Steep, wing-burning falls

I've been "studying" popular culture with a new drive and vengeance. It's been a gargantuan task to metacognitively distill WHAT exactly makes me feel like i come from another planet. Not only am I appallingly ignorant on the specific who's and what's of this celebrity plasma we breath in, but I am, even more confusedly, completely baffled by the underlying STRUCTURES of tabloids and gossip. It may seem ingenuous to confess to such a basic level of outsider-ness, but in this proclamation i am most earnest. Reading US magazine on the toilet has proven to be one of THE most trippy things I do.

I've been reading Salman Rushdie's FURY, and ran across this gem of a paragraph. It is a perfect synthesis of the larger mechanism that has taken grip of our world in the last few decades, and that I have been oh-so-late to hitch a ride on.

This was the period in which the two great industries of the future were being born. The industry of culture would in the coming decades replace that of ideology, becoming "primary" in the way that economics used to be, and spawn a whole new nomenklatura of cultural commissars, a new breed of apparatchiks engaged in great ministries of definition, exclusion, revision, and persecution, and a dialectic based on the new dualism of defense and offense. And if culture was the world's new secularism, then its new religion was fame, and the industry- or, better, the church- of celebrity would give meaningful work to a new ecclesia, a proselytizing mission designed to conquer this new frontier, building this glitzy celluloid vehicles and its cathode-ray rockets, developing new fuels out of gossip, flying the Chosen Ones to the stars. And to fulfill the darker requirements of the new faith, there were occasional human sacrifices, and steep, wing-burning falls.
-Salman Rushdie, Fury