With the steady rise in our reality of being driven and influenced by a celebrity driven culture, complementing this has been an increase distance betweenthe lives of the commoner and elite celebrity, professional and old wealth classes. What's more intersting is the idea that celebrities and VIPs in the USA are more isolated from the common classes and everyday life than in the UK or Europe.

Mark Lawson says that American anchors and top journalists are wisked away in limousines and taken to special, high security VIP airport facilities as they await their private jets. In America there appears to be something exclusive in having high security, VIP existence which makes the new elite more separated from the lives of the common people any elite has ever been in history (Mark Lawson Loss of Innocence Guardian Weekly 5/9/99 22).

While in aristocratic Britain, famous people are seen amongst the masses riding the Underground and frequenting neighborhood supermarkets, American celebrities and other well known, powerful people seem to go to quite a distance separating themselves from the masses. A lot of this may be out of necessity since the American civic orientation seemed to really encourage over the years a number of events include a predisposition towards celebrity obsession and worship and the corespondingly of whole new media and entertainment industries. Much of this led to obsessional tendencies on the part of die hard fans and/or sociopaths. The results of this in terms of privacy intrusion and security were quite frightening to many notable personalities.

However it is hard to isolate whether the rich and famous live their security obsessed celebrity class, lives separated from the lives and experiences of the common people for this reason totally. Since it is that the American experience has for quite some time fostered the notion of us verses them, but this has been if not as much, then more apparent in England. England is a much more spatially tight society, that has not seen the same the demographic and cultural changes take place. For one thing there is less space to move at a level that most Americans have grown accustomed to. British society is still centered in London a city of seven million people, the scale is much smaller and in many respects. England is much more tightly knit society than the U.S. The social fabric for the common people may be more satisfying than that what many see as the soulless culture in America. The common people in the U.K. not been completely rendered into mindless consuming masses to the extent that they have in the U.S.

However there are signs that this is changing, as their have been an increasing occurrence of trajedies involving famous people. More people are living their lives through famous people that idolize to an extent which many psychologists might see as mentally unhealthy. When one lives their life vicariously through someone else, there is a element of meaninglessness and worthlessness in their own lives, so they put all their energy into the worship of the all powerful and supremely distant other. Thus a cult of personality "ring "is configured much like a religious cult, and all religions begin as cults. This may explain why they so deviate from the original truth of the prophet. It is for this reason that almost all organized religions are little more charismatic, "personality" games that are defined by idol worship, "ass kissing," back stabbing and a heavy dose of hedonism.

With the death of Princess Diana there was a Kennedyesqe show of sorrow. The obsessive compulsive behavior among a large cross section of society that manifested illuminates the magnitude by which people have lost a sense of themselves and then seek to recapture it among the people who "matter" in the world. It demonstrates the gross distance between the haves and the have nots that goes beyond simple economic statistics. England has been seen as less affected by celebrity, but this little more than a quaint platitude that is useful to remind Brits as to their superiority over the Americans.

Yet there are signs that England is becoming more Americanized. That it is not immune to the statistical inevitability of tragedy as the celebrity obsessed cultures of the world cultivate mentally unstable people who target the stars. Jill Dando was a television presenter (anchor) that was recently killed by a stalker outside of her terraced house in London. Ironically she had just sold her house and planned on moving to more private and exclusive surroundings. Her killing has shaken the British from their ivory tower that was perched way above the Americans. Soon after Dando's killing in 1999, the BBC tightened security so that uncredentialed, unauthorized people could not so easily access on the premises of the most prestigious media entity. George Harrison was nearly killed when somebody entered his house and stabbed in the chest several times.

On a deeper level, our need to become important relates to the sense of ordinariness within the common everyday lives that more people live. What's interesting is we are not simply talking about different class distinction but entirely different human realities and the increasing inability of one lower class group to relate to the reality of the upper class group. Regardless of the rationale for celebrities isolating themselves from the general population, we must consider whether such isolation of the elite classes from the common person experiences in the USA as well as the world is healthy in terms of maintaining a thriving and sustainable global society.