The Year of Charitainment

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Verily, then, Jessica Simpson traveled to Kenya not for her sins but for mine. When a pop star inserts herself into weighty world matters, she may seem ridiculous, but only because we are too--because she has reminded us that we spend so much time on trivia that we ignore matters of life and death to other people. Even matters of our own life and death. We think about stem-cell research because Michael J. Fox or Nancy Reagan talks about it. We put off colon-cancer checkups or mammograms, and then get them because Katie Couric reminds us to. Think about that one: the specter of our own slow, painful deaths is not itself enough for us to get a simple test. But the nice lady from the Today show tells us to do it, and suddenly we're there.

Of course, after the cancer screening, there's always a heart attack to worry about. And Parkinson's. And Alzheimer's. And then all the ails of the rest of the world. Who needs my help more--the New Orleanians or the Kashmiris? Oppressed Christians in China or battered women in Minnesota? MS or MD? If I give to AIDS patients, am I leaving breast-cancer sufferers, starving children and land-mine victims to die?

It is easy to say that people don't help others because they're unaware of what's going on in the world. But maybe the problem is that they're too aware. In a world of endless woes, you can be overwhelmed into inaction. Or you can make, at some level, an arbitrary choice. That is where celebrities come in, because there is no phenomenon more arbitrary than celebrity. They are attention filters, the human equivalent of throwing a dart at a map. A pretty face and a famous name are a convenient excuse to focus on one problem in the midst of a thousand equally unignorable others. To give to Tibet and not Africa may seem callous. But to pick Richard Gere over Bono--that's just show biz.

It has been said that celebrities serve the same function that ancient gods did, but there is a difference. People created gods to explain things--lightning, death--that they could not understand. We worship celebrities because they're simple focal points in a world in which we have too much information. As Witness preaches--See It, Film It, Change It--the most valuable commodity in ending misery is not money or even will but attention. And attention is the celebrigod's lightning bolt. If the most fatuous celebrity plants himself near a problem, he may embarrass himself. But at least someone will see it. And someone will film it. And a few of us may, little by little, be moved to change it.