This is an email I sent to American Morning on CNN, I thought it was marginally clever, and so I'm s
Of course someone paying $3000 for Justin Timberlake's partially-eaten toast is ridiculous. However, this is nothing new-- just look at the Catholic's veneration of saints. It only took a few hundred years after Christ's death for there to rise up a great traffic in saint's relics--pieces of Jesus' cross; vials of saintly/holy blood; skulls, fingers, and other bits and pieces of the saints-- which were acquired, at great expense, for the glory of individual collectors, churches, and cities. Over the course of the middle ages and the Renaissance (and to a slightly diminished extent) up until the present, people have flocked to cathedrals and museums all over Europe to see these relics, contained in bejeweled and gilded relequaries. It was considered completely normal to have great civic pride over the toenails of St. Anthony or the finger of one of the Popes in a chapel in your city's cathedral.
It's a pretty widely-accepted fact that many of these icons are fake, and a collection of thousand-year-old rotting body parts of any type are disgusting, but it's really no different than Justin Timberlake's nibbled-at toast or Britney Spears' gum. People have always idolized celebrities-- they used to have to be extraordinarily pious, chaste, or maybe they recieved the Stigmata or performed "true miracles" but now we only require them to dance provocotavely and lip-sync convincingly. Oh, they also usually have to wear as little as the FCC will allow.
It's a pretty widely-accepted fact that many of these icons are fake, and a collection of thousand-year-old rotting body parts of any type are disgusting, but it's really no different than Justin Timberlake's nibbled-at toast or Britney Spears' gum. People have always idolized celebrities-- they used to have to be extraordinarily pious, chaste, or maybe they recieved the Stigmata or performed "true miracles" but now we only require them to dance provocotavely and lip-sync convincingly. Oh, they also usually have to wear as little as the FCC will allow.