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We are overwhelmed in our time by images of suffering from far away - devastation unfolding in real time in digital resolution and Dolby sound, lives being ruined before our eyes - that we don't know what to do with, how to live with. It's a kind of relief then to turn to another genre of dramatic images that bombard us: the lives of celebrities, people who by contrast "have it all." We can admire their excess of beauty and fashion and parties and love affairs and then, when their marriages end or they head into treatment, we can follow their plight knowing that they require nothing of us, not even guilt. They have the resources and all the opportunity in the world to fix for themselves what has gone wrong.

All this is by way of saying that I don't worry overly about our cultural interest in celebrities per se. I understand and participate in it and suspect it is as old as time. But as I've watched Britney Spears unravel before our eyes, in real time, with no end in sight, I have begun to think it's time now for a pause, a moment of cultural soul-searching. I've been profoundly disturbed by the numerous reports I've heard - not in People or Us but in major news outlets - gleefully tallying all the money she continues to make for paparazzi and other people around her, noting with amusement that the profits only rise as she sinks to ever-lower depths.