The Doctor is IN:
Dear Doctor Jeff - When Heath Ledger died, I am embarrassed to say that I actually cried. Seeing him in The Dark Knight makes me sad all over again. I read the tabloids and watch E! and I think I'm like a lot of people who are little obsessed with the rich and famous. What is that all about?
-Sad in San Diego
Dear Sad -
A couple years ago I read that Princess Diana’s son, Prince William, told an interviewee that he liked apple cider. Within two weeks, apple cider sales in England rose 26% ! Which leads us to celebrity worship/celebrity scorn. Flip sides of the same coin. Where does this come from?
Most of us, early on, were taught to look outside of ourselves for our inner value or worth. Thus, instead of cultivating self-esteem, we cultivated something we were told was more important… others’ esteem. How others thought of us became more important than what we thought of ourselves.
Looking outside ourselves puts an unnatural amount of attention on others and how to act. This explains the craziness of a celebrity’s endorsement of products. By association, if apple cider’s good enough for a prince, and he’s wealthy and royalty well then by association, so am I. Apple cider’s what I drink, too. Lastly, this also leads to a brutal scorn heaped onto celebrities involved in scandals. How the mighty have fallen. Either celebrities are better than us, and we look up to them… or they’re worse than us, and we look down. Both up and down are out of balance.
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2 comments:
Hello Doctor,
I remember the days when I use ot imitate Tony Montana from Brian Depalma's Scarface.
"In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women"
Love it.
The good old days.
Thanks for bringing back the memories, Doctor.
Cinema is good medicine.
The power of cinema.
Years ago, Granta magazine out of the UK dedicated an entire issue to the excessive mourning over Princess Diana. Mentioned was a woman in London who was so broken up over the death of this woman she had never met that, daily and without fail, she'd come to her desk at work and weep uncontrollably for hours on end about "poor Di."
It lasted for, wait for it, six months. She was of course, as they say in Britain, given the order of the boot. Or, as is sometimes known hereabouts, a healthy dose of reality.
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