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The recent rash of celebrity deaths has rekindled the obvious statement that we as Americans are obsessed with celebrity. How can it be that thousands of us - and many of us, unwillingly - tune our ears and eyes to every tidbit about these celebrities that slip across our televisions and computer screens?

Personally, I hadn't thought a lot about Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon or Billy Mays for a long time. Their sudden deaths and the subsequent media saturation has brought them to my mind repeatedly throughout the last week. I'm one of those people who purposely avoid celebrity worship. Still, I am drawn to the tributes, memoirs, and even the parodies that inundate the airwaves.

Celebrities embody for us the modern "American dream" of doing what we want, when we want, and how we want. When we see a person like Michael Jackson, who in many ways turned back the hands of time to re-capture his lost childhood, or Farrah Fawcett, who embodied the release of our sexuality as teenagers, something in us clicks and moves these people into a place of adulation in our hearts and minds. They represent a place of escape from our mundane lives, and provide a living, breathing "get-away" for us when the regularities we live under start to pull us down.

Celebrities also give us a chance to "gossip" without the ramifications of verbal backlash that occurs when we talk about people we personally know. Michael Jackson personally could care less if my neighbor thought his acquittal to child abuse charges years ago were bogus. Everyone loved Farrah, and everyone made fun of Billy. Being a celebrity brings with it an expected level of fans and enemies, and so there's no problem with me mouthing off about them. Somehow, celebrities provide us with that cathartic "need" to talk about people without losing personal friends and angering family members.

Celebrities give lonely people "friends" who they can control and manipulate in their own worlds. They give kids heroes (right or wrong) to emulate, and they give teenagers someone to "whisper vague obscenities" to as they construct their fantasies. On the positive, they have a platform to do good from that most of us only dream of. Because of our obsession, celebrities have the opportunity to change lives around the world. We give them difference, and listen to them (whether we should or not). In this way, the obsession can be used to change lives - not consume them with worthless make believe or jealousies.

Despite myself, I too find the obsessions with celebrities, their lifestyles, their loves and their deaths near impossible to ignore. And when successive successful people succumb to the final date with death that we all must face, perhaps their demise somehow reminds me that at the end of the day, we're all people. That fuels my preoccupation because maybe, just maybe, someday I'll be the object of celebrity gossip and fan adulation. Who knows? I could obsess about it for a little while ...

Learn more about this author, Gina Lawton.
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