The other day while reading Time magazine, I came across a political cartoon. The first box gave a headshot of a double-chinned, balding man declaring that he was tired of people saying Americans don’t care about children in Africa. Then in the second box, you see the upper half of the man’s body as he grins and says with confidence that he went out and bought a T-shirt.

The shirt says ‘Brangelina had a girl!’

The cartoon pokes fun at the constant celebrity obsession that currently plagues the nation. Three manifestations of this obsession can be seen just through the cartoon. 1)The fuzzy and lovely moniker Brangelina coined to join the couple into a blob of a single entity in the legacy of Bennifer and TomKat. 2) The man actually thought wearing the shirt meant caring about African kids. 3) The fact that there are shirts out there stamped with tabloid-sounding headlines circulating America’s apparel world.

And there really are shirts like that. Remember the famous Team Aniston vs. Team Jolie? Poor Brad Pitt. I wonder which one he was sporting. Or the line of white tees stamped with a bold black ‘That’s Hot’ to show the world your Paris Hilton attitude post Simple Life.

There is something seriously wrong when there are people on eBay willing to bid thousands for Britney Spears’ saliva-drenched chewing gum or when magazines dedicate whole sections to analyzing the latest picture of a celebrity couple, trying to decode their body language and love habits. Or my personal favorite? A jar of Brangelina’s possible exhalations sold for $530 in an online auction.

Not that being interested in celebrity culture is a curious phenomenon. It’s definitely understandable that we, as commoners, are intrigued by the glamorous lifestyle of the rich and famous. In fact, I enjoy reading celebrity gossip: who is dating whom, who lost weight, who had a baby; But when there are pictures zooming in on Mischa Barton’s Starbuck’s and captions concluding that she likes soy with her coffee, it’s too much.

Why have we become so obsessed with how these people live? My guess is that we are just inherently curious, or nosy about other people’s lives. The more intimate, the better. The more sensational, the better. It provides a sort of entertainment where we can all live vicariously through the ups and downs of the glamorous drama of other people. And hone our psychoanalysis skills in the process.

The media is not helping to curb this OCD, what I would like to call the Obsessive Celebrity Disorder. Instead, it stuffs us with more and more intimate details of these star’s lives. When there are more than a hundred something tabloids running in the nation, reporters and photographers are out to beat the competition. Getting a picture of Mischa Barton is good. Getting a picture of her with puffy eyes and no makeup is better. And getting a close-up of her daily soy-enriched coffee is the best.

But in our mad desire to know every juicy detail, we are directly supporting media to take more images, find more gossip, butt into more lives. That’s what happens in a supply and demand economy. We demand it. Media supplies it. And the vicious cycle continues, until we reach a zenith where celebrities have no privacy at all.

And that’s the other issue, that celebrities do want and deserve some amount of privacy. Though they should realize that, yes, they are in the nation’s eyes and need to deal with paparazzi and eager fans, they don’t deserve to be scrutinized to the detail of what’s in their coffee. Nor should they have weird people lurking around their house scouting for discarded gum or mad hatters prancing around with empty jars ready to cap the air around them.