United States, the So-Called \"Cult

¶ … United States, the so-called "cult of celebrity" means that people who become famous gain a popular following regardless of why they may have become famous. Once they achieve popular notoriety, they become influential models for the rest of society; that is why they are recruited my consumer goods manufacturers as celebrity endorsers of their products. The general public seems to value anything said by almost anybody who is famous even if whatever they happen to be famous for has nothing to do with their intelligence or understanding. The current Twitter phenomenon provides a perfect example: disgrace golfer Tiger Woods, troubled actor Charlie Sheen, and television curiosity "Snookie" each has many times the numbers of Twitter followers as most tenured college professors.

The cult of personality is bad enough when it results in admiration for people who have never done anything particularly worthwhile to justify their admiration by others. It is only that much worse when their celebrity status results in their admiration even after they have been publicly exposed as shameless chronic adulterers, drug users and physical abusers of women, and as drunken fools. In the case of sports stars, their public influence may be completely out of line with anything of value they have ever achieved off the playing field: many of them are sought after for speaking engagements despite the fact that they have nothing of particular value to say about anything outside of their sport. In fact, some of them may have little to say of value even about the sport that made them household names.

By far, the worst modern example of the way that superficial fame dwarfs all other considerations may be the case of O.J. Simpson. In the 1970s, he was one of the nation's best National Football League (NFL) players. After his retirement, he went on to a lucrative career as a celebrity sports commentator and as a highly-paid endorser of consumer products such as shaving cream and luggage; he also served on the Board of Directors of a major company. In 1994, he butchered his ex-wife and another person, a waiter named Ron Goldman, apparently in a fit of jealous rage. He was eventually acquitted in the murder trial when the prosecution failed to prove his guilt. However, he was later found responsible for the deaths of both victims in a civil trial for wrongful death. Today, Simpson is serving a term of incarceration in Nevada in connection with his use of a gun to threaten someone over some of his former belongings that the individual had obtained legally after they were sold off to pay part of the court award to the family of one of Simpson's murder victims.

Even before the civil trial where it was determined that he did, in fact, kill two people, there was substantial evidence to any objective observer that Simpson obviously was responsible for the gruesome crime scene at his ex-wife's house. He fled the state the next morning, left traces of his own blood at the murder scene, and even managed to drip his ex-wife's blood into the interior of his vehicle. Meanwhile, as he led California police on a nationally-televised slow-speed highway chase, thousands of supporters came out with signs and banners supporting him. Because he once ran fast holding a ball.

During the time that Simpson was on trial for murder, the public also learned that he had an extensive history of physically abusing his ex-wife for years prior to their divorce and even saw Polaroid pictures of her bloody and swollen face that she had preserved in her safety deposit box for evidence in case Simpson eventually killed her. Instead of rejecting Simpson for being an abuser who killed two people, the public actually embraced him and sought to emulate him even more. News reports showed that many people defended his innocence even with all of the obvious evidence of his guilt. Even worse, sales of anything associated with Simpson jumped so suddenly and so much that white Ford Bronco trucks were being purchased in record numbers, and pet store owners reported that people were purchasing Huskies after asking for an "O.J. dog." Even the expensive shoe manufacturer, Bruno Magli, experienced such a spike in their sales that they were unable to fill the orders until their foreign factories could hire more people to increase production of a product that only a small handful of Americans had ever heard of before. The public first became aware of them only because the prosecution introduced photographs of Simpson wearing the same shoes whose prints were left in the blood at the murder scene.