[lbo-talk] Celebrity and false idols

[Tom Walker]

Some people seem to be blissfully unaware of the ideological role of the 
celebrity. Or pretend to be for the sake of making some point that is, 
for some reason, more important than THE point. The celebrity is 
promoted specifically  to fuse certain supposedly desirable qualities 
with unrelated ones and therefore to win acceptance for the opinions 
being advanced by association with those supposedly positive qualities. 
X is "brilliant" and backs the war in Iraq. Y is "beautiful" and says 
liberals a bunch of traitors. Z is "trustworthy" and wants to privitize 
social security. Under the criteria establshed by the celebrity 
machiine, calling into question the supposedly good qualities of the 
celebrity is fair game, even when it might not otherwise be appropriate.

In this context, "Ann Coulter" is NOT a woman. She is not even a person. 
She is "personality" and moreover a very special kind of personality -- 
a celebrity whose "claim to fame" is based entirely on having been made 
famous by the celebrity apparatus for the sole purpose of facilitating 
that ideological fusion between her alleged excellences and the 
ultra-reactionary positions she represents.

Coulter's bony knees, like Carol Doda's breasts, are already an 
objectification and, furthermore, an objectification with an agenda. To 
project responsibility for that objectificaton onto the critic is to 
impose a double bind that exempts the ideological process from the very 
critique (on the level of images) it invites and thus enables ideology 
to speak to the masses while forbidding (through a requirement for 
self-censorship) such discourse to its critics. In other words, to 
criticize Coulter, our discourse must be so elevated that it is 
inaccessible to a popular audience. Coulter can be a political whore but 
we must not use the word "whore". Well, fuck that.

The Sandwichman