The toxic seeds of John Galliano's fall - Celebrity - Salon.com: "I'm tired of pretending I'm not special anymore." -- Charlie Sheen
It has been a red-letter week for the grand-mal celebrity meltdown.
The Bush administration took an imperialist stance, rooted in delusions of American exceptionalism -- i.e., America decided to view itself as Charlie Sheen. Because of America's tiger blood and Adonis DNA, the U.S. was too special to be understood by any normal country, so we decided to do strafing runs in our underwear before we had our first cup of coffee. Karl Rove's secretive, post-reality, ideological hubris resulted in a credibility gap that the American political system has yet to recover from. Dick Cheney's personal cornered-rat paranoia resulted in policies that ushered in a preemptive war on a sovereign nation -- and ever since, we are a nation that debates the merits of torture and lives in fear. Neoconservative fiscal policies ushered in the fastest, most balls-to-the-wall economic calamities that have ever happened in America. And American life, as a result, took on the morose character of the Bush administration: We became isolated, paranoid and morally bankrupt and ultimately broke -- a dry-drunk nation, in other words, that had totaled its car and lost all daddy's money.
Exploding stars seem to have the same illness shared by oligarchs, plutocrats, dictators, tyrants and serial killers. For the sake of discussion, let's call it Extreme Morbid Elitist Narcissism (X-MEN). It turns people into Superheroes that need to fight their biggest and only deserving enemy: themselves.
There is no comfort in perceiving yourself as being so exceptional as to be utterly divorced from the family of man. The inner poverty of having no common language of human experience -- nobody bigger than you, in your own mind, no equal or superior on earth or in heaven -- is deadly. To think of yourself as glaringly exceptional -- whether you are a designer or an actor or a country -- is to invite the most grievous form of hellish isolation. The super-elite person/class/nation who hates him/her/itself must punish and humiliate itself in the absence of a thunderbolt-hurling Zeus that will do it.