Mad Icon Disease
Belief:
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Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
Don't Fear the Deficit Bogeyman
John Miller
DrugReporter:
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Jim Hightower
Environment:
White House Garden Won't Make Up for Obama's Nomination of Pesticide Lobbyist for US Chief Agriculture Negotiator
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Food:
Don't Be Scared of Food: Are We Being Needlessly Hysterical About Food Safety?
David E. Gumpert
Health and Wellness:
47,000 Women Could Die As a Result of the New Mammogram Guidelines
George Lakoff
Immigration:
Republican Playbook on Immigration Debate Long on Emotions, Short on Facts
Mary Giovagnoli
Media and Technology:
The Memory Scrub About Why Ft. Hood Happened Is Almost Complete ... If It Weren't for Archives
Mark Ames
Movie Mix:
Disney Apocalypse: Why 2012 Sucks
Alexander Zaitchik
Politics:
White House's Ties to Health Care Industry Deeper Than Visitor Records Show
Daniela Perdomo
Reproductive Justice and Gender:
Why Can't We Look Away From Sarah Palin?
Vanessa Richmond
Rights and Liberties:
Whatever Happened to the CIA Black Sites?
David Corn
Sex and Relationships:
Hot Mormon Muffins and Models for Jesus: What's With All the Sexy Christians?
Liz Langley
Take Action:
G-20 Meetings: Nothing Much Happened in the Suites, and There Was Too Much Punch in the Streets
Laura Flanders
Water:
Poseidon's Financial Shell Game: Why Is a Private Desalination Plant Asking for Public Money?
Peter Gleick
World:
Is Obama Following in the Footsteps of Bill Clinton?
Jeff Cohen
My DNA strand has a bunch of typos in it. As a result I'm inattentive and nervous. On the upside I treat this for free by using Denial and Avoidance. I don't watch the news for days, can't tell you the names of some of my relatives or what many of my colleagues actually do for a living.
I can tell you where Jackie Chan went to school (the China Drama Academy), that David Lynch hates cooking smells (he won't allow food to be cooked in his house) and that before he became America's best chat catalyst, Bill Maher appeared in the movie, "Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death." I pick up this stuff like a pop culture Swiffer, while real events slide off my brain like it was Scotchguarded. As Oscar Wilde, a celeb I could discuss for days, once said, "Through Art and Art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence."
In other words, real life sucks; movies are much better.
This belief puts me in the running for a new mental disorder -- Celebrity Worship Syndrome, or "mad icon disease," which was discovered recently by Dr. John Maltby of the University of Leicester. Dr. Maltby's findings appeared in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, and you want to believe him just for being in such a fabulously titled publication.
CWS comes in three levels: mild, which means you like to talk about your favorite celebrities with your many real-life friends; moderate, which means you believe you have "an intense personal type relationship" with a celebrity; or severe, whose sufferers, Dr. Maltby says, "feel they have a special bond with their celebrity, believe their celebrity knows them and are prepared to lie or even die for their hero." The technical term for level three is "ca-rrrrazy."
This study doesn't just consider celebs of J-Lo level ubiquity, either; many people in the study professed unseemly attachments to one of Tony Blair's cabinet ministers.
In a story in the London Daily Telegraph, Dr. Maltby says that this interest in celebrities is not just entertainment for some people but has "a clinical component," and is probably due to the dominance of TV and the breakdown of family and community; people are replacing the real people in their lives with celebrities.
Of course the severe loony-stalker level of CWS is deranged but it's hard to believe that merely liking to talk about stars or even a star requires the label of "disease." And honestly, if family, community and reality were all they were cracked up to be there wouldn't be a need for celebrities in the first place; you'd be so entertained by the people across from you on the couch you wouldn't have a TV. Let's examine the facts:
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| More News and Analysis: | ||
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Republican Playbook on Immigration Debate Long on Emotions, Short on Facts Immigration: Senate Republicans have “thoughtfully’ provided immigration advocates with their strategy for opposing immigration reform in 2010. By Mary Giovagnoli, Immigration Impact. November 27, 2009. |
Lou Dobbs Suddenly Loves Illegal Immigrants? Clearly He's Eyeing Public Office Politics: Dobbs said he now favors the very legalization process for unauthorized immigrants that he's long derided as a brain-dead "amnesty". By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. November 26, 2009. |
Whatever Happened to the CIA Black Sites? Rights and Liberties: The CIA ordered its secret prisons closed, but lawyers for terrorism suspects want them preserved as possible evidence -- and the CIA won't say what's going on. By David Corn, Mother Jones. November 26, 2009. |
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