Ok then, quickly name the last four people to receive the Medal of Honor. I can’t without having to look it up. Now name at least three people who appeared on Dancing with the Stars. I can, and I go out of my way to avoid such shows.
Celebrity is national, if not global. However, within some fields it narrows a great deal. A person can be a famous chess player and still not be widely know.
Nonetheless, the Medal of Honor is noteworthy and honorable without being the makings for celebrity. In this way, winning an Olympic gold medal is something that bestows celebrity. Being brave in battle does not. This of course is more about the society than the individual.
Also consider that “celebrity” itself it not always deserved or desirable. We currently confuse notoriety for celebrity and being famous for being a useless rich whore doesn’t strike me as a good thing.
To address points in reverse order: Audie Murphy; Eddie Rickenbacker certainly went on to fame and fortune, starting with the noteriety he got from his Medal award; Alvin York is such a staple of popular culture that most people who know the name are shocked when they find out there was a real man behind the legend; More recently Jack Jacobs is at the very least a media figure as a military analyst for MSNBC.
Secondly, your definition of celebrity is so stringent you’d limit us to simply sports and movie stars.
No authors. No poets. No politicians. No scientists. I enjoy this game for the people I’d never heard of, whom others care about.
Missed the edit window since I’m cooking but here’s this too:
They give away the Olympic gold medals all the time and the Medal of Honor is much more rare, that pretty much nails the meaning of celebrity for you, doesn’t it? Celebrity is easy. Honor is not.
Not to mention it opens up the subjective can of worms of how notable is enough to confer “celebrity”. If I get my picture on a cereal box, does it have to be a top-tier cereal, or can I achieve celebrity by getting my mug on a box of Ruskets Flakes?
I can name ONE person off the top of my head, without checking, who has appeared on Dancing with the Stars. I cannot name the last three recipients of the Medal of Honor, but I can name quite a few off the top of my head.
Celebrity may be national (Though I’d argue that. Johnny Most, for example, was a celebrity, but one who wasn’t much known outside of Boston.) but it’s not universal. i.e. someone who may be name recognized by one person may mean diddly-squat to you. And vice-versa. By your standard, Donald Westlake wouldn’t count as a celebrity. Which seems as wrong to me as claiming that the Medal of Honor doesn’t confer celebrity status.
On preview:
Sorry, if you’re going to allow “any writer” I think you’ve just shot yourself in the foot. With a very few notable exceptions, even authors who get major movie deals, often get forgotten. Just for an example can you think of the name of the author who wrote Marley and Me? I can’t. Likewise, I can’t name the author for Eat, Pray, Love. For that matter, can you name three authors currently on the NY Times bestseller list? I sure couldn’t.
The authors I think about most are big names, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d never heard of them: Lois McMaster Bujold; David Weber; Eric Flint; David Drake. Which again, simply emphasizes to me the individual nature of what is or is not a celebrity.
Oh certainly, one could come up with a list of celebrated rodeo clowns for all I care.
My point, lost as it is, is that claiming such and such GI as a celebrity because he was at the Battle of the Bulge is stretching the “celebrity” label a lot more than picking a well known, at least in his field, expert on pubic lice. And that picking a group of college students to die in a plane crash doesn’t make them celebrities because they happen to come from a well known school.
Not denying the slippery notion of what makes this or that person a celebrity. But I am saying that the Medal of Honor isn’t necessarily the best guideline to reach celebrity. Sports are valued more in this society than smarts, so being a Rhodes Scholar isn’t a celebrity issue either, though a couple of Rhodes Scholars went to achieve celebrity status. Being famous for 15 seconds on youtube seems to be enough to claim celebrity status these days, but that doesn’t mean it should be embraced.
By all means, make as esoteric list as you’d like. But is the guy who repaints and repairs the horses on a 19th century merry-go-round really a celebrity? Does appearing in the newspaper once count? Can we all claim celebrity because there was movie about Facebook? A line has to be drawn somewhere.
I understand what you’re saying about celebrity, but the bolded part seems to be you speaking for others. I can’t name the individual guys who were on the Doolittle raid, but that hardly means I’m not “impressed” by what they did.
Which is why I didn’t put it in bold. That’s your emphasis, not mine. If you’re going to quote me, at least leave the quote alone. Nonetheless, “impressed” was the wrong word and I made myself more clear in other posts. But let’s move onto the real reason we’re here: posting obits.
Chalmers Johnson gets a huge, long winded send off after kicking the bucket at age 79.
With a very few notable exceptions, even authors who get major movie deals, often get forgotten. Just for an example can you think of the name of the author who wrote Marley and Me? I can’t. Likewise, I can’t name the author for Eat, Pray, Love. For that matter, can you name three authors currently on the NY Times bestseller list? I sure couldn’t.