Media Gossip

With his usual insight and clarity, Robert Scheer points out the absurdity of the media gossip that portrays celebrities and the powerful as “just like the rest of us,” but he misses the salient point (“Civic Life Rots While Gossip Rides High,” Commentary, Aug. 19).

The powerful and the celebrated--the people who make laws, publish news, shape opinion and provide diversion for the rest of us--are universally possessed by the bizarre delusion that they are just like the rest of us. The sad soul sitting in a trailer park knows far better than to think that she’s in any respect “just like Cher,” but the celebrities and oligarchs themselves prate endlessly through the media about what ordinary, hard-working, aw-shucks kinds of everyday people they are.

In the bad old days of frank aristocrats and overt robber barons, law, guilt or noblesse oblige placed the burden of tending the public garden on the well-strapped shoulders of the privileged. But in a society in which the wealthy and the powerful imagine themselves “just like the rest of us,” no one is privileged, no one claims the power or the responsibility for tending to our decaying commonweal, and there is nothing to talk about except who is doing or being done by whom.

J.L. JONSSON

Long Beach