We Americans are childish about our celebrities and icons. We worship, then we denounce; we identify passionately with them and then, if they do something - anything - we dislike, we cast them off.
Interpretation
The quote reflects how Americans have an inconsistent and often superficial relationship with their celebrities, idolizing them only to quickly turn against them.
Margo Jefferson's quote comments on the fickle nature of public admiration in American culture, highlighting a cycle of adoration and repudiation towards celebrities and icons. It suggests that Americans often elevate public figures to a pedestal, forming intense emotional connections, yet when those figures falter or behave in ways that displeases the public, they are rapidly discarded and criticized. This behavior indicates a deeper commentary on societal values and the ephemeral nature of fame, which can be brutally mercurial.
In practice
In a discussion about the changing nature of celebrity culture on social media.
We talk about how we think, believe, suspect Michael Jackson treats children. We don't talk about how WE treat child stars. Child stars are abused by the culture. And what's more treacherous than when the rewards of child stardom issue from the abuse?_x000D_ Child stars are performers above all else. Whenever their triumps, they are going to make sure we see everyone of their scars. That's the final price of admission.
I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.
So much of what blacks and women contend with is centered in how we view, and how the world views, our bodies. Gestures, voices, affect.
Depression is so treacherous - it can be so alluring as well as punishing. After all, it's yours and yours alone - no one else can interfere with it.
I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who'd dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.
Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with. That whole belief... that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness... all of that just began to burst open.
Just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind.
We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe.
We have such a young culture that there is an opportunity to contribute wonderful new myths to it, which will be accepted.
Food should be cheap, and labor should be cheap, and everything should be the same no matter where you go; whether it's a McDonald's in Germany or one in California, it should be the same. And this message is destroying cultures around the world. Needless to say, agriculture goes with it.
Hip-hop gave a generation a common ground that didn't require either race to lose anything; everyone gained.
What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.
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