Celebrity Birthdays

A staple of the newspaper entertainment section is the listing of entertainment industry notables whose birthday it is. They run them in TV entertainment news shows as well. It's a curious thing to me that anyone should be interested. I try to fight the impulse to look and become invested, and while I have sometimes limited success, you can rest assured that I consider there to be very good reasons for eschewing this odious bit of genuinely useless information.

Probably the only necessary reason is that I don't know these people. If it's Adrian Zmed's birthday, I'm not going to call him with well wishes, send him a card or buy him a gift, because he's not a friend or relation. The nature of entertainment and public relations is that there is a deliberately cultivated false relationship between star and consumer which starts the latter to thinking that something like the star's birthday has some significance. It's all I can do to keep up with the birthdays of people I do know, so that's what I'm going to focus on.

Maybe less significant are the birthdays of the deceased. They make a big fuss over long-dead luminaries like Beethoven or Poe, saying it's this person's eight hundredth birthday or that person's eightieth birthday if they had lived. Call me callous if you will, but they didn't live so I don't see how it's their eightieth birthday. The meaning of age as a number is lost if we don't stop counting after they die. Are there any standards of accomplishment or excellence that will survive the overwhelming urge to feel good? I do wonder.

As bad as it is to make a big deal out of birthdays for the dead, at least they lived once. I'm treading on ground already walked by the great George Carlin here, but it upsets me as much as it seemed to him that the media marks the birthdays of fictional characters. If celebrity birthdays mean little and deceased birthdays nothing, than the birthdays of imaginary characters have less than no significance. While there remain any problems at all in this world, while there is anything left of any meaning to be accomplished, people are getting excited about a cartoon character getting older in our timeline while he remains exactly the same in his own? I sigh as I write this and say, "God help us".