So, yesterday alone, two ridiculous non-news stories lit up the sky like a flame. (Fame!) First off, young Falcon Heene, whose family had previously appeared on a reality show called Wife Swap (a show, may I add, that I would gladly perform impromptu ocular surgery on myself with a salad fork or clothes hanger to avoid seeing), upped his family's fame-quotient--FQ--by at least a few orders of magnitude by not climbing aboard a weather balloon and launching it, leading authorities, newmannequins and a bored news-watching populace to follow the unboyed flight as they have never followed a space shuttle launch. (Except for the ones that went boom.) Then Meghan McCain, daughter of failed presidential candidate and oldest man in the world John McCain, tweeted a picture of herself at home with an Andy Warhol biography and her massive dinners; the ensuing uproar--very little of it actually negative--putatively upset McCain, who threatened to close her Twitter account (a worse fate cannot be imagined for Western Civilization), but cooler heads prevailed and she ultimately backed down from this course of action. Meghan's FQ, which sank into the toilet after her father's electoral ass-kicking and has languished there since, shot into the blogosphere--sorry, the stratosphere--and could well result in a Fox News show featuring her bodacious ta-tas (™O'Really) trenchant commentary.

            Mary Elizabeth Williams penned an intriguing inquiry into the reasons for this attention-whoring in Salon, in which she suggests that in trying economic times like ours, achieving some measure of fame, not unlike buying a lottery ticket, seems to offer a way, however unlikely, out of monetary difficulties. (Williams also mentions the Gosselins, Rachel Bilson and Tom Delay, none of whom I can contemplate without spending a few minutes retching in my mouth, so with respect to their substantial absence from this essay: you're welcome.) Perhaps it is the desire for money that motivates these bids for fame, but I think that the desire for fame is more a priori than that; many people are not seeking fame because being famous will make them rich, they are seeking fame because they want fame for its own sake. Nor is this a new phenomenon, peculiar to our cash-strapped age. Andy Warhol--and hey, look whose biography McCain was reading (no, seriously, look away from the massive dinners, and check out the book) (do not stare directly into the dinners! do not let the dinners hypnotize you!)--famously suggested that in the future (and we are now living in the future, hence the flying cars) everyone would have 15 minutes of fame. I would suggest that fame, in and of itself, the adoration--or calumny--of masses of your fellow naked apes, constitutes a sufficient motivation for seeking fame.

             For those whose self-worth, indeed sense that they exist, depends on the regard of others (coughcoughbloggerscoughcough) (I post, therefore I am) (am what?), money is a secondary consideration. Being seen, being known, being sought-after makes you real. Confidence a little shaky? Show us your tits! Instead of a plastic bead necklace, we'll give you the top search spot on Google for awhile--awhile being the key word, because to keep our attention, to keep your FQ up there, you have to keep being new and interesting, and we are rapidly bored. The maw of our interest is vast and voracious, and grinds not only exceedingly fine but also exceedingly fast, and once you're swallowed, it's a struggle, a much greater struggle, to come back. Being shat out and making your way back to the mouth takes time. (And when you get there, you're still shit.) Next time you'd better show some nip, Meghan. The next time a weather balloon goes up, Heenes, there'd better be an adorable kid dangling in plain view underneath it. Gosselins, a little knife fight might keep you in the public eye; I am, as always, just sayin'.

            Fame also acts as an antidote to thoughts of mortality. Those kids in the High School Of the Performing Arts hit on a home truth: we know that our bodies will die, but we believe that our dreams, our words, our actions, need not. In Tim Rice's lyrics to Jesus Christ, Superstar, the apostles boozily sing about this very thing: "Always hoped that I'd be an apostle / Knew that I would make it if I tried / Then when we retire we can write the gospels / So they'll still talk about us when we've died." (Remember Tim Rice? He made Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber not suck.) (Is he as famous as Sir Andy? No, sir, he is not.) (From which we learn: writing crappy music makes you more famous than writing excellent lyrics, and writers are underpaid.) (We learn that, even more vividly, from the biography of Trotsky, too: Lenin got beatified, Trotsky got a pickax in the brain.) This immortality is illusory, though: one day even the Clash, even George Carlin, even Shakespeare will be forgotten. Homer's words survive, but we know nothing of Homer, and one day even his words will be gone. Your words and songs die more slowly, but they die too. And if you are a reality-show star, the reason for your fame will no doubt disappear long before you yourself in your very own corpus do. But for a moment, when everyone is talking about you, you feel immortal, important, not one of the common run. You're famous.

            If this type of thing seems to be happening more these days, it's because we have more ways of becoming famous, and the barriers to entry, as economists say, are lower, or nonexistent. Back when Warhol first made his prescient pronouncement, to be famous you generally had to have actually achieved something, in some field. Sure, Truman Capote got on talk shows in the '60s because he was the bitchiest man on the face of the earth, and would say pretty much anything about anyone, but he also wrote In Cold Blood. Sure Gore Vidal called William F. Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" on live television and Buckley responded, "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered," but both men were brilliant writers and Buckley more or less invented modern conservatism. (I know, but still, it was an achievement.) Okay, there were a few people--Kitty Carlisle, ubiquitous game show guest, springs to mind--whose job title seemed to be "Celebrity," but they were indeed few. And even Kitty Carlisle had been in the Marx Brothers' A Night At the Opera, as well as actual operas, and had been educated at the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics.

            Not so in this our exciting fast-paced world of the future. To be famous, you need not write well, or act well or sing well. You need, in fact, do none of these things at all. The collective attention is like lightning, and strikes where it will. Just as lightning may ignore the perfect conductor of a lightning rod to pass through 20 feet of insulation and strike a woman in her bed, fame may strike a worthless sack of clichéd illogical shit like Dan Brown or an original and brilliant novelist like Michael Chabon. Megan Fox's face has launched a thousand blog posts; Emma Thompson's has not. (And just by the way, I think Thompson's face eminently more attractive, but I'm a little queer that way.) (And no, that wasn't me coming out.) (But if I did, it would be fabulous.) A Top Chef winner can cook; what exactly is it that a Big Brother winner can do? And our Kitty Carlisles, our famous-because-they're-famous celebs, are legion. The Gosselins and the Octo-mom...have a lot of kids?  Bravo, you have working reproductive organs. Paris Hilton...inherited a lot of money? Big congrats, you chose the right family to be born into. (I tried to major in Inherited Wealth in college, but those classes were always closed.) And the Heenes...have a rather laissez faire attitude with respect to personal safety (and let's see if natural selection doesn't catch up with you on that) and parental supervision? Hm. Interesting. Let's watch them on a TV show until we get bored and are only reminded of them by a possibly-fake incident of parental neglect.

            Emily Dickinson, as so often, said it best: "Fame is a bee. / It has a song— / It has a sting— / Ah, too, it has a wing. " (Who couldn't love a woman who used so many dashes?) When fame flies off, the once-famous chase it ever more desperately. Like a dealer's stock in trade, fame's first taste is free; subsequent transactions are more expensive. And in the embrace of this drug fame, you may indeed feel immortal, but just like the rest of us, you've got 70 or 80 years. For me, I won't be spending any more time of mine on storm-chasers' progeny.

            I might go check out Meghan McCain again, though. What can I say? It's a fallen world, and I'm weak. And those? Are some massive dinners.