PRISON NATION PT 2

In part one of this subject I took a look at America current status as the world's number one jailor.  Now let's take a look at what helps fuel that status: the war on drugs.  Putting it bluntly, the war on drugs has been a disaster in this country.  It stands for everything the US does wrong: it's racist, classist, wasteful, ineffective, hypocritical and puritanical.  And what better argument can be made for its failure than the fact that,  despite our huge prison population, our country remains the number one market for illegal drugs in the world.  (According to a recent Frontline report, the government estimates that the US spends around 60 billion dollars a year on illegal drugs).  To be blunt once again, the only possible way that the war on drugs can be seen as a success is if its goal was to jail as many poor minorities as possible.

The term war on drugs was created by the media in 1971 after president Richard Nixon called drugs "public enemy number one", but it really took off in the early 1980's with the arrival of crack cocaine.  For those of us who can remember that time, the spread of crack was indeed frightening, with nearly every inner city neighborhood in America having a serious problem with crack related gang violence virtually overnight.   While the negative effects of the drug were often overestimated (a recent article in the New York  Times showed that the media's fears of a generation of crack babies leading horrible lives were overblown at the time), it was a undeniably scary drug.  But, sadly, our reaction to it was to greatly increase drug sentencing laws, which were inevitably used disproportionately against minorities;  in 1986 President Reagan signed the Anti Drug Abuse act into law.  It contained a whopping twenty nine new mandatory minimum sentences, and even worse, punished crack cocaine violators more than powder cocaine ones at a ratio of one hundred to one.  Although this law was repealed in 2010  by President Obama, the damage had been done, and for years crack users, overwhelmingly minorities, were given long prison sentences, while mostly white powder cocaine users were given a slap on the wrist.

Sadly, the blatantly racist aspects of the war on drugs continue to this day: current polling shows that although white people are more likely than Black people to smoke marijuana, Blacks are five times more likely to be arrested for that crime.  From the stop and frisk laws in New York City to the automatic pulling over of any nonwhite male driving a nice car all over the country, the war on drugs is mostly about jailing non white men.  While in jail they are forced to survive in an environment filled with murderers and other brutal criminals, which often results in their coming out far more violent than when they entered.  And jail time is just the beginning: after their release a prison record hangs over their head for the rest of their lives, making them second class citizens with limited job options.  In 2012 author Michelle Alexander published a book about the drug war entitled THE NEW JIM CROW : MASS INCARCERATION  IN THE AGE OF  COLORBLINDNESS, and really, the name says it all.

Let's face it, for a lot of people in this country, youthful experimentation with drugs is seen as right of passage; while most parents certainly don't encourage it, many of them  expect that their  kids will try drugs at some point in their lives, like in college, and that most of them will not suffer any long term ill effects from their experimentation.   Just look at our last three presidents, Obama, Bush and Clinton, who have all admitted to using drugs in their younger years, without it having a serious effect on their electability. As Bush put it, "when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish", essentially shrugging off an illegal activity by implying that everybody does it.  So why are Americans willing to accept former drug use in our leaders, but still think that non violent drug users should go to jail?  And why aren't we angrier about the hypocritical way that those leaders punish others for doing something they themselves did?
Also, there is the simple question of freedom: if someone is an adult in a free society, and they willingly choose to take drugs, and that drug use does not involve harming or threatening anyone else or anyone else's property, why is that person a criminal?  Why can their freedom be taken away?  Are drugs potentially harmful and even deadly?  Obviously.  But consider that it is perfectly legal for an adult to buy an entire bottle of vodka or Jack Daniels with the intention of drinking it all in one day, which would be just as  harmful or deadly as taking any other drug.  Alcohol kills tens of  thousands of Americans every year, sometimes slowly(like through cirrhosis of the liver) or quickly, through alcohol poisoning(the center for disease control states that binge drinking alone kills around eighty eight thousand people a year in this country) , and when a person is addicted to alcohol, trying to stop can be agonizing and cause drunken tremors and hallucinations.  Given all of that, why are other drugs illegal and alcohol isn't?

"Alright men, we dumped out four barrels.  I guess we got this alcohol problem licked!"

Speaking of alcohol, we all know that this country had a prohibition of alcohol from 1920 to 1933, and you would be hard pressed to find any historian who would call it anything other than disastrous.  Making liquor illegal only increased its usage while opening the door to an extremely profitable illicit bootleg market in which rival criminals often violently protected their turf from others.  Sound familiar?  Why can't America learn from its past mistakes and realize that the real problem with drugs isn't the drugs themselves, but the enormous amounts of money to be made off transporting and selling them?  And that as long as that money is there to be made, there will always be people trying to make it, especially in a money worshiping culture like ours?
So how should we legalize drugs?  It's a difficult question: I am certainly opposed to the idea of privatizing drugs, so that corporations could actually profit from getting people addicted.  One need look no further than the horrible behavior of alcohol and tobacco companies, who downplay the dangers of their products and  sometimes blatantly aim their advertising at children, to see how terrible an idea that is.  (I'm old enough to remember candy cigarettes that were sold to kids in packages with real tobacco company labels.  What could be more evil?!)   What I propose is that we have government run stores that adults could enter and buy drugs in, with signs that clearly explain the negative effects of each drug, and safe rooms for them to take the drugs. They could also take the drugs home and use them there, or at specially designated bars or cafes, but not in public. And the crucial element of the stores would be that the drugs would be sold at a very low cost, putting all the drug dealers out of business.  Meanwhile, the federal  Drug Enforcement Agency could be modified to only go after drug dealers who try to sell to children, for whom I certainly have no sympathy for, and the money saved from incarcerating less people can be used to make federal drug rehab centers bigger and better.  I will freely admit that most of this idea comes from the late conservative icon William F Buckley, which shows that ending the war on drugs can be a conservative position.  After all, the drug war is a wasteful big government  program that interferes with people's lives, everything that conservatives claim to hate.

Like the gay marriage issue, there has been a sea change in public opinion concerning the  legalization of marijuana, with Washington State and Colorado passing outright legalization while twenty other states allow it for medical use.  Along with that, more and more Americans are coming to the common sense conclusion that it's better (and cheaper) to put non violent drug users into rehab than jail.  Hopefully, these trends will continue and America's dreadful war on drugs will become a thing of the past.

PRISON NATION PT 1

In 2014, for the first time in years, the American prison population began to decline.  That's the good news; the bad news is that America still incarcerates more people than any other country in the world.  It's hard to get one's head around just how draconian the US prison system is: America makes up just five percent of the world's population, but has twenty five percent of the world's prisoners.  With a total prison population of around two to three million people (plus millions more on probation), we jail more people than China and Russia. Given these awful numbers, how can we honestly call ourselves the land of the free?
How did America come to such a shameful state of affairs?  The first part began in the early 1970's when then president Richard Nixon began a "war on crime", combined with a "war on drugs", both of which were really responses to the tumult the country went through in the 60's, from violent anti war protests to hippies smoking pot,  to many middle Americans the country was out of control, and that a crack down on scofflaws was needed.  Things stepped up in the 1980's when crack cocaine began to be sold in inner cities and president Ronald Reagan responded by signing the Anti Drug Abuse Act in 1986, which had minimum mandatory sentences for non violent drug possession.
Another turning point came in the 1988 presidential election: at first, Vice President George Bush was running behind Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, but then Bush's campaign manager Lee Atwater discovered that while he was governor, Dukakis had furloughed a man named Willie Horton, who went on to rape and murder a woman.  Pouncing on this story, Atwater whipped up a fear campaign that prominently featured the black Horton's mug shot in TV ads and mailers.

"By the time we're finished,  they're going to wonder whether
Willie Horton is Dukakis' running mate."-Lee Atwater

The campaign not only worked for Bush, it lead the way for conservatives in the 1990's.  For years Republicans had benefited from scaring the American public about the Communist menace, saying that they were the ones strong enough to stand up to the reds.  But with the collapse of Soviet Russia and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the party was without an enemy.  The Horton campaign gave them a new one: crime, particularly crimes committed by non white people.  Forgetting that violent crime was at its highest rate in 1984 when Reagan, a Republican, was president, they latched onto this new issue.  Sadly, the Democrats, not wanting to appear soft on crime, went along with this trend; in one of the more shameful moments of presidential campaign history, then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton halted to his race for the presidency to return to Arkansas to sign the death warrant of a death row criminal.

Then in 1993, the horrific kidnapping and killing of a twelve year old girl in California by Richard Davis made national headlines, leading the voters of that state to  pass  the "Three Strikes Your Out" amendment , which mandated a life sentence for a criminal convicted of a third felony.  Lost in the anger and fear over the Davis case was the fact that the law would apply to non violent felons, like  drug addicts.  (In an interesting bit of irony, the father of the murder victim actually came out against the amendment's passage, to no avail).  The passage of that amendment lead to many similar laws being passed in other states, leading to an inevitable increase in the prison population.

Another reason for the increase in prisoners in the US is the terrible trend of states turning to private prisons that are run for profit to incarcerate prisoners.  Beginning in the 1980's, companies like the Correction Corporation of America have profited from more people being imprisoned, and, like all corporations in America, they have lobbied congress to protect their interests, throwing their weight and money behind politicians who promise to get tough on crime, thereby increasing the number of "customers" in their jails. It's a vicious cycle, one that has been given the frightening moniker of  "the prison industrial complex".

As I said at the top of the post there is a trend to slowly but surely reduce prison populations in this country.  I would love to say that this is just because of common sense and compassion for non violent drug offenders, but actually, the reason is simple economics.  After the disastrous economic crash of 2008, many states were strapped for cash, which resulted in them taking a long hard look at their budgets and realizing that doing things like putting non violent drug addicts into rehab instead of jail would save money.   And so, this country's disastrous turn towards becoming the world's number one jailor appears to be turning, unfortunately it took the worst recession since the great depression to make that turn.

QUESTIONING THE JESUS STORY

In the final episode of TV's BREAKING BAD, the last image we see is of the show's antagonist  lying down flat, arms outstretched, bleeding from a wound in his side.  Although I'm a big fan of the show, I couldn't help rolling my eyes at this when I saw it.  "Ugh!"  I thought to myself, "another Christ figure?"

Our Meth dealing Messiah

Yes, from superheroes like Spider Man and Super Man to science fiction characters like Neo in THE MATRIX, evoking the Jesus story in a Hollywood movie or TV show is often a cheap and easy way to build audience sympathy for their heroes. The Jesus story is such a huge part of Western culture, that it can be invoked through the simple gesture of having a character spread his arms. Along with references to Jesus, the life of Jesus has been portrayed numerous times in many different movies over the years, one of which, without a trace of irony, referred to it as THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD. And then there are the uncountable versions of it in other media that have appeared over the years.  It is so accepted and acknowledged as a wonderful story of sacrifice,  that it is rarely questioned.  But why not?

 Consider the story, according to the bible, God created humans as its most beloved creation, and, while they occasionally disappointed it (causing it to at one point to flood the entire earth and kill all but a handful of people), it was mostly pleased with humans.  So, one day it decided to forgive us of all of our sins; now, considering that this is an all seeing, all knowing supreme being we're talking about here, it could have done so easily.  All it had to do was snap its fingers, wiggle its nose, tap its ruby red slippers, whatever the hell it wanted, to just easily forgive all of mankind's sins.  But instead it went through the long, drawn out process of impregnating a virgin, then having her son grow into adulthood, give some nice speeches, perform a few miracles, and then get railroaded and crucified, with the act of that crucifixion becoming the way that our sins were forgiven.  Why did a supreme being take such a circuitous route to bring forgiveness?  This is the same being that was supposed to have created the entire universe in a week, so why wait thirty three years to forgive the sins of mankind? Why all the bother, when it so easily could have done such a thing without even sending down Jesus?
The answer to that question would seem to be that Jesus had a message from God to bring to humanity.  But that also raises some problems: if you were to look a world map that showed were Jesus was born, lived and died, it would only be a tiny spot in the Middle East.  If Jesus died for the sins of all mankind, why did only such a small part of the world's population get to hear his message?  While it's impossible to know just how many people heard Jesus speak, it's safe to say that it was, at the most, in the  hundreds of thousands.  So, there were millions of people all over the world, in places like North America or Asia,who didn't get to hear this wonderful message, merely because they lived in the wrong place.  Did God not care about them?  Were they beneath its interest?  Couldn't a supreme being send down more than one messiah?  Why not ten, or a thousand or even a million?  Why not blanket the world to make sure that this message, that was intended to be heard by all of mankind, actually was?

There was a lot more to the world than this

And an even darker question arrises concerning Jesus; if God sees and knows all, then surely it can see into the future, and if it could see into the future, then it would know that the belief in the divinity of Jesus would become a huge dividing line between its worshippers.  That there would be Christians who believed that Jesus was the messiah and Jews who believed that the messiah was still on the way.  This  dividing line would become so  sharp and bitter that it would lead to centuries of hatred and bigotry that persist to this day, from the torture carried out by the Inquisition to the bitter pogroms imposed in many countries, culminating in the Nazi concentration camps. Surely, when God decided to send down Jesus it must have known that this would be the result, and yet it still chose to.  Why? Wasn't there an easier way for God to forgive our sins, a way that would not have resulted in so much suffering and death?
To question the actions and motivations of God is seen as blasphemous by some religious people and unfathomable by others, but what I think they're really afraid of is that Christianity, like all myths, loses the strength of its arguments when logical thought and common sense questions are asked about it.  It's easier  to nip such questions in the bud then try to answer them, because for religion, ignorance is truly bliss.

BLAMING THE MEDIA

I've already mentioned here that the violent crime in America is going down; however, it's still a serious problem, with crime rates (both violent and non violent) ranking higher in the US  than in other industrialized nations.  Often when there's a violent crime, newscasters and commentators are quick to blame the media, and from violent movies to rap lyrics to video games,  pretend media violence is an easy whipping boy. (The NRA love to do this as a way to deflect any kind of new gun laws). Blaming the media is nothing new; in the 1930's the Catholic Legion of Decency was so outraged by Hollywood's "immorality" that a production code was put in place that dictated what could and could not be shown on screen.  In the 1950's rock and roll music that seems tame today, shocked the nation with its wild beat.  In the 80's and 90's  heavy metal and rap music would also come under fire, and now video games that are "teaching violence" to children are the current vogue target.
It's easy to see why people want to blame the media for violence; the media is so big, so unavoidable and influential, that it provides an easy target.  Add the fact that so few Americans have any control over the media as anything other than consumers, and attacking its effects on impressionable people, especially children, is an easy way to shift the blame for away from parents and onto something else.  There have been numerous studies done over the years about the effects of media violence on children without any conclusive proof. While it may appear that people with a violent nature may enjoy violent based entertainment more than others, it's really impossible to say whether the media creates the violent behavior, or if violent people are just drawn to media that suits their nature.  But the lack of proof hasn't stopped many concerned parents and media watchdog groups from pointing fingers.

This kind of thinking really reached a head in 1989 when the heavy metal rock band Judas Priest were sued by a family who claimed that a hidden subliminal message in one of their songs pushed their son and another young man into committing suicide.  Although the case was thankfully dismissed, it shows the absurd level that some people will go to to  blame a personal tragedy on something outside of themselves and their families.

They were, however, found guilty of having horrible fashion sense

People who attack the media are forgetting an important truth: sex and violence (or, put more gently, romance and adventure) have been a part of storytelling since the beginning of storytelling itself; they are  universal and dramatic parts of the human experience.  Nearly every story, movie or song ever written has an element of one of them.  Some of the most enduring works of art ever are filled with violent elements , from the play HAMLET, (often considered the best writing in the English language), ending with a stage full of dead bodies, to the huge wars described in the Iliad.
The inevitable question that arises is, if violent media causes violence in America, why doesn't it in other first world nations?  For good or for bad, America has the dominant media in the world; go to any European country and you'll see Hollywood movies playing in the theaters and America shows on their TVs.  So, they are absorbing the same horrible media that we are,  but they have lower violent crime rates.
Still not convinced?  Consider Japan; back in the 1960's the Japanese made cartoon shows SPEED RACER and GIGANTOR were brought over to the states for American kids to see.  Along with being dubbed into English, many violent scenes from the shows were cut before they could air in America.  So you had Japanese children growing up watching more violent TV shows than their American counterparts, and yet those Japanese kids were far less likely to grow up and commit acts of violence than the American kids.  And it should be mentioned that Japanese media in general is more violent than American media;  anyone who thinks America's media is too violent needs to watch some movies by Japanese film maker Takashi Miike (on second thought, don't!).  And yet, again, Japan has less violent crime than America despite watching more make believe violence than we do.

Don't say I didn't warn you....

So why is America more violent than most first world countries?  There is no easy answer to this; certainly some blame must go to our well entrenched gun culture that sees even the tiniest of gun control laws as an infringement on freedom.  But America also has a problem with non gun related violent behavior, so guns can't be the only culprit.  Perhaps part of it is our enormous economic inequality (we have the second highest child poverty rate in the first world, after Romania), combined with the competitive, capitalistic belief that getting ahead and fighting for every dollar is the American way.  It's difficult to say,  but blaming our violent society on the media is foolish at best and tantamount to censorship at worst.  Are there some things in the media that children shouldn't see?  Of course,  but the responsibility of controlling access to those things is up to the parents and guardians of those children and not society at large.

KILL THE FILIBUSTER

Harry Reid, the Democratic majority party leader in the Senate, recently exercised what is known as the nuclear option, a process by which the filibuster rule (in which only a vote of sixty senators or more can allow a filibustered nomination or piece of legislation to proceed) can be superseded and instead a straight forward majority vote can be taken for passage.  This was seen as a big news story, and it was, but it was also inevitable.  The Republican party had used the filibuster so often and with such little regard for their status as a minority party that the Democrats really had no choice.
It's important to remember that the filibuster is never mentioned in the US constitution and that it was not even used in the Senate until 1837.  The rules of the procedure have gone through many changes over the years; once upon a time a senator had literally to speak non stop on the floor of the senate to keep a filibuster going (the 1939 movie MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON dramatically portrayed this with Jimmy Stewart's Senator Smith talking himself hoarse during a filibuster). Sadly, the longest filibuster on record was Strom Thurmond's  24 hour filibuster of the 1957 civil rights bill.

I paved the way for that jerk?

The big change came in 1975 when the Senate decided to allow any Senator to proclaim their intention to filibuster as enough to require a two thirds (60 votes) majority to pass a nomination or piece of legislation.  It was this creation of a virtual filibuster that sadly opened the floodgates, making it far too easy for any member of a minority party to slow down or kill the legislative process.  And sure enough, as the country has become more divided the filibuster has been used more and more.  In the Obama era, with the Republicans reflexive opposition of literally anything the president has tried to pass through congress, it's reached a crescendo.  The straw that broke the camel's back was when the Republicans used the filibuster to deny presidential judicial appointments to the Washington DC Circuit  Court not because they had objections to the nominations themselves, but because they felt that no more judges were needed to fill the vacancies.  It was a dare to Reid to use the nuclear option, and, after years of extreme obstruction, that's just what he did.
Hopefully, this will bring an end to this absurd practice that stands in the way of democracy and the importance of elections.  Remember, the constitution allows the president to appoint whomever he wants to be his cabinet members as long as they are approved by a majority of the Senate; the bottom line is that when a president is elected, he should be allowed to appoint like minded people to his cabinet, that's really the whole point of elections.  The Senate vote was intended mostly as a formality to prevent giving the president too much leeway.
The filibuster gets even more undemocratic when used against legislation.  Again, the constitution allows that a bill that is passed by  majorities  in the House of Representatives and the Senate and that is signed by the president, becomes a law.  I think that's how it should be; surely that counts as enough checks and balances on a bill without adding yet another obstacle for it to pass .  (And even after that passage, a law can still be challenged in the courts.)
 There is a fine line between necessary debate and compromise and outright gridlock, and giving the power of the filibuster to any member of the Senate promotes the latter over the former.  And, so I'm not a hypocrite, I'll go on the record and say that I think a bill that passes the House and the Senate and is signed by the President should be a law even if it's a law I don't agree with.  Again, part of the reason we have elections is to vote for candidates who will change laws passed by previous leaders.  Even if congress moves in the wrong direction, I think it should keep moving.  A congress that does nothing weakens democracy and makes voters cynical and less likely to vote, which again weakens democracy.  So put a stake in the filibuster's heart already.

A FEW WORDS IN DEFENSE OF OBAMACARE

Obamacare has had a rocky start, but I think things will get better, and that ten years from now, it will be generally accepted by the American public, and its name will be changed to simply,"the national healthcare system."   Now I should mention that I find the Affordable Care Act  far from perfect; like a lot of people on the left, I almost lost faith in the crazy days of the health care debate of 2009, when Republicans blustered (as they do) and Democrats dithered (as they do).  I almost threw up my hands and wrote it off completely when the public option portion of the bill was killed, reducing it to a plan that was originally floated by the conservative Heritage foundation, for crying out loud!
But then I remembered the wounds of 1992, when Bill Clinton attempts to reform health care resulted in such a resounding defeat that any real overhaul of the system was put on on hold for 17 years; I didn't want to see the same thing happen to Obamacare.  There is a saying, "the good should not die in the search for the perfect", and that exactly  describes my feelings about the bill; today, no child can be denied health care because of a pre existing condition, that's reason enough to be glad it passed.

And now the health care website is experiencing problems, with people being unable to sign in and get help; there are reports of Obama venting angrily at his underlings, while conservatives engage in schadenfreude.  Honestly, this does look bad, with the president's signature plan stumbling in a way that never should have happened; you would think that access to the some of the finest thinkers in the country would lead to a workable website!  Still, this isn't the first federal government plan to have trouble; under the Bush administration, the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan was seen as too unwieldy at first, but people eventually figured it out, and now there are no complaints.  So, mistakes aside, the government health care  web site will be fixed eventually.

"OK, so we shouldn't have used Commodore 64 to set up the website!  Can I go now?"

The other big problem is that some people have seen their health care plan ended, after the president said repeatedly is speeches that that wouldn't happen.  He recently apologized for this, and that's understandable, but there is something that's important to remember: the people who have had their plan ended only make up about five percent of the American public, and furthermore, those plans were ended because they did not live up to the basic standards set by the bill.  The bottom line is, many people will be able to get a new, better plan at a lower cost.  Is that such a bad thing?  Are there some people who have lost their plan and that are being forced to pay more for a new one?  Yes, but, while the numbers are certain yet, there appears to be only a handful of people that fall into this category.
Not only do I think that eventually Obamacare will be accepted, but I think it may be improved; call me a cock eyed optimist, but I think that eventually the goal of a single payer system (or Medicare for all) will be reached in this country, as more and more Americans become comfortable with a government run health care system.
Why do I think this is important?  Because I think that in any society, there are some things that should be run by the free market and some things that shouldn't be.  Selling TVs and computers is just fine for the free market, since paying less for a slower computer won't be a big problem for most consumers.  But some services are beyond the free market; for example, once upon a time in England, fire stations were run for profit; people would pay the fire station and get a plaque to hang outside their house.  If their house was burning down, the fire fighters would see the plaque and put the fire out, if there was no plaque, they'd let the house burn.  Not surprisingly, this horrible system was eventually put to an end in the nineteenth century,  and firefighters were paid with a central fund to put out all the fires. And, of course, the police department is also run the same way.  I think health care qualifies also as something that should be beyond the free market; let's face it,  the best way for a health care company to make a profit is to charge as much as possible and to provide as little service as possible.  To them, the perfect client is a healthy person who only occasionally goes to the doctor, never has any serious health issues, and who switches to Medicare once she's 65.  So not only do they reject people that they think may need their service, but they also look for any excuse to deny coverage to people in their system (the dreaded pre existing condition).  Quiet frankly, I think this is an untenable system in any civilized society, as bad as letting a house burn to the ground because it lacks the right plaque.
In closing, I would like to address the conservatives who honestly compare Obamacare to Communism with a simple question: Was Winston Churchill a Communist?  Churchill has often been seen as hero to Conservatives in America, with some poles even putting him over Ronald Reagan in their hearts.  Now Churchill was Prime Minister of England from 1940 to 1945 before being voted out.  In 1951 he returned to the office; in 1948, England's National Health plan had been put in place in his absence, and upon retaking office, he made no moves to dismantle it.  In fact, he allocated more funds to strengthen the popular program. Yes, he supported a National Health Care System.  That's right, according to the modern conservative view point in America, Winston Churchill was a no good red.

"Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains."

CELEBRITY WORSHIP

Last July the world's media went into a crazy obsession over the birth of Prince George to Prince William and Kate Middleton; along with the usual celebrity watching organizations following each step of the birth with a microscope, even more legitimate news providers like CNN had camera crews staked outside the hospital to report to the world that, yes, a healthy young woman just gave birth to a baby that looks a lot like the thousands of other babies born that day all around the world.  Why do so many people care about the lives of the rich and famous?  Why are there so many magazines and websites dedicated to describing their lives in such minutiae?  What is it about them that fascinates us?

We often compare celebrities to gods, and with the worship and adulation they receive, along with the bubble of wealth and privilege they live in, the comparison seems apt.  They seem to reside in a world outside of ours, a world the vast majority of us will never get to see.
Now the adulation of certain exalted members of society (leaders, artists and athletes) seems to be something that stretches back thousands of years to the earliest human tribal societies, but I also think the roots of that adulation have another component: paganism.  With the exception of Hinduism, the world religions of today are monotheistic, but the majority of religions humans have practiced since our beginning have been polytheistic.  Is it possible that we have substituted our worship and attention of those many gods to our modern celebrities?
Here's an interesting example: in the ancient Greek myths, Zeus was the most powerful of all the gods, and yet what's the subject of most of the stories about him?  His womanizing!  Zeus was forever portrayed as sneaking out from under the watchful eye of his wife Hera to have sex with mortals.  Weren't those tales of a powerful god cheating on his wife the celebrity gossip stories of their day?  And just like today, these tales both exalted the gods while also pulling them down to our level, in much the same way we laugh at celebrity scandals but usually still wind up rewarding  them with money and fame.  I imagine that the ancient Greeks were probably amused by the stories of Zeus's philandering but they still worshipped him anyway.
 Nowadays, of course,  most people in America worship the Christian Judeo God, but that god is very different from the pagan gods of old, who were usually just more powerful versions of humans.  The Christian Judeo God is believed to be all powerful and perfect, so perhaps our fascination with celebrities provides a fix for that part of our brain that misses those ancient pagan gods with their more human foibles.
This may explain just why so much media is devoted to celebrity stories, (just as it also may explain why I, as an atheist, find celebrity gossip so dull!) and for the most part, the obsession some people have about the private lives of the famous is a fun way to spend one's free time.  Sleazy tabloids are a guilty pleasure, but a harmless one, for the most part.

Ah, read this or eat cotton candy, same thing.

But there is a darker side to this, and that comes in the way people often give more credence to an argument that comes out of the mouth of a celebrity than the would if it came from a normal person.  For example, in 2006 Rhonda Byrne wrote a ludicrous new agey book called THE SECRET that posited that somehow, thinking positive thoughts could bring health and wealth to your door.  Byrne admitted that she got the idea from an earlier book, THE SCIENCE OF GETTING RICH (written by Walter Wattles in 1910), but she promoted it as something new and made a short promotional video to accompany the book.  It was her two appearances on the Oprah Winfrey show that really pushed the book into the stratosphere, making it an enormous best seller world wide as Winfrey gave her seal of approval to this pile of nonsense.  (In an ironic bit of timing, the book came out just two years before the American economy suffered a terrible crash; apparently millions of more people knowing the secret didn't help!)
I have a friend, a smart, college educated woman, who is a follower of Winfrey, and who once tried to defend THE SECRET  to me.  I pointed out that, like all good scams, the book started with something uncontroversial (its good to have a positive view of life) and then extended that into the ridiculous (nothing in life is chance).  I quickly showed that there is no way that THE SECRET could explain terrible events like the Holocaust, or horrible natural disasters.  Every time I almost convinced her, she would fall back on her unshakeable belief that because Oprah Winfrey said, it must be right; like a creationist denying evolution, she refused to accept what seemed to me to be the logical truth.  Even a smart person like her was so in thrall to Winfrey's celebrity that she countenanced no argument against it, a perfect example of celebrity worship gone overboard, in my opinion.  

The pretty face of crazy.

An even more frightening example arises when one considers Jenny McCarthy; once just another minor celebrity, in 2007 she announced that her son was diagnosed with autism two years earlier, and added that she believed that her son's vaccination shots were responsible for his autism.  She noted a scientific study written by Andrew Wakefield in 1998 that made such a claim about vaccinations, ignoring the fact that his findings could never be duplicated by other researchers (in 2010 THE LANCET, the paper that he first published his findings in, officially retracted his study after discovering conflicts of interest in his research and outright falsehoods in his writing; not surprisingly, McCarthy still defended him.)
Now normally, a woman with no scientific education or training would be consigned to the far ends of the internet with the moon landing hoaxers  when she started spouting off  on something like this, but, just because of her celebrity, people listened as she gave more and more interviews and became the spokesperson for the anti science, anti reason, anti vaccination movement.  Sadly,  there are now thousands, perhaps millions of people in this country who believe her.  In doing so, they're reject all reliable research that shows no connection between vaccines and autism, even worse, they're refuting one of the great health stories of the modern age, with sicknesses like  whooping cough and measles eliminated from children's lives.  And the real world consequences of her beliefs are frightening, with a possible resurgence in such illnesses threatening children's health.  Perhaps worst of all, her speaking out has made her more famous than she was before, winning her a coveted spot on the afternoon talk show THE VIEW, where, sadly, she'll be sure to spew her crazy theories even more.  Really, is there anything more depressing than people giving more weight to an argument made by a know nothing celebrity than the counter argument made by scientists and researchers backed up with years of study?  Especially when that argument concerns the health and well being of children?  I don't think so.