Baffling Celebrities -- the Spears Lohan Hilton Boggery

Among the many mysteries of today's existence is the constant celebrity of certain people, three of them in particular, who all happen -- or maybe just don't happen -- to be women.  These three are Brittany Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton.

To be famous is generally thought to be a very desirable thing, though we can never expect it to be a reward for any really meritorious action.  In fact, it's almost the opposite, going by the huge numbers of  criminals who are as well-known as anyone else.    But when, out of the teeming billions of people on earth, some one person becomes  so famous  that the purveyors of the news feel that they can't let a day go by without reporting on his or her most recent actions, even of the most insignificant kind, and for no obvious reason, things seem to have gotten especially out of hand..

I first became aware of this phenomenon when I was young, long before the eras of the Internet and of TV. I noticed that the news couldn't get enough of Frank Sinatra, and I was totally baffled by this, because he was just a pop singer -- not my idea then or now of an achievement always worthy of note.   But at least he was a singer, and as it turned out, for very long time afterward, too.

In the same era, or maybe a little later, Arnold Palmer, over and above all other sports figures, got the same kind of constant attention that was incomprehensible to me,  because playing golf then as now was not high on  my list of the great, great human activities.   But at least he apparently won a lot of golf tournaments, for a few years anyway.

Occupying their niche in today's world, though for reasons that are even less visible to my probably badly impaired vision and are in fact invisible are Spears, Lohan, and Hilton.

Early in the Internet Age I noticed that whoever reported on current happenings for AOL thought that right up there with the really important stuff were the doings of someone named Brittany Spears, day after day after months and years.   Yet right now I can't tell you what Brittany Spears did, and still does, to merit so much mention, and her face, even if I saw a picture, never did register on my brain.

I do know what Lindsay Lohan has done.   She has been in several movies, one of which I may even have seen, and she does have the merit of having a quite noteworthy face that is, however, completely out of tune with the wackiness of her actions.   But none of that explains why we have to get a day to day account of her every move.

Paris Hilton's face is a blank to me, too, as are the reasons for her being able to stay so relentlessly in the public eye.    She is most often spoken of in the media as being a "socialite," though today I saw a reference to her as being an "inheritress," presumably of the hotels.  But is that an achievement worthy of the constant reports on her actions?   In fact, my impression is that she is more familiar with the interiors of cop cars than she is with social salons.

These three ladies do have that one common denominator.   They are all adept at getting into regular scrapes with the law, especially after they've felt moved to alter the normal states of their minds.   But  somehow that still doesn't offer any clue to the solving of the mystery of their renown.