Martha Stewart should thank her lucky stars she went to prison for five months for lying in a stock scandal. Today, she emerges a bigger celebrity, signed to star in two new TV shows and virtually assured of greater personal wealth.
Prices of shares in her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, have soared from around $10 when she began serving time to over $30 this week.
What then, are we to make, of the old saw, "Crime doesn't pay"?
Other celebrity figures in U.S. life who have been disgraced by their lies also have salvaged their reputations and gone onto riches and greater fame and even public honors: Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton (he commands $100,000 per speech) to name two of the most prominent.
This is a cynical testament in a country whose first president, George Washington, is said to have vowed, "I cannot tell a lie," and where the judicial system requires witnesses to swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth.
But times as well as social mores and manners have changed. Celebrity no longer necessarily means men and women of noble bearing and glamorous good behavior. Now, public acclaim might well derive from the fascination for scandal, criminal behavior and moral turpitude.
Which provides yet another odd contradiction: U.S. culture increasingly honors figures with anti-social conduct precisely at a time when religion and "moral values" dominate the public agenda.
