We are witnessing an epochal moment in human history where men with undeserved power, poor self-preservation instincts and no morality are falling to the forces of popular judgment. This phenomenon has been recurring all over the world lately and although future historians may give it a grander-sounding title, for now let’s call it the Great Celebrity Implosion of the 21st-century.
What are the constants of this phenomenon?
1. A prolonged psychological unraveling of a celebrity in full view of television or photographic cameras, the watching of which qualifies as more macabrely entertaining that any produced work by the celebrity;
2. Big trouble with the law;
3. The grinding into action of a heavy-horsepower public relations machine that attempts to minimise the damage of, or deny the very existence of, the original source of scandal and infamy;
4. A diarrheaic flow of hostility that for some unknown reason fixes on the target of world Jewry and its evil machinations.
That last trait would be disturbing in a single occurrence, but as a repeat performance by famous and supposedly image-minded figures, it hints at darker civilisational disturbances on the horizon.
First there was Mel Gibson, all-in-one foe of the Los Angeles traffic police, women’s shelters and the reformist tendencies of the current Church of Rome.
Then came Julian Assange, a celebrity by any measure, who has interrupted packing his bags for Stockholm to angrily ring up Private Eye magazine in London and assail its critical coverage of him by suggesting a defamation conspiracy led by the Guardian and its supposedly “Jewish” editors. (Assange had already employed a known Holocaust denier who feeds the dictator of Belarus WikiLeaked information on that luckless country’s political opposition.)
Up next was Charlie Sheen, who lost his ridiculous CBS sitcom and $2 million-per-episode paycheck for radio rant in which he referred to his boss by his alleged original Hebrew name. (In fairness to Sheen, he seems to have fashioned a convincing case against any dark motive in doing so, or so Tablet magazine says. His is a hieroglyphic nuttiness that we should leave to others to decipher.)
Now comes John Galliano, a fashion designer who looks like Salvador Dali, shaves like Guy Fawkes and dresses like a bee-keeping Diane Keaton and yet whom sensible people everywhere assumed would behave himself unto the grave.
Galliano was captured recently by the British tabloid newspaper The Sun as telling one horrified patron of the Parisian bar La Perle, “I love Hitler… People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers, would all be f****** gassed.”
Anti-Semitism is a crime in France, much like wearing white after Labor Day is to those who had followed this strange man’s career up until now. Or former career: Galliano’s employer, Christian Dior, has just sacked him.
The New York Times rule of dubious trendspotting — three of anything over any span of time is a pattern — is slightly outdone here by both number and frequency . One wonders if the Great Celebrity Implosion isn’t really some baleful M. Night Shyamalan-style buildup to the coming apocalypse.