A Stretch in the Klink - Is it the Latest 'In-Thing' to Do?

It started with Martha Stewart. More recently, there was Paris Hilton. Now it appears that both Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie stand a pretty good chance of doing celebrity time in prison. What's going on here?

It's becoming common knowledge that making at least one trip to 'rehab' is the fashionable thing to do. The recent craze of celebrities taking a seemingly revolving door approach to rehab has gotten so worrisome that some in the soft sciences are growing concerned about the impression this is leaving on the larger populace when it comes to the viability and effectiveness of rehab programs. Britney Spears's recent saga of being in and out of rehab so concerns psychologists like Harris Stratyner that he says folks like Spears are "making a mockery of rehabs...In some ways it's starting to make rehabs look like a joke." He's right. A quick perusal of the blogosphere will reveal how cynical most people have gotten about celebrity rehab, and it's hard to believe that this cynicism doesn't extend to larger negative perceptions about rehab globally. Folks like Stratyner are correctly concerned that the celebrity tendency to treat rehab as 'the [cool] thing to do' rather than as a necessary step to take to get one's life back on track harms the viability of rehab as a whole in our culture. Stratyner is ahead of the game in identifying a dynamic that threatens to corrode the cultural credibility of a critical element of the societal safety net. In doing this, he is well ahead of the legal profession, the media, the elite universities, and even the church in understanding how tenuous cultural credibility can be, and how difficult it is to get it back once it's been lost.

But one has to now wonder whether it's no longer enough to join the club of those who have done stints in rehab. Celebrities now seem to be climbing over each other in amping up their behavior to the point where they'll have to do time in the klink. A cynical view might conclude that doing short stretches in the klink is now the 'in-thing' to do. And even if this isn't the actual attitude of the celebrities who seem determined to do the kind of stuff that lands normal people in prison, it's ominous to think how younger people who idolize these celebrities in a celebrity culture might be viewing all this. Do they think it's now cool to go off the grid enough that they might end up wearing orange jumpsuits for a while just like their idols are? It's common knowledge that 'street cred' is imperative to be a player in the hip-hop world today, and there is plenty to suggest that this mentality has found its way into the culture with devastating results if even half of Bill Cosby's rantings have some foundation in reality. Do we think it will somehow be different among the entranced followers of Hilton, Spears, Lohan, Richie, et al? I mean, Nicole Richie recently showed up at some Hollywood premiere wearing a stylish outfit consisting entirely of vertical black and white stripes. Is this a coincidence, or is it confirmation that even the fashion industry is now building cutting-edge clothing lines around jail attire themes to further enhance and legitimize the 'bad girl' image?

The church in particular had better not assume that its teens and college students are seeing all this for what it is - sad. We would be wise to assume the opposite - that there are probably teens in our midst who are instead thinking of the possibilities in ways that might become dangerous and destructive. The onslaught of the celebrity culture is not something to fool around with, and the church would be wise to get out ahead of this latest trend before it becomes a trend in their own church.