George Packer’s Togo Peace Corps memoir is known as “In the Village if Whining” but if you didn’t know that you’d think he was a sharp, insightful person (which he is, I’m just being mean and snarky) … but this op-ed whining about celebrity culture, from a person who himself is a celebrity, strikes me (not a celebrity) as self-indulgent.  You have to openly say: “Heck, I did have the chance to stay working in West Africa and remain a non-celebrity my whole life, but I decided I would rather become a celebrity myself.”  Packer seems to offer no insight into how someone like himself ( a celebrity) should act (with abnegation, instead of writing yet another op-ed in the world’s most read newspaper?).  If he was putting his money where his mouth is, he’d give Togo a second chance and announce (at Davos?) that he was going to spend three years in a Togolese village and NOT write anything about it, not blog about it, not tell amusing stories about it (why sing for a supper that celebrities are paying for?) and be cranky, hot, and miserable.

This new kind of celebrity is the ultimate costume ball, far more exclusive and decadent than even the most potent magnates of Hollywood’s studio era could have dreamed up. Their superficial diversity dangles before us the myth that in America, anything is possible — even as the American dream quietly dies, a victim of the calcification of a class system that is nearly hereditary.As mindless diversions from a sluggish economy and chronic malaise, the new aristocrats play a useful role. But their advent suggests that, after decades of widening income gaps, unequal distributions of opportunity and reward, and corroding public institutions, we have gone back to Gatsby’s time — or something far more perverse. The celebrity monuments of our age have grown so huge that they dwarf the aspirations of ordinary people, who are asked to yield their dreams to the gods: to flash their favorite singer’s corporate logo at concerts, to pour open their lives and data on Facebook, to adopt Apple as a lifestyle. We know our stars aren’t inviting us to think we can be just like them. Their success is based on leaving the rest of us behind.

“The rest of us?”  Yeah right.  Just another working class writer at The New Yorker BFF with Tina and Ariana… PS Packer doesn’t seem to recall that in the 1920s plenty of people were choosing a non-celebrity “lifestyle”… Emma Goldman RIP…. via Inequality and the Modern Culture of Celebrity – NYTimes.com.