't be surprised by such developments: we are living in age where he whole concept of traditional expertise is decried: 'people are tired of experts', our political leaders tell us, so to hell with them, just follow our uninformed and biased prejudices, instead, is the modern message.  Add to this the fact that 'celebrity' itself is now promoted as the ultimate goal.  Whereas in the past, to achieve fame, you had to have actually done something, to have proven proficient in some endeavour, be it acting, singing, science, medicine or exploring the Amazon basin, in our post-expert, post-knowledge world, you can be a celebrity simply by being on reality TV, or You Tube, or Instagram or a million other types of social media.  Actual talent doesn't come into: just having the right 'look' is often sufficient.  And once you have celebrity, you can start offering the rest of the world your opinions as if they were facts,  Because, obviously, if you are a celebrity, your opinions are more important than those of non-celebrities - you can fill books with them and spread them to the masses.

Clearly, I have a lot of problems with celebrity books. On the most basic level, they put real experts on their subjects out of business, (although, to be fair, they undoubtedly keep a lot of ghost writers in business).  But far more seriously, the opinions they peddle as fact are usually, at the least, half baked, at the worst, completely wrong.  Dangerously wrong, because there are people who will take these falsehoods as fact and act upon them, potentially sending themselves and wider society, down potentially dangerous paths.  Worst of all, though, is the fact that these celebrity authors actually seem to think that they are telling us something profound. Only the other evening I caught June Sarpong, (does anybody actually know what she is famous for?), telling a CGI Vladimir Putin, (really, don't ask) about her new book.  Now, whilst the TV show she was on was clearly a parody of a chat show, she was still serious about trying to sell her book, earnestly telling virtual Vlad that its message was that, despite all our apparent differences, we can actually all live together in harmony - and that's a good thing.  No shit Sherlock!  I mean, fuck my hat, I never knew that!  Really, though, that's meant to be some kind of insight into the human condition?  Just watch any of the X-Men films and you'll be taught he same message, (those mutants are just like us, there are good ones and bad ones, and even the 'bad' ones are only that way because of the bigotry and cruelty directed at them by 'normal' humans), and be entertained a great deal more, (well, maybe not by some of the later ones, like X-Men: Apocalypse and X-Men: Dark Phoenix, which just retread earlier films without really adding anything new).  But to get back to the point, that's the fundamental problem with celebrity books: the way in which they try to pass off ideas and concepts which have been better and more intelligently articulated in comic books and movies as something original and profound.