Word: crash
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There are two kinds of celebrity crash. The first, like Tiger Woods' on Nov. 27, is accidental. You leave your house and drive your car into a tree, 911 is called, the authorities become involved, and the incident cannot be contained by the walls of your estate or the iron grip of your publicist. You give cryptic answers and implore the media (and cops) to respect your privacy. Anyone with further questions can see your official statement...
...second is intentional. You crash a President's state dinner or crash a balloon into a Colorado field. Like Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the socialites and Real Housewives of D.C. aspirants who swanned into the White House on Nov. 24, you do doughnuts on the lawn of notoriety and smack head-on into the tree of shamelessness. Then you take pictures of the steaming wreck and post them on Facebook while touting your availability for "national and international" product endorsements. Anyone with further questions can see your agent. (See the top 10 people caught on Facebook...
There are two kinds of celebrity crash because we now have two kinds of celebrity: attention controllers and attention seekers. Woods is an example of the former, whom you might also know as "people who are famous for actually doing things." Attention controllers' fame derives from some public competence; their private lives are used as complementary assets (setting the photo ops, selling the baby pics), but with tight boundaries...
...what the Salahis seem to understand that Woods did not is that in our world, attention is like gravity: a force that you cannot command to cease. Fight it, and it will plow you under. Ride it, like a downhill skier or a skydiver, and - well, you may still crash. But you'll make a very photogenic wreck...
...lifeline out of the crisis, Sheik Mohammed will certainly look again to Abu Dhabi, whose vast oil deposits make it by far the richest U.A.E. entity. It stepped up with $10 billion in support immediately after the global crash in 2008 and can be expected to do so once more; Abu Dhabi's ruling al-Nahyan family, as cautious as the al-Maktoums are daring, knows that it, too, will be dragged back by the demise of Dubai. A glance at the $600 billion-plus balance sheet of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund puts Dubai's debt crisis...