Tony down in Melbourne asks a good question today. Why do we praise and worship false beauty but not false athletic achievement?
How come it’s abhorrent for an athlete to take performance enhancing drugs for material gain but an actor/actress can have plastic surgery and drugs to improve their looks for material gain!!!!!!
At first thought it sounds like I”m crazy but some of those drugs help athletes recover from injuries quicker, and may not have the long term shock of looking at Michael Jackson or Farrah Fawcett!!
I write and talk a lot about authenticity and I’m constantly struck by paradoxes like this. I think most of us humans have a love-hate relationship with truth. Like Tony, I sometimes feel despair at our celebrity-fixated world and its enthusiasm for what is laughingly called reality TV. I liked that lyric made famous by Baz Luhrmann – about beauty magazines making us feel ugly.
Mind you, I think it’s possible to get too puritanical about this stuff. My niece loves the tawdry gossip about Big Brother et al, and she has her feet planted very firmly on the ground. So I’m going to try not to go all “Why oh Why?” today.
