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"THERE ARE THREE THINGS THAT ARE REAL", said John F. Kennedy. "God, human folly, and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third." Much the same might be said of the three main pillars of modern American culture; social status, celebrity, and the possession and consumption of material wealth. These have always been part of the American experience, but have been magnified in importance in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. The process by which this has occurred is cogently explained in a delightfully dishy new book by New York Times writer Michael M. Grynbaum: "Empire of the Elite: "Inside Conde' Nast,the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America". Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and Gentleman's Quarterly, among other widely distributed magazines in this publishing empire are largely responsible for the precipitous rise in the importance of these three commodities in modern Americana. America's founders sought and possessed material wealth and social status. The first true celebrity, the first person who became famous for being famous was, arguably Davy Crockett, not Paris Hilton. His admirerers went so far as to change his name to a more endearing "Davy". (He preferred "David".) These popular magazines represented a veritable culture factory, instilling within the general population ideals about how to dress, how to speak, how to think about such pertinent topics as intellectual preferences, political ffiliation. Everything one needed to know and do to be chic in the land of first impressions could be found in print,in the glossy pages of influential magazines which have long since lost much of their influence and popularity in our age of internet influencers. The Si Newhouse media empire crowned newly minted celebrities much like the Medici family subsidised artists in Renaissance Italy, and brought them together in gala social events much like King Louis XVI hosted fabulously opulant parties in eigtheenth century Versaille France. Americans were trained to embrace the dubious belief that you too can become rich and famous, as if the two necessarily had anything to do with each other. Social status became equivelant to fame. Our present day consumer society, in which we buy whatever we can and want, and are willing to go deeply into debt to do it, regardless of how wasteful our throw away society increasingly becomes, can be directly traced to the hedonistic spirit evinced within the pages of publcations designed precisely for that purpose. A great philosopher once said that fame is worth exactly what it brings: recognition from a lot of strangers, Much the same may be said of social status, which,in the shallowness of mmodern American culture, usually translates as celebrity. Precisely what makes a celebrity a celebrity is up for grabs. People who do a good job of keeping us entertained make the list. In our crass culture, we build statues and monuments to those we elevate to celebrity status, almost as if they were Gods, which, in a sense, they are. Upon entering Graceland, people often fall reverantly silent, whispering, almost as of standing at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial or attending church. Our current obsession with Taylor Swift can be directly linked to this phenomenon. Surely someday she shall be chiseled in granite. All this, becasue of a handful of slick magazines with nothing better to do. Our blessing is that a cultural historian took the time and effort to tell us all about our nonsensical, incomprehensible love affair with human folly.