Celebrating Inequality
By GEORGE PACKER : New York Times: May 19,2013
THE Roaring ’20s was the decade when modern celebrity was invented in America. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” is full of magazine spreads of tennis players and socialites, popular song lyrics, movie stars, paparazzi, gangsters and sports scandals — machine-made by technology, advertising and public relations. Gatsby, a mysterious bootlegger who makes a meteoric ascent from Midwestern obscurity to the palatial splendor of West Egg, exemplifies one part of the celebrity code: it’s inherently illicit. Fitzgerald intuited that, with the old restraining deities of the 19th century dead and his generation’s faith in man shaken by World War I, celebrities were the new household gods.
What are celebrities, after all? They dominate the landscape, like giant monuments to aspiration, fulfillment and overreach. They are as intimate as they are grand, and they offer themselves for worship by ordinary people searching for a suitable object of devotion. But in times of widespread opportunity, the distance between gods and mortals closes, the monuments shrink closer to human size and the centrality of celebrities in the culture recedes. They loom larger in times like now, when inequality is soaring and trust in institutions — governments, corporations, schools, the press — is falling. [Read more]
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We are living at a time that is called the Dark Age by one Religious Philosophy. The Vedic era saw the age of the Truth and Light. Darkness never prevailed because it was never fed. In this particular dark age the fountain of Truth and Morality have dried up.The pillars of society have all perished due to the inequitable distribution of the taxed dollars.All and sundry are tainted by greed and they soon become the corrupted in all societies. The Law becomes weaker every day and society sinks into a deeper abysmal pit of no return.The Devil has possessed all the light is nowhere to be seen.There is absolute darkness everywhere! The time has come to call on the name of the saviour if you want to be healed and to be saved of the evil and inequities of Satan.