This is not the kind of magazine that mostly sells at the supermarket chain checkout. Vanity Fair is extremely rare and expensive real estate in American popular culture. You're in the inside circle of celebrity. By the time you make the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, you are inside the game. It exists to celebrate a certain level of the celebrity culture. What is the very well-attired AOC doing on the cover of Vanity Fair? What does that tell us? Well, as you're looking at Vanity Fair, the actual magazine, you're looking at something that is an artifact of the celebrity culture. And so here you have someone who is a socialist who is on the front of Vanity Fair magazine. She, like Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, identifies as a Democratic Socialist. We're talking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, United States member of Congress from the Bronx elected in the Democratic wave of 2018, and now pretty much the great celebrity symbol of the left wing of the Democratic Party. Now Vanity Fair's December cover has on the cover AOC. For one thing, you have the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. Now, just in the last few days, there've been several interesting developments all along these lines. But from a Christian worldview perspective, what's most important is not just the existence of the cult of celebrity, but the temptations and the use of the cult of celebrity in the world around us. A cult of celebrity can be built around just about anyone. And in the 21st century, add social media, and guess what? Your puppy can be a celebrity, and be so very quickly. It requires just about everything that now marks the 20th century and the 21st. Celebrity in the modern sense, that sense of being famous for being famous, requires mass media and it requires massive communications technologies. There was no way for a celebrity to break through.
If you go back a few centuries, who would have been famous? Certain leaders in this society, most importantly monarchs, kings, queens, emperors, empresses, perhaps a duke or a duchess thrown in here, or perhaps someone involved in the church or other spheres of leadership. When you're looking at fame, you're looking at this kind of attention.
Now, the interesting thing is that throughout most of human history, that wasn't even really possible. But more recently in popular culture, celebrity means just being famous and using that fame for one purpose or another to build a certain cult of celebrity.ĭaniel Boorstin, who was for many years, the Librarian of Congress spoke of the pseudo-event, but he also spoke of the cult of celebrity in such a way as to describe them as "people who were famous only for being famous." That is, someone who has an unusual accomplishment, and celebrity is attached to the celebration of such accomplishment. If you go back in the history of our own culture, celebrity would mean that it's someone who's being celebrated. One of the most common words in our cultural vocabulary is actually something that is fairly new, or at least it's used in a fairly new way, that word would be "celebrity."
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