I have principles.
You are being stubborn.
He is a pig-headed fool.

I have the subtle, delicate frangrance of a rare, night-blooming Oriental flower.
You rather overdo it, dear.
What has she been rolling in?

That second title looks like it’s right down my alley. It would seem to concern itself with what I’ve long called “euphemasia”.

Thank you.

Two books come to mind. On Bullsh*t by Harry G. Frankfurt, and Death Sentences : How Cliches, Weasel Words and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language by Don Watson. The second is superior, and although seemingly a text on language it is really about how the decimation of language in business and government has led to the escape from reality you are describing. The first is merely okay, an essay, really. But he does say that people need to call BS by its name, something that I always thought to be a particularly American trait.

He got snapped-up instantly by another firm, and he’s well known in his business so there are other offers rolling in. He’ll be okay, so I’ve been amused by the whole thing. (“Job security” is a prevalent American concept that has just about always made me fall down laughing, because it simply doesn’t exist in my business.) But that scene was just about Soviet in the details, or reminiscent of, say, universities, now. This kid is damned good at his work, and that is the very thing that won him the boot.

The general issue in this discussion is reality and how people deal with it. More and more and more, it’s something alien to peoples’ consciousness.

I know what I’m talking about when I call our time in history “The Endarkenment”.

Your description mirrors in many ways the saga of corporate life in general, albeit writ larger and more colorfully. But the egos are as enormous, and so too their need to be petted, groomed, and their various whims attended to with dispatch.

As per Shannon (spot on as usual), much of the real work goes on behind the scenes, unheralded, unsung, lacking even thanks save for the hatefully bureaucratic “kudos” proffered in place of actual money. Temper tantrums, hissy fits, and pouting are as frequent among some bosses as in a daycare for toddlers. The difference, of course, is that these “little princes” (and princesses) can crush you.

Stanley Bing’s Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up is a good place to start. He is a TV exec, and describes this circus rather well.

I still love my work, so I generally keep the details to myself.

But you’re absolutely right about that division in the entertainment industry. Very few people ever see who’s dealing in reality out there. They’re all offstage, in the dark, and there are some really great people out there.

(That was my comment, above. I don’t know how my name didn’t end up in it.)

It is the anonymous tech crew behind the scenes that create the illusions of the stage. Without them modern productions just don’t happen. Techs are the adults of the entertainment industry who can’t rely on temper tantrums to get their way. They must answer to metal, wood, optics and electronics not fashion and style. They rapidly develop rather taciturn personalities and spend a lot of time rolling their eyes at the antics of the onstage individuals.

I can’t help but see parallels between accountants, engineers, managers and others who work in the “real world” and academics, journalist, lawyers and the like who work in a world of fad and fashion.

I’ve only ever been fired once, when a British singer went neuro during a roll through Alaska. He was tired and cranky and bitchy, and I told him, “Just shut up. You’re not working any harder than anyone else out here.” I was looking for another gig when we got home a week later.

Eighteen years later, we’re good friends, and he’s still ashamed of himself.

I can hang with that.

Except that Hollywood is far less interactive than desired by the average male (or female, I would hazard).

Celebrity heierarchy is simply a form of theater itself. Nothing real ever happens, and the viewers are as unaffected watching Mr and Mrs Smith as they are reading about Ben and Jen and Jen and Matt and Angelie and the cast of Friends.

A king must act. A celebrity is just an actor. One wages war, the other performs in one on TV. One taxes me, the other entertains me.

It satisfies as a safe community for the viewer, who does not have to compete in it, unlike high school. However, there are no real relationships with your fellow viewers, even though you may watch the same thing together. Like high school, it is a false community, a faint echo of real life. Ultimately, celebrity is an empty experience for all concerned.

2. Celebrity can be viewed as a disease. Cintra Wilson wrote “A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations” about his thought. It is funny to be sure, but her central idea is really quite insightful. Celebrity defines, deforms, delimits, decapitatates, and ultimately devours nearly all who enter its beckoning doors. One couldn’t wish a more appropriate fate for one’s own worst enemy.