Print edition: 
Once there was a time when you became famous by doing something that mattered. Not anymore. In the age of instant celebrities like Paris Hilton, Perez Hilton and the Kardashian sisters, one only needs to be famous in order to matter.
This Internet-age reasoning drives the fame junkies of our age, which apparently helps us to understand Michaele and Tareq Salahi, better known far and wide as the White House gate crashers, the couple who sneaked into President Obama's first state dinner.
For the record, the Virginia couple deny that they crashed the president's party, despite their lack of an invitation or a name on the guest list. Details, details. The House Homeland Security Committee quickly set a hearing to give the Salahis a chance to explain themselves, but the Salahis declined to attend — a surprise, because calling them before more TV cameras had seemed like throwing Uncle Remus' Br'er Rabbit in the briar patch.
Despite their professed innocence, the Salahis cannot deny that they charmed, cajoled and otherwise oozed their way past the velvet White House rope at the state dinner to honor India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. They passed through the required metal detectors and behaved in no more of an annoying fashion than any of the dinner's other swells, all the way up to the president himself, with whom they exchanged small talk while the cameras snapped away.
There's a lesson here, America. You too can feed your fame addiction. Simply stroll into the presence of famous people while projecting all of the upright, self-assured sense of entitlement that would be expected from someone who actually belonged there.
Fame junkies are all the rage. Recent months have made it hard to tell the truly interesting Americans from those who merely want to play them on TV.
The Salahis were under consideration for the cast of cable-network Bravo's reality-TV show "The Real Housewives of D.C." A film crew followed them through their daylong preparations for the dinner — to which, apparently unbeknownst to Bravo, they were not invited.
The Salahis easily remind us of Richard and Mayumi Heene, Colorado parents of the "balloon boy" hoax and veterans of "Wife Swap," a reality show no less unreal than the one for which the Salahis were in the running.
They also remind us of Nadya "Octomom" Suleman, who parlayed her multiple births into a TV series, and Jon and Kate Gosselin, who let us watch their family with eight children fall apart on camera.
The Salahis' White House stunt infuriates those of us who expect something a bit tighter in terms of White House security. The Secret Service is embarrassed, especially director Mark Sullivan, who issued a rare apology — one that, as I recall, sounded a lot like the one he issued when President Bush had two shoes flung at him during a news conference in Iraq. Neither episode marks the Secret Service's finest hour.
If further social climbing was their goal, the Salahis' hunger for camera lenses may well have blown whatever respect they might otherwise have gained from the famously uptight and reserved elites of Washington, D.C. But maybe the local snoots don't count like they used to. Fame for its own sake defines a new upper crust in America. Publicity, good or bad, becomes like gold to a new narcissistic elite. It makes you matter.
