Why world leaders call on celebrities to do their dirty work

Kirchner has discovered that, in international face-offs, the Penn is now mightier than the sword. The Penn affair reveals something very important about today’s speedily growing celebrity culture—it shows that it is motored, not so much by voyeurism amongst the lower orders and white-trash magazine-readers, as we are so often told, but rather by a profound crisis of authority among our rulers and betters. It is the upper echelons’ lack of moral authority, their estrangement both from the public and from the old, accepted ways of doing politics, which has encouraged them to cultivate celebrity as a new source of authority.

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More and more political leaders now outsource authority to celebrities. George W. Bush aided and abetted in the transformation of Bono into spokesman for the whole Third World, to the extent that Bono was invited to a G8 gathering (as “the People’s Republic of Bono”, joked one British journalist). Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown once had a chat with Angelina Jolie about what to do with Africa. The Hague made supermodel Naomi Campbell testify at the trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, partly because it wanted to bring the “spotlight” to this important political matter.

Again and again, leaders who feel they lack the purchase or gravitas or old-fashioned moral authority to make certain claims or front certain campaigns call upon celebs to do their dirty work for them. As a result the prefix “celebrity”—as in celebrity campaigner, celebrity doctor, celebrity chef—now enjoys far more clout in the public realm than old-world prefixes such as “political”, “royal,” and even “elected”.

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