An important message from the Entertainment Industry
Saturday, February 21st, 2009Seen on Glyn Moody’s Twitter feed:
Posts Tagged ‘culture’
Cretinous celebs and the politics of emotion
Friday, April 4th, 2008Today’s Guardian on Geri Halliwell’s role at the UN:
” … we live in a celebocracy, with one academic recently noting that celebrities tend to “practise the politics of emotion”. Geri’s recent “fact-finding mission to Zambia” is a case in point. Asked what the most memorable part of the “mission” was, Geri cites “seeing light in the children’s eyes when they see they are not forgotten and that people care”.
Yes … this column has a powerful suspicion that the relentless seepage of celebrity into these areas is not a Good Thing, that it dangerously skews debate, that it forces people to engage with political issues in emotional, largely cretinous ways, and that if we don’t start calling them out for it, we’re going to be distilling drinking water from our own urine by 2032.”
A pretty good summary of the problem if you ask me.
(Factoid: “geri” means “diarrhoea” in Japanese.)