KEY POINTS:
Let's say you have a troubled colleague. She's recently divorced and you've heard she has a drug problem that has grown worse lately. It's got so bad, in fact, that someone in the office has quietly told you her kids are now living with her ex by court order.
It's the end of the week and you see a cluster of people around her new boyfriend's desk laughing and talking over some video clips of her on his computer, so you stroll over to see what's up. One clip shows her sitting on a bed not wearing much; in another she's in a towel, rambling to the boyfriend behind the camera about guardian angels, or working hard and winning beauty pageants at age 13, referring to herself in the third person. Obviously out of it.
You're just about to walk away in disgust, but there's more. Someone else starts passing around pictures that show her flashing at the camera without any underwear in the back of a car. Another actually shows menstrual stains on her pants.
Has the penny dropped for you yet? Let me change the names to protect the not-so-innocent.
Adnan Ghalib is a paparazzo who has been recently dating Britney Spears, not some colleague. And he has reportedly been trying to sell similar footage to that described above, asking US$2 million ($2.5 million) , reports the PerezHilton website. He's allegedly peddling photos and phone messages, too.
You may not be familiar with the pictures now circulating on the web, but the underwear-less shots of Britney out partying after her divorce are old news to most of us. We have passed them around our collective conscious - and probably didn't walk away then, either.
If this was a colleague, even one we'd never met, it's unlikely we'd be comfortable being a part of watching a boyfriend expose his hurting partner publicly. But if she's a celebrity, all bets are off. Her humanity is replaced by collective ownership, as if it's our right.
In fact, her problems are our gain. Portfolio magazine estimates that even excluding record sales and performances, the "Britney Industrial Complex" generates US$110 to $120 million a year for the economy. The photo agency X17, which has a team trailing her 24/7, estimates that Britney alone accounts for 30 per cent of its revenue.
When magazines put Britney on their cover, especially now that the train-wreck years are generating so much good copy, sales spike by an estimated 33 per cent. That's why her face was slapped on magazine covers 175 times in just 78 weeks, reports Portfolio.
When the Associated Press said that her obituary was already written, even that story became news worldwide.
I'll earn my daily bread from this article too - just as the rest of the media will tout every step of her decline to the sound of heavy dollars piling up in happy corporate ledgers.
Isn't it glorious? My colleagues are doing what they do best: covering midnight trips to the pharmacy with cameras pointed into her car window as she throws out a few slurred sentences to the lenses - all because we buy it. We enjoy their rise, but love their fall more - up to a point. You might watch the mascara-smudged tears of Amy Winehouse as her hubby gets hauled into jail, but you won't sit through the new footage of her freebasing cocaine taken by a friend. At least at first, until you've seen enough of it that this new level of low doesn't faze you either.
How did that line become so elastic in just one generation?
We've always used celebrity to vicariously live other's dramas safely enough away from our own. The difference today is that we have nurtured a gigantic financial machine that's always hungry. The faster it manufactures product, the more we feed the beast on websites and entertainment news shows that are sometimes updated hourly.
No more good old days when JFK's affairs were kept under wraps out of respect for the dignity of his office. Or before that, when Roosevelt's polio-withered legs - even the wheelchairs he used - were never allowed to be photographed.
Congratulations. We are the generation that does close-ups of presidential semen stains on Monica Lewinsky's little blue dress. We are the generation that watches a woman shave her head in despair like a party trick.
We are the generation that watches Britney Spears tell a paparazzo this past week, "You are better off being homeless than being me, sir."
And I am so proud - proud at how much that line has crumbled under the paparazzi economy that's taught us all how to consume somebody else's life.
