Oops…she’s done it again

I’m writing this column on Wednesday morning, anxiously waiting out the results from Montana… I’m writing this column on Wednesday morning, anxiously waiting out the results from Montana and Virginia, and breathing the clean, crisp, Santorum-free – uh, take that any way you like – air of Pittsburgh. So why am I thinking about Britney Spears?

Because I am, I can’t help it, it’s not like I want to think about her and K-Fed and their standard-issue, boring, “irreconcilable differences” divorce; I just am. I worry about her; I worry about him; I worry about Sean Preston, and that other kid whose name I always forget, growing up in a broken – albeit extraordinarily wealthy – home.

Of course, worrying about Britney’s kids didn’t used to be one of my problems. I, like millions of other Americans, watched in a strange, gleeful, ecstatic horror just a few months ago as Sean P. went through a troublesome stage that Britney later referred to as her “oops” moments with him. These incidents legendarily involved Sean P. falling off his high chair, Sean P. being strapped into his baby seat incorrectly and Sean P. nearly being eaten by K-Fed’s pet crocodile that Federline wrestles every night before he goes clubbing. Hah! I made that last one up. But seriously, that kid’s troubles were legion and we, the teeming masses, the judgmental crowd, the ironically amused, we could not get enough of that kid nearly being injured or taken away by social services.

I blame the Lindbergh baby. Before that little tyke ever got kidnapped, children were only famous if they were the Dauphin or something like that. The Lindbergh baby made it hot to be a kidnapped baby. In fact, I like to think that maybe it was his kidnapping and the explosive atmosphere around the case that planted the seeds for today’s media-driven, celebrity-obsessed world.

For anyone not familiar with the Lindbergh baby, it’s a pretty basic story. He was the son of Charles Lindbergh, he was born, then kidnapped in 1932 and eventually he was found dead, despite the payment of several ransom notes. Eventually a German immigrant named Bruno Hauptmann was convicted of kidnapping the baby and, despite a lot of suspicion over whether or not he did it, he was executed. Oddly enough, several people claim to be that little baby, and that the corpse found was that of another child. One woman even wrote a book titled, endearingly enough, “I Located Myself, the Lindbergh Baby, Alive.” Apparently she won’t let the fact that she is of a different gender stop her from telling the truth.

You can see echoes of this case everywhere nowadays, and not just in the case of little Sean P. Look at JonBenet Ramsey and at how disgustingly fascinated we were and – as the recent appearance of John Mark Carr proved – still are with the sad case of this murdered kid. Fame is strangely linked with scandal, the two seemingly feeding off of each other in some bizarrely symbiotic way, like Spider Man’s black costume or Sin and Death in Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” We are drawn to the tawdry; we are deer in the lightning-bulb-paparazzi, nipple-slipped, spectacular, flashing, nightclub headlights.

The Lindbergh baby, however, created the modern idea of fame for no actual reason. Why was the kid famous? Because he was kidnapped? No, lots of kids get kidnapped. Fine, maybe not “lots” but, you know, enough. He was famous because of who his father was. Fame was passed down to him like it was a gene.

And this state of fame is a modern one, a new way to view celebrities as even less of a person and more of a construct. If the Lindbergh baby trial was really one of the trials of the century, it surely owes the distinction to this fact. The baby was secondary to the father: With this event the celebrity could be seen as human, as a figure of grief and not triumph. The kid didn’t matter: Everyone just wanted to see the famous parents grieve like it was a movie and their grief would vanish when the cameras did.

That’s the part inside all of us that we understand the least. What is it that draws us to seeing people collapse? Is it just envy or is it something else? If you look at Britney, I think the answer becomes clearer. Celebrities transform themselves into totally different creatures. They are constructed images that are barely human. When they screw up with their kid, or get divorced or have their child kidnapped, we suddenly see them not as more human but even less human, and even more of a public figure. Hollywood makes stories in three acts, so it’s natural to desire to see that story structure in real life. With celebrities, they’re so removed from us already that it’s easy to put them into whatever scenario we want. And then we can watch them collapse or witness them in a starring role in the greatest comeback ever.

Speaking of comebacks, the Democrats just took the Senate.

Why wait? Send hate mail to kjs34@pitt.edu.