Even the doctor from “House” would like her among his staff doctors. She rose to fame playing a mentally unbalanced child in the movie Girl, Interrupted and as a sexy archeologist searching scripted relics in Tomb Raider.

I am talking about Angelina Jolie.

Nowadays she seems to embody the epitome of beauty. The media are selling her as an icon (aha! the new Ava Gardner) but, do you really know what’s beneath those skin-deep fleshy lips and what perils she holds for growing generations?

The now shiny star admitted in a CNN interview to cutting herself in the past. “It was somehow therapeutic to me,” she acknowledged. And along with moshing and enduring a rebellious life, she won the Oscar for Girl, Interrupted.

Oh, but excuse me, her body makes her little transgressions forgettable. That’s exactly the type of success we should not capitalize on. Does the average Joe know that out there there are probably hundreds of proto-Angelinas who cut themselves and didn’t make it out? Do you know what happens when success doesn’t give you a hand in those situations?

Besides, an actor should be Oscarifiable for truly mastering the Stanislavski System and not for mimicking his or her own life into the big screen.

Besides this panorama, stands the current “Brangelina” affair that keeps sensational newspapers busy. The perfect couple, you might think, but did you notice its total lack of integrity?

Jolie, who does not talk with her father, actor Jon Voigt, has destroyed a marriage (the Pitt-Aniston one) and replicated in the process what exactly she grudges against her own father: unfaithfulness.

And so the story goes: Woody Allen marrying his former lover’s adopted daughter, the current Miss USA 2006 Tara Conner publicizing out loud her cocaine use.

Success, after all, is the only thing that matters, seems to be the underlining message and no matter how immoral you are, the masses and history will eventually overlook it.

Are these the kind of icons we want in a society? The motivations we need to succeed? I know, I know, you have to be really “different” to succeed, among other qualities and circumstances, so those kind of objectable behaviors seem to be the “acceptable” downsides about the truly meritorious ones.

Maybe it’s a sad reality and you can’t have one without the other. Or maybe being decent is too boring to create an economically-successful interest? The media and society should think twice before publicizing and admiring our current idols.

David Soler is a biomedical sciences graduate and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].