Heard the latest?

The ancient Romans had a term for it - "Bread and Circuses." The emperors would make sure that the average Josephus had plenty of free grain to make bread, and chances to attend the Roman version of NASCAR - chariot races - at the Colosseum. Filled with tasty loaves and rollicking entertainment, Josephus and Maria failed to notice the decline of the Roman Empire. After all, the first volume of "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" didn't come out until 1776, by which point the empire had completely declined and fallen.

I've been pondering the rapt attention that many of us gave this imbroglio between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. The lurid details of their fights, physical and verbal, had people the world over mesmerized as the scatological details spilled out of our television and phone screens, making an ugly pile on our beds and elsewhere. They were married for two years, and their breakup will take at least two decades for all of us to get over. So many of us are so invested in their story that we heard intimate details of their relationship over the water cooler every day for weeks.

Depp is an actor; I remember him from "21 Jump Street" a long time ago before he went on to dress up like Keith Richards playing a pirate. I know he is considered to be of great skills as an actor, but I haven't seen his movies. Heard, I don't think I ever...heard...of her until this matter came to prominence.

These folks are in show business, and their job is to entertain us. Entertainment means "the action of providing or being provided with amusement or enjoyment," and that's the key. We slog through our days, most of us, working for the dollars, and we come home and turn on shows like "Entertainment Tonight" to take our minds off the Brewster account or the boss's latest tirade or that noise the car was making. Understandable.

A friend of mine who works in the counseling field told me that troubled teenagers cut themselves with razors because the pain of that laceration somehow hurts worse than the psychic pain they deal with every day. It's shocking to think of kids having such trouble that they reach for something sharp like that, but it happens. 

And for everyone who pays attention to the news, the mass shootings, the economic crises, the diseases running rampant, and so forth: real life can be overwhelming and depressing. Granted. 

And so, to escape to the troubles between two actors is a much nicer place to drop off our minds for an hour or so. 

As long as we don't forget to stop by and pick them up and resume our own lives, a little walk through celebrity goings-on is not the worst thing to do, I'm sure.