What We Can Really Learn from the Rich and Famous, Chapter 1

STARGAZING I want all those kids to do what I do, to look up to me. I want all the kids to copulate me.

—Andre Dawson

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ndre Dawson, nicknamed Awesome Dawson, was a 2010 inductee into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. No wonder he wanted kids to “copulate” him! And they did. Hero worship of an athlete, in and of itself, can be beneficial. From them, we can learn the importance of practice, perseverance, “grit,” and so on. But often, hero worship borders on idolatry. After the death of Diego Maradona at the start of 2021, soccer fans mourned throughout the world. But nowhere was the mourning more intense than in Argentina’s Church of Maradona. Yes, the Church of Maradona has followers all over, from Brazil and Mexico to Spain, Italy, and beyond. The church has its own Ten Commandments, and the tenth commandment is this: “Name your first son Diego”—after the man they worship.3 Whom do you look up to? Whom do you wish to emulate?

Whom do you seek out for guidance? In ancient times, people looked to the stars for direction. We moderns seem to do the same … but we look to living stars.

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Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg

In 2018, Taylor Swift had 112 million followers on Instagram— that’s more than a hundred million followers anxious to hear whatever she had to say. Then Taylor Swift spoke … and people listened! Before that year’s election, Taylor Swift endorsed two candidates in her native Tennessee for the first time. She told her followers to register and vote. According to Vote.org, sixtyfive thousand registrations came in within twenty-four hours!4 The voter site within those same twenty-four hours had 155,940 unique visitors, compared to the usual average of fourteen thousand. As the spokesperson for Vote.org put it, “Thank God for Taylor Swift!”

And Taylor Swift ranked only ninth in popularity on Instagram.

Do you know who has even larger followings? Such distinguished people of letters as Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, Kylie Jenner, and, of course, one of the great thinkers of our time: Kim Kardashian.

What do they know?

What does Taylor Swift got that I ain’t got? Why do people follow her advice when it comes to politics? Yes, there has always been “hero” worship. We have worshipped celebrities for their exceptional achievements in sports and in the arts. But to seek and heed their advice? To emulate them? To see audiences hanging on their every word? Journalist and author Peter Carlson once wrote, “In France, philosophers are celebrities. In the United States, celebrities are philosophers.”5 But why?

Every week People magazine publishes a story about the life of some celebrity, one of the rich and famous. And do you know what you learn if you read that story? That these people have their full share of problems, just like we not-so-rich-and-famous people do.

One is going through a messy divorce, and one has checked herself into a rehab center for drug abuse. You read about failed relationships, alcoholism, talents squandered, and fortunes and families 4

What We Can REALLY Learn from the Rich and Famous

lost through narcissistic excess. These are people you would think have it all—unlimited wealth, incredible fame, sexual magnetism, the homes and the cars and the svelte bodies that we all dream about. We follow their every move on Facebook, Instagram, etc.

And yet when you read about them in more detail, you find that they are living what Henry Thoreau once called “lives of quiet desperation.”6 Do you know whose picture has appeared on the cover of People magazine more than anyone else’s—for a grand total of fifty-five times? The late Diana, Princess of Wales. If you looked at her life from the outside, she had it all: a storybook royal wedding, a prince of a husband, enormous wealth, great beauty. Who would have believed that she was so miserably unhappy in that marriage that she fell victim to bulimia, is rumored to have made a suicide attempt, and was driven to extramarital affairs? People magazine, page by page, week after week, shows us how empty and lonely and desperate the lives of so many of the rich and famous really are, how much they are really missing. And these are the people we look up to?

In December 2020, Joseph Epstein wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal ridiculing First Lady Jill Biden’s title of Dr. and claiming kiddo would be more appropriate for a woman with a doctorate in education.7 A few days later, Heidi Stevens wrote a scathing reply in the Chicago Tribune. In it, she quoted a former professor of hers, Lola Burnham, a journalism professor at Eastern Illinois University.

In America, we have this strange need to tear down people who have put in the effort to delve into and specialize in an academic field, to make themselves experts by their intense study.

We celebrate athletes who rise to the top of their game. We celebrate actors who win awards. And we just love rich people whose 5

Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg

only accomplishment was to inherit wealth … but as a society we seem to have nothing but scorn for people who make reading, observing, studying, experimenting, and, yes, thinking the focus of their professional lives. These days, a huge chunk of our society even scorns those with medical degrees and advanced degrees in the sciences.8 Al Gore got it right when he said, “The planet is in distress, and all of the attention is on Paris Hilton.”9 We would do well to reflect on what Cassius says to Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Caesar.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

It is not fate that rules our lives; we don’t always need to look up to those with fame and wealth as if their superior luck gives them greater wisdom. In the end, our faults and our fates alike are in our own hands.

Remember what Joe Theismann said: “Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.”10

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