Bieber: When celebrities think they’re gods

Justin Bieber thinks he’s above the law, said Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon.com, and he just may be right. The 19-year-old Canadian pop star was arrested in Miami last week after his entourage blocked off a residential street in the wee hours so he could allegedly drag-race high-end sports cars well past the speed limit. “Why did you stop me?” a belligerent Bieber asked cops, after allegedly failing a field sobriety test and resisting arrest. It’s just the latest in a series of bad-boy outbursts for the singer, who’s been accused of underage drinking, drugging, frequenting strip clubs and whorehouses, pelting a neighbor’s mansion with eggs, and “alarming recklessness” of every kind. If a poor Mexican had been busted drag-racing under the influence, he could expect “a holding cell awaiting a one-way trip out of the country,” said Andrew Rosenthal in The New York Times. But for a rich, white, pop star? Just another excuse to post a smug selfie on Instagram.

“It may be time to worry about Justin Bieber,” said Kevin Fallon in TheDailyBeast.com. His sad descent is familiar enough, thanks to River Phoenix, Tatum O’Neal, Lindsay Lohan, and so many other child stars: Puberty sets in, star “rebels against puritanical expectations,” surrounds himself with toxic friends and hangers-on, and winds up in jail, rehab, or an early grave. Today, celebrity is even more distorting than it was when the Beatles ran through gantlets of hysterical fans 50 years ago; Bieber is fawned over not just in public, but also every time he picks up his phone and sees countless, fawning fans hailing him as a god on Twitter, Facebook, and online fan forums. “What the Bieb really needs is a smack upside the head, preferably from his father,” said Rosie DiManno in the Toronto Star. But with the pop star worth $130 million, his dad is just another enabler, and was reportedly one of the flunkies who cordoned off the street in Miami.

The society that turned a boy into the Bieb also deserves blame, said Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in The New York Observer. “There’s something sick” in turning celebrities into gods, and then reveling in their inevitable downfall, as if they were not real people, but “cartoon characters who get squashed by a giant hammer only to pop right back up.” Sometimes, they don’t pop up.

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