Corey Haim’s death is big news?

In the late summer and early fall of 1987, Corey Haim was probably the country’s most popular young celebrity. I remember because I was 16, and you never know pop culture better than when you’re a teenager. People our age talked about Haim. Guys dug his star turn in “The Lost Boys,” while chicks considered him a heartthrob. But after those three or four months, we stopped talking about Haim, other than to chuckle at the fact that he and his buddy had the same first name.

Check his film and TV career after “The Lost Boys,” and you find that Haim’s career went … nowhere. He acted in not a single memorable movie; if you remember Dream a Little Dream and “Prayer of the Rollerboys,” you’re a scholar of ’80s and ’90s cinema. And it wasn’t as if he were a forgotten or ignored talent. Haim was a B- or C-list talent. Perhaps his talent was squandered after his rise to fame, but it was squandered just the same.

Everybody has a morbid interest in the fall of child stars, but this much interest? The Today show this morning ran a segment about him. The New York Times’ obituary last night was at the bottom of its front screen. Yahoo and AOL’s Sphere listed his death as one of its top stories.

Contra The Washington Post, the media isn’t to blame for overreacting to Haim’s death. We Americans are. We treat minor figures, a B- or C-list celebrity, as a major one. Witness the recent popular outpouring of grief for Brittany Murphy, David Carradine, and Natasha Richardson.

For the last half century, intellectuals have criticized Americans’ cultural tastes. Now they have a point. Our common culture, or the celebrity part of it, is debased. It prizes personality over skill, hedonism over self-sacrifice, and fame over virtue.

Put another way, our culture is more about breadth than depth. We know about the lives of celebrities don’t know the lives of our neighbors, family members, and even spouses. Tocqueville said that democratic cultures were susceptible to this problem, but the diffusion of TV and the Internet have worsened it.

I could go on, but you get the point. What we need is a revivified local culture and civil society. Churches, schools, civic clubs, union halls – these are the things that need strengthened at the expense of the state, market, TV, and the ‘net. We had a democratic culture like this not long ago, one in which solidarity rather than amusement stretched across the races, classes, and genders.