The Met Police, in their infinite wisdom and with a notable sense of theatre, have granted a restraining order to the pop starlet Sabrina Carpenter. A stalker, presumably a devotee of the cult of celebrity, has been keeping the lady from her slumber. The police cite a 'rising threat' to celebrities, as if the Romans suddenly noticed the lions were getting hungry.
This is the price we pay for worshipping at the altar of fame, a cult that demands human sacrifice in the form of privacy and sanity. We live in an age of inverted Platonism, where shadows on the screen are more real than the flesh and blood behind them. The stalker, poor soul, has mistaken the image for the person, a confusion that our culture actively cultivates.
We teach our children that fame is the highest good, and then we act shocked when someone takes the lesson to its logical conclusion. Miss Carpenter is now a protected species in the concrete jungle of London, a city that once prided itself on the anonymity of its crowds. But anonymity is dead, killed by the smartphone and the social media feed.
Every fan is a potential paparazzo, every admirer a possible threat. The restraining order is a bandage on a haemorrhage. What we need is a cultural shift, a rediscovery of the distinction between public persona and private person.
But that would require the sort of intellectual heavy lifting that our clickbait age abhors. So we will instead pass more laws, hire more security, and build higher walls around our celebrities. And the stalkers will find new ways to climb them.
This is the cycle of decadence, the dance of the gladiator and the lion. Miss Carpenter, be careful. The Colosseum is a hungry place.
