In fact, the media understated the situation. To fully understand the depth of her confusion one must read the original message, reproduced at www.slate.com/id/2155028. This 600-word brain dump may have been written under the influence of something, but that would be no excuse for the lack of an apparent main point. We are clear that the 20-year-old is not holding up well under a lot of pressure and scrutiny. With hundreds of active news outlets it is really hard to be famous these days.
Ultimately, Lohan's note is a call for help. She says as much, naming former Vice President Al Gore as someone who had offered to do so. Gore, however, distanced himself from Lohan by saying they only met once at a party. We don't know what he said to her, if anything, or what she heard.
The message is remarkable because reading it provides an active window into Lohan's thoughts and feelings. The bad news (and this is again her point) is that she is so completely unimportant when compared with everything else happening today.
But what if this fantastic power could be used for good? Perhaps someone significant, Bill Clinton or Bill Gates, could write a similar letter to a few friends about a subject that mattered. We could benefit from an unfiltered peek into their minds. Pass it along, without editing or interpretation, and the world's collective intelligence could increase a point or two.
There are a few obstacles, most notably that famous people have their own built-in filters that shape any message that goes out under their names. So the chance of an aforementioned Bill becoming truly frank is as likely as a name change. Some might argue that such messages are already here, in the form of blogs. Internet honor demands that any blog under a person's name is actually written by that individual.
But blogs all assume the same chatty know-it-all voice, which is not at all how people talk. Lohan's note is true to life, because it is written from one person to a small group and represents her own voice. It would be like so cool if she was saying something.
If you have questions or suggestions for Charles Bermant, you can contact him by e-mail at cbermant@seattletimes.com. Type Inbox in the subject field. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.
