A lot of people don’t like to talk about substantive issues. Partly because very few people are willing to change their minds about what they believe in, and debating any topic with someone who is equally unreceptive to change is not very fun. (Yes, it can be educational, and a person can learn a lot about their own ideas in the process, many people don’t want to be educated, and believe they already know enough about their positions and have no desire to learn more about them.)

We overhear a lot of office-talk. And the day after Obama’s latest speech, people were talking — about anything but. Quite a few ladies in the lunchroom were talking about a person that they kept referring to as the “Mayor of New York,” and his involvement with prostitutes. Also, Britney.

That name always comes up. Britney this, and Britney that. She always inspires outrage, sympathy, and pity in various amounts throughout the day. There was even quite a stir amongst a few brainy bloggers when her picture appeared on the cover of pseudo-important magazine, The Atlantic Monthly.

The gossip about her, we think, can tell us a lot about ourselves. Quite a few assumptions seem to have been made, and those notions tend to influence the talking we’ve been hearing. There are two major beliefs out there, apparently.

One of them seems to be a belief that could best be summed up in this sentence: “What she really needs is someone to straighten her out. If I could just talk to her for, like, ten minutes….” Not that anyone would be so confident as to say this out loud, to boldly proclaim that they believe they could have some healing influence on Britney. But how else can we explain the ubiquitous sight of one person explaining to another person what they think Britney should do? They are, essentially, offering advice to someone who is not actually there to receive it, and they’re implying that the person they’re (not actually) advising hasn’t thought up any of the trite, obvious, solutions on her own. Wait, who’s the crazy person in this scenario again?

This leads to a second important point: by presuming to advise Ms Spears on the proper way to handle her business, those advisers are basically saying that they could to a much better job of handling fame than her.

Maybe some of them are right, but it’s certainly not a majority. It’s unbearably trite to say that fame is a drug, but if the metaphor fits…. We’re not talking about the emotional ups and downs that celebrity causes in its subjects — rather, we’re talking about the delusion of control. Listening to someone go on about how if they were Britney, they wouldn’t have done this or that; it’s tremendously irritating. It’s like listening to someone saying, “Yeah, I could totally handle heroin. No way is it going to get the best of me.”

We’re sure that, at one time, even Britney felt this way about fame. And that’s what we’re talking about when we compare it to a drug: We mean its something big, too big for most people to handle, no matter how convinced they are that, yes, they totally could.

Sure, some people might be right about that; but a lot are probably wrong.