“Why Celebrities Go Bad” was the head on Maclean’s Michael Jackson story and it seems to me exactly wrong, like a Dog Bites Man story.

Celebrities don’t go bad, they are bad. It’s the job description.

Most stories “analyzing” the bad-celeb outbreak (Martha, Kobe, Paris) took that tack: something gone wrong. “Rich pedophilic chic is growing because . . . it’s the one taboo left,” wrote Frank Rich in The New York Times. In fact, you could compile a long list of the one taboo left, and it would be incomplete since taboos tend to be unspoken and hard to spot. Many societies think only theirs is taboo-free. On CBC Newsworld, Andrew Younghusband said bad celebs make “us” feel “morally superior” to them.

Most commentators assumed that division between our world and the bad one of Michael Jackson (“allowing us to seem pretty normal by comparison”), though Tina Brown fretted in The Washington Post about things changing so that, “The world is now as surreal as he is.”

My disagreement is that I think it’s the “normal” world inhabited by most people that is surreal, and that seems weirder by comparison. It is striking how much of what could be called perversion and delusion fills the lives of “ordinary” people, from the harmlessness of, say, cross-dressing through obsession to profound cruelty.

Take a current hearing into charges of sexual abuse in Toronto: The apparently bizarre acts of both doctor and patient don’t sound to me far beyond the potential of most people, or just barely. Take the economic realm we all enter at work each day. It’s driven by greed, terror of failure and job loss, and disdain by those at the top for competition (despite rhetoric to the contrary). What is the cost of coping with such realities while being barraged by a whole opposed set of professions? There is vast rage, frustration, bitterness, self-hate etc. out there. That most people can function “normally,” even lovingly, in such circumstances just makes it weirder!

That’s why I say it is the normal world that is surreal. A celebrity like Michael Jackson is deemed — owing to fame, genius, whatever — to have acquired the ability to inhabit this surreal world overtly, rather than repressively or only in fantasy. He gets a licence to do so, issued, in effect, by the many who cannot. Maybe in return they get to identify, like Lynn Crosbie in The Globe (“I, nihilistically, love all celebrities who live outside the law and laugh at all of us”). Maybe they feel relief at seeing the real explode from the surreal. Maybe sighting the craziness out there in Neverland calms the craziness within. (Of course it is in the nature of licensed activities, that sometimes a licence will be withdrawn, without ever challenging the basic system of licensing.)

Friendly pols: I’d like to parse (for those who miss parsing since Bill Clinton left office) a phrase at Paul Martin’s press conference this week, where he defended taking rides on planes owned by his rich friends. He said, getting that hurt look, that they are his friends and he will continue to holiday with them — it sounded as if he might abdicate, like the Duke of Windsor, rather than give up vacations with the friends he loves. Then he added that it might surprise reporters, but among his friends are athletes and even journalists. That was the full set of examples, beyond rich guys.

I wish he looked like he understood the problem here. I doubt anyone feels Paul Martin will do them political favours because they took him on a flight. It is that his life is populated by rich businessmen; they seem to count to the exclusion of other categories and, as it happens, people close to you usually weigh heavily in your judgments. The problem is not that there is something wrong with this; it is that there is nothing wrong with it — but it is lamentable.

All the Martin bios recount a moment when young Paul was thinking of going to Africa as an aid worker. But Maurice Strong convinced him to stick with business, which could better vault him into politics eventually. Had he gone to Africa, he might have other images to help him now: women spending a large part of the day carrying water, for instance; and not just images of misery but also of their dignity, which are harder to acquire without going there. As it is, he must depend on Bono to keep him current on such issues, though he could do worse (and may, en vacance ).

This is a problem with our so-called democratic politics altogether, including the left. It is very hard for those not middle-class professionals to get elected positions, or influence those in them. NDPer David Miller, Toronto’s excellent new mayor, went to Harvard and then to law school. People without those credentials, but with political ambition or leadership skills, must generally turn elsewhere to express them. To a union, if they’re lucky, or a community group, or maybe they end up coaching kids.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.