Anti-Martyrs

Jade Goody and her notorious rise and fall from grace is a great example of the human grist to the great mill of our hunger for feeling superior. Celebrities, or rather anti-celebrities like Jade are blasted into the firmament with other stars for nothing other than having an overdeveloped need to be loved. As that cannot happen in the cold light of gossip mags, they satisfy themselves with simply being talked about and seen, as if that were some kind of affirmation of their worthiness. They will not be loved, they can only be gossiped about, and to be gossiped about they must bear all their intimacies and their very souls to me, jasem, marco and all us hungry public. Not only that but they must open up in a way that parodies and caricatures themselves, they must find a niche for their personality like a product on the shelves of a supermarket. They become marketable personality traits... or body parts. And it can all go well, as Jordan (or rather now the more womanly Katie Price) and Jodie Marsh have shown they can walk the line without falling... but always, periodically we hunger for blood. It used to be politicians who would be devoured by a public baying for moral and personal rectitude, but now we have created figures who seem to exist quite singularily as statues to be toppled for this very purpose. We are bared their histories and characters just so that when they go astray (which they ALWAYS will, even if it is largely fabricated), we may watch them fall spectacularly, and so that we may ourselves feel like better, more upright individuals in our denouncing of others' failures. It is the contemporary incarnation of the Witch-Hunt urge in human nature. Edification and assurance of the moral security of the masses through the ritualised burning of individuals who stop being humans, and become simply representatives of one or more negative traits which, through their burning, are cleansed temporarily from the conscience of the whole group.

Are Z-list celebrities anti-martyrs? Do they symbolically die on the stake in order that we may not face our shortcomings, in order that we may not scrutinize our lives, in order that we may not have anything to look up to as was the case with martyrs, but indeed only have things to look down upon?