Celebrities Aren’t Very Important

No matter how much you think about them, they don’t even know you exist.

If you hate someone you’ve never met — someone you’ve seen in a movie or online, a star of music or reality TV — you’re just a little bit crazy. Kanye West, JK Rowling, Ezra Miller, Alec Baldwin, Woody Allen, Joe Rogan, Ellen Degeneres — they get a lot of hate from people who have never met them, who will never meet them, who they have never thought about for one instant. Hating celebrities has supplanted organized sports as the National pastime for easily half the population of the USA. And what has it achieved? Nothing really. I suppose Ellen lost her talk show, for what, being kind of mean to people? She was one of the first openly lesbian celebrities, you know. Big pioneer for gay representation in the media.

The same applies to loving celebrities. It’s crazy. Easier to think about if you apply it to someone from an earlier era, like a teenage girl in the 50s with a photo of Elvis on her nightstand, marked “XOXO” and festooned with lipstick kisses, screaming her head off on the Ed Sullivan Show. That’s who you are when you leap to the defense of Taylor Swift on Twitter. She doesn’t give a fuck. I mean, she digs the money you give her, but she doesn’t even know who you are. Taylor Swift is focused on Taylor Swift. The elevation of certain…