And now, if you would, a moment of silence for the triply- and quadruply-failed careers of Lindsey Lohan and Mel Gibson.

Victims and aggressors of the star-making machine, with a penchant for vitriolic self-pity and that tragic inability to look anything other than awful these last months, the pair shares little else, in abstract, other than the handful of attributes that caused their communal pop-cultural catastrophe.

Adam Carlson

But seeing Lohan and Gibson bottom-out, days apart from one another, provides a fascinatingly intertwined look at that thorniest of rich people woe – how-to, and how-to-not, manage immense fame.

Together, the two of them — bottle-bleached and ghoulishly-jowly, respectively — add up to a whopper of a tale, equal parts cautionary, moralistic and tragic.

The facts are these – after years of treading on the public’s ever-thinning good graces while producing movies in annoying disproportion to their on-air face-time, the starlet and star have now found themselves tossed unceremoniously out-of-the-Hollywood-club.

But nothing this easily explained is actually easy — or explainable.

Confronting the messy tangle that has led the both of them to immense public scorn and, one hopes, intense private struggle raises one too many intriguingly messy questions:

How did this happen?

What does it say about us? …

And whose fault is it?

Wrestling with the ever-shifting answers must, of course, begin one certain way, and the disclaimer is this – great or awful a person that Lohan and Gibson each must be, their flagrantly self- destructive self-pretention is reprehensible.

Yet the why of it remains endlessly at-the-ready for parsing.

It’s clear enough, from the start, the logistics of the two disasters: good-girls-gone-bad (and badly parented), with their accompanying heaps of good-actress-gone-drunk, are nothing new, and the steps taken in Lohan’s spiral are not surprising; the same goes for Gibson, that imploding-star- gone-supernova, with his ever-escalating rants — those circles of profane delusion so mad their method.

What muddies the water is the seeming inability of seemingly everyone to gain any perspective on the pair’s own worst habits.

It’s sad, certainly, to survey the Lohan saga: the crumbling of her even-keeled façade against a backdrop of socialite-unseemliness played out ad infinitum, each account tinged equally with been- there-before nonchalance and a toxic curiosity.

But it’s far more disquieting to realize that Gibson’s been boxing his demons in the public eye for near on two decades, and this is the first we’ve ever all, at once — in a great soaring chorus of ewwww, gross! — kicked him from the limelight.

It’s not hypocrisy, really, that I’d argue is at the heart of the intangible catharsis that comes along with seeing these great flameouts. Rather, instead, we’re washing our hands not just of the disasters Lohan and Gibson have become, but also of our part is fueling and feasting upon their disaster-making.

Celebrities know the score before they agree to play the game; of this, there can be no doubt. It’s not as if we, as a nation, hoodwink them for our own derision and personal self-satisfaction.

Still, amidst the acid-tongued delight over what has now come to pass, there’s a refreshingly clear-eyed sort of solace in taking a moment, gaining some distance and taking stock of all that has now passed by — not forgetting, really, but appraising and moving-on.

Lohan may continue to toil-onward after jail, and Gibson is rich enough to finance himself, but until they’ve begun to rebuild after their self-made wreckage, here’s hoping each is surrounded by something new: the resounding echo of no one caring.

— Adam Carlson is a sophomore from Dallas majoring in magazines