One of the odder human traits is our apparently inborn ambivalence toward celebrities. There would be no such thing as a celebrity if the rest of us did not, in some sense, celebrate certain people -- for their artistic gifts, their looks, their wealth, their charm, their brains or whatever else it is that sets the golden few above the gray crowd. At the same time, we love to hate them, reviling the cult of stardom and mocking its objects for foolishly inferring, every time we pay them attention, that they are special people with special entitlements.
We obviously want our celebrities, since we create and sustain them; but we also want them to behave as if they aren't celebrities, because the "celebrity type" is, by anyone's definition, obnoxious. Hence the glee that followed news last week of one longtime celebrity's perfect comeuppance.
We have nothing personal against the aging American diva Ms. Barbra Streisand. And we admit that her voice is a gift from the gods -- when she uses it to sing. When she uses it to rail against ordinary members of the public who are simply minding their own business (albeit closer to her clifftop California backyard than she would like) and to file a $10 million lawsuit against them, that's another matter.