“Don’t look now, but the unlikeliest people are being restocked as celebrity inventory: politicians.

Barack Obama made Forbes’ top 100 celebrities this year, the first sitting head of state ever. Obama is now the country’s main celebrity. The cameras are on him, all the time. He gives speeches. That’s his main act, most of the time.

Barack and Michelle. Nancy, Sarah. Arnie. Eliot. Joe. Huck. Mark. Barney.”

***
“It seems to be an unhealthy phenomenon of the modern age that we allow ourselves to focus deep love on people who in life simply couldn’t bear the weight of idolatry thrust upon them.

Of course, it is admirable to express sympathy for these people, but it smacks of the worship of victimhood, rather than achievement.

Great funerals of serious individuals call forth memories in a population of what they most revere. Anyone watching the millions who turned out in the U.S. for Martin Luther King’s funeral, for example, could not doubt that they wished to put behind them the bad days of racial segregation…

But what if these sugary, sentimental, morally empty displays of collective hysteria really do represent the modern soul? Two or three generations have passed in the West who, compared to their historical predecessors, have suffered no real hardship – no wars, no food shortages, no tyrannies.

As we sat in front of the telly or plugged into our iPods, guzzling cheap food and listening to cheap music, did we become bloated on the cheapness and the ease?”