Deep Frozen Post-Christmas Prayer
I
Oh, my God! He's got a gun! Hello? I call upon Thee in my...YOW!. .. Are you there?! Pick up if You can hear me. Hello? Hello? Oh, this is serious. I am out in the barn, and there's trouble.....Big Trouble! Can You understand what I am saying, even though I am not moving my lips? I do not want to be here. Hello? Are You screening your calls? I don't want to be here. With them. And with it....the gun! I promise this is not a crank call. This is about to be dead serious! This is already cocked and loaded! It is MAYDAY! here in the barn.
II
Oh, God! No one is moving. I can't tell if you are on the line or not. There's a funny ringing in my ears. Is that You? Hello? OK, So don't pick up. But surely You saw?....surely You heard? He said, "Not this time, Buddy!" And then Buddy said, "Do you really think I am afraid to die?" And then I said, "Oh, My God! He's got a gun!" And You know the rest. That's where we are God. Here in the barn. And the gun is leveled straight at Buddy's heart. And now...it is...as if....we....are....frozen......even....my dog....seems....frozen....with her ears....pinned back....ready...to pounce...with....her fangs...on display....yet....frozen.
III
Nobody is moving. Can it be true? That we are, in fact, frozen? Have You frozen time? Have you stopped all this? But I can hear my own breathing. I think I can hear my heart. And this faint crackling sizzling sound, like my brain is frying. Oh, God! Are we stuck here all by ourselves? Buddy seems to be leaning into the gun. Staring right into the barrel. Will the real God please stand up, and identify Yourself, and tell us where You're from, and a little bit about Yourself? I don't mean to be a smart-ass, but Omnipotence has got to come with a big toolbox. So, can You freeze time or not? You of all people, must know, timing is everything.
IV
Oh, thank You! Thank You! I know nothing has been really solved, but it is such a relief to be frozen for a minute. Just to catch my breath, and try to figure out what happened. Please, don't thaw us out yet. Ok, it's coming back to me. I came into the barn. It was early. A front had moved in over night, and it was cold and rainy. Yet, no one had bothered to fire up the old wood stove in the corner. It was as though we all knew from the beginning, that we wouldn't be here long before we would all be frozen in time. And it wouldn't matter then whether we were standing by a warm stove or not, for the fire too would be frozen.
V
I really need to talk to you, God. I mean, my lips are frozen, but you can read my mind, right? Even my last breath hangs as a little frozen cloud in front of my face. A frozen cloud, my frozen eyes can hardly see through to the frozen gun in the frozen hand. And all the frozen words still hang in the air around us. One big frozen run-on panicky sentence. NotthistimebuddydoyoureallythinkIamafraidtodieohmygodhesgotagunhello? And my dog's frozen growl....Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. I was hoping maybe since we have this frozen moment we could talk. You and I. Mano el Godo. What do You say? Hello? Are You still there?
VI
Ok, so You are not picking up (You must get a zillion calls a day). That's cool. But, I am assuming, since everyone and everything is still frozen, that You are allowing me time to talk. Maybe You will play it back later and we'll play "phone tag". I am just your average mortal guy. Just your Happy-Go-Lucky -Joe in a crisis situation. Frozen in time and thinking these simple thoughts. And , of course I am assuming You are God and All. So Your ego must be under control right? And after all, we are stuck here in the barn with all this "no time" on our hands. Maybe we could come up with something that could be good for both of us. Bottom line: Can I be frank, and You won't hang up?
VII
Actually, I suppose if I said something really stupid right now, it really wouldn't count, seeing as how everything that has happened since you froze time.....hasn't really happened. That's a very strange thought. What is happening now is not happening? Umm...it's what I like about You, God, the paradox stuff. My God, what am I saying? I'll assume I didn't hear myself say all that. I am just nervous, I guess. There are real bullets in that gun. And after all, I have never been frozen in time before, a freeze- virgin . All I really wanted this morning was a good hot cup of coffee. It's all so sudden. Do You get where I am coming from Lord? Are you digging my scene? Of course You are, You are God. As for me, I am just me in a fucked up situation. Pardon that expression, it is just a saying we use down here on Earth when things aren't going quite right.
VIII
God, I need to tell You something. Put my money where my mouth is. Well, actually I'm broke, but You get the idea. Tell it like it is. I don't know what it is, but it seems my thoughts are moving slower. It's like, that watery space between the axons and the dendrites of the nerve cells in my brain have turned to thin ice. And my words are timidly tip-toeing across hoping not to fall through into that murky sea of things I haven't even thought of yet. I guess it's all part of being frozen. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that, I stopped going to church a long time ago. It was like, one day I realized that You had stopped going a long time before that. So, I figured.... what-evvveeeerrrr!!!
IX
So I say, forgive and forget! Let bygones be bygones. But seriously, where do You hang out these days? Do Gods, like people, have there own trends? New restaurants to go to....coffee house to hang out in? Seems like people are looking for You everywhere. There are people here on earth that have reported seeing Elvis. And there are reports of UFO sightings. And two accounts of people (they were identical twins, by the way) seeing Elvis get out of a UFO. And even I, skeptic that I am, admit bumping into Juan Valdez in a grocery store. Of course, I was in a weird state of mind, having run out of coffee. So maybe it was a hallucination. You would make a great photo op down here. I'm not kidding, the Paparazzi would be all over You! Hello? Hello? Uh Oh.
X
This is probably going to sound pushy, especially for someone who might not make it out of the barn when the clock starts again. But if there was ever a do or die situation, I'd say this is it. So, here goes nothing. Here's what I think. I think You might want to consider a whole new attitude about Yourself - and about humanity. More of a take charge, damn it - this is the new millenium - kind of attitude. Just an idea. Just my, oh so humble, mortal (in fact, I must be a complete raving idiot out of my mind to suggest it) myopic opinion, of course. Wow! I am still here! Look, I'm just saying that if You are going to call Yourself God, You've got to get Yourself out there, every morning...rain or shine...and show them who is in charge. Between me and you, are the other Gods picking on You? I hate bullies.
XI
I don't want these things I am saying to demoralize You. But You can't just rest on Your laurels. A few days, maybe...but thousands of years?! People are going to start talking. Hey, by the way, You do have some really great laurels! We just saw the other day, the latest photos from the Hubble telescope, and I for one have got to tell You, those early galaxies You were cranking out right after Your Big Bang Period, were definitely out of sight! Until recently anyway. And even now, some five or six billion years later, they still look so "Now". How did You do that?! Hats off...really great...spell-binding, and very flashy! In fact, I think it would be fair to say You are the Godfather of Pop Art! But that was then and this is now. Surely You would agree, it's time for new ideas. A Divine make-over, so to speak. Hello?
XII
OK. Everything is still frozen. Cool. Look, why don't we start at the beginning. Right about where You had that free will idea, remember? Ummm, You still there? I don't mean to tell You how to run our lives. But, honestly, it appears to "little ol' frozen in time" me, that maybe You should have taken Saturday off too. If I was You, I think I would re-consider those opening scenes. Maybe You had a deadline to meet, I don't know. But now, after two thousand years of reflecting and reminiscing, thinking about the good old days in the garden...doesn't it seem to You that maybe you rushed the whole concept? Like this morning, I was just free-willing myself down the road, minding my own business. Stopped in at the barn and KABLOOEY!!...outa nowhere a gun is in my face. A big gun. A sawed-off, double barreled 16 gauge with pump action. See what I mean? There are some kinks in the idea.
XIII
So, what I have been working on is a modified, or revised free will plan. See what You think about it. You are under no obligation, of course. You are God. You have nothing to lose. If I am out of line in my remarks, it could just be hypothermia, or nicotine deprivation talking. Of course, if You really like my ideas, perhaps we could consider what You might be able to do for me. Frankly, I'd like to leave the barn alive today. So shall we push on? I don't mean start the clock again. But shall I allow my frozen mind to go on this way? If I go too far, start the clock. I am ready to take my chances.
XIV
Ok. Let's back up again. To those first six days of creation. To be really honest with you, I don't have a problem with the first six days. They are a bit vague, perhaps, by the standards of today's inquiring minds. Today, people want all the juicy details. Like what were the dinosaurs really like? And did the fig leaves cause chafing in those sensitive areas? I for one, don't care. So let's go on. Let's go into the garden. The garden was pretty cool. I would have liked to have been there with a cute girl myself. But unfortunately, there were only a few idyllic days before life got forever much more complicated. So, this is the point at which I have a bone to pick with You. A rib bone. What were You thinking? Like I said, I think You should have taken Saturday off.
XV
I mean, put Yourself in a woman's shoes. Not literally, of course. Let me put it this way. How would You like to go around in life thinking you were made as an after-thought...out of some rib bone some guy didn't need anyway? And, on top of that, made because the guy was lonely. See what I mean? That doesn't fly these days God. That's why I am saying, we need to overhaul your image. Up-grade the stories. People want the latest thing these days. The Jahweh 2000. The new Millenial God. The boys and I are still frozen. Standing here staring through our frozen words. So, I take it You are listening. I know You are God and all, but don't feel embarrassed or ashamed for slacking off. I am here to help You!
XVI
Wow! I have never been frozen and hysterical at the same time! It's actually a nice buzz. Let's talk about Adam and Eve. Nothing wrong with those names...nothing whatsoever. Except names, like a lot of things run in cycles. A few decades ago, Desi and Lucy, or Ozzie and Harriet would have worked. But not today. People want the "hot" names. Want me to take a shot at it? Well, not a shot, actually. No need to shoot anything. Or anybody. But for instance, Britney and Prince Andrew in the Garden of Eden. Now you have a story! See what I'm saying? You gotta bring the story up to speed. Of course, it doesn't have to be them. You might want to go more generic and la vida loca. "Bubba and Heather". Bottom line? You've got to change the story up, or You'll never make the tabloids.
XVII
Let's just go with Bubba and Heather for now. We can tweak the details later. "Heather" might have some appeal to the Valley girl surfer crowd (this needs research), ummmm...British Botanists, flower children, and their children, yuppie landscape designers, and so on. As for "Bubba", that goes right to the heart of America. Enough said! Sounds like a girl -meets -boy story to me. (We can change these names later if You want...we are brain-storming here.) So, now let's put Bubba and Heather in The Garden of Eden. Am I moving too fast? Get up, stretch. Let's take five ...and walk on some clouds for awhile. My feet are killing me!
XVIII
Ok. All better now? I hope this doesn't sound too chauvinistic when I say my favorite part of the story is when Bubba gets lonely, and You make this woman, Heather for him. It touches my heart strings...strikes chords in me, and frankly, even makes my hands perspire. (Is that some kind of religious stigmata, or what?! ) Maybe, it's just some kind of male drumming in my head. But it gets to me now, all frozen in time. I think to myself, "Would I rather be here in the barn with an option for maybe a last cigarette before I die? Or would I rather be with Heather in some cozy cafe in the Garden, thawing back into time over a steamy cappaccino?" Am I asking for too much?
XIX
The silence in the barn is deafening. It must be You. No mortal could be as silent as this. Let me paint a picture for You, of a new mythic platform for the remainder of humanity. We don't have to call it that, of course. But basically, we are talking about a divine "do over". A new genesis. Genesis II, The Sequel. No,no...it's not a sequel. Ummmm...Genesis:The Lost Scrolls! Whatever...we'll name it later. Heather and I can handle packaging, marketing, distribution, promotional guest appearances and so on. All those details that You might find boring. So, let's start with a preliminary story-board and construct the new story of Bubba and Heather. It's a simple tale of a first love that begat all love thereafter.
XX
Bubba and Heather live in a garden. A fairyland of delights. And yet, paradoxically, it's not a garden. It's an amusement park. Well,actually, to compound the paradox, it is a big shopping mall too. Yes, genius! Did You think of that or did I? I can just see it! Mostly Bubba and Heather wander around in a kind of moist fuzzy light through flowers, and food vendors, and babbling brooks, and quaint little shops. And they love to shop! They shop 'til they drop, as the saying goes. And then after a short nap, they awaken refreshed and shop some more. And they do all this completely naked. They really dig the no clothes idea, since everything is climate-controlled. And also because, in this new garden You have chosen to eliminate mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers, and sand fleas from the ecosystem altogether. (People will love You for this idea alone!)
XXI
So, that's the wide-angle establishing shot. Bubba and Heather in love. Shamelessly walking hand in hand, hanging out naked in the mall. Like it so far? I know what You are thinking...time to introduce some dramatic tension. I gotta say, You are a Master at that! Like that Big Bang thing, where out of nowhere You exploded the universe into being! Awesome. We still wonder what was going on in the non-universe that led to that dramatic moment. OK, enough with cosmic explosions, but we do need to thicken the plot. Introduce some kind of dilemma everyone can identify with.
XXII
It can't be a snake. No snakes. Why? Well, for one, You have already used that idea. Secondly, we have eliminated snakes from the ecosystem. And thirdly, (and perhaps most importantly), the sub-conscious connection between the snake and the male sex organ? Not cool! (Thank you, Sigmund Freud!) On behalf of all guys everywhere, let's lose the snake from the scene. In fact, let's not take it out on the animals at all. In this day and age of political correctness, You can't just go around making animals, and turning them loose, and then calling them bad when they try to sell people apples on the side. OK, let's think people! We've got to come up with something else. Let's break for lunch, we'll re-group at three. Hey God, what do You think? Sushi? Have You ever tried Thai food? You choose, I'm buying...no,really, I insist.
XXIII
OK. Hear me out. How about this? We give Bubba and Heather a brand new, totally tricked-out Jeep! Why? Because they have been going steady now for almost two weeks, and they also did a great job naming all the animals. It will make a fabulous temptation as they go tooling around this marvelous and infinitely labyrinthian mother of all malls. Can you imagine how many ways they could screw up? Driving without seat belts...failure to yield right of way...refusal to take a breathalizer test after being pulled over for driving under the influence of making out in a hospital zone? There's gotta be a zillion ways we can kick these kids out of the garden! And there's not a snake in the whole idea. That's the beauty of it!
XXIV
OK. So cut to: It's Christmas in the Garden! Yes, yes, I know Christmas isn't until a lot later. But go with me. If we are going to have paradoxes, let's start having them right out of the gate. We've already established that the garden is paradoxical. Besides, Bubba and Heather are cruising the mall in a tricked out Jeep. They didn't even make Jeeps until World War II. But, it doesn't matter. That's the wonder of paradoxes, they suspend disbelief! When people can't wrap their rational minds around something, they get uncomfortable. But they feel a lot better when they think, "Oh, it's a paradox! I get it!" So we have to move the viewer from that uncomfortable feeling to the relief of paradox. So, Christmas! Everybody loves Christmas. They get lots of presents. And then there's the rum balls, mistletoe, spiked punch...so we open here. Move the audience from discomfort into participation and relief. I didn't invent this paradox thing, You did. I'm just saying let's use it as a special effect. The glory and the credit is all Yours. I am just applying it to an opening scene.
XXV
If there is a paradox out there, I could sure use one right now. There is a gun in my face! I know in the original story that electricity had not been invented yet. But let's keep the paradoxes rolling So picture this: It is Christmas time. And Bubba and Heather are practically delirious driving the avenues of the mall and looking around at all the little lights You have strung everywhere. On trees and bushes, on lamp posts and buildings, on the satellite dishes. Even the alleys are strewn with lights...the trash cans, the abandoned old couch by the dumpster; everything is aglow with the magic of Christmas in the Gardens of Eden Mall.
XXVI
Bubba and Heather are bedazzled, mesmerized by this scene. They have never seen anything like this before. Never mind that two weeks earlier, they didn't even exist! They are more in love in this moment than ever before. They impulsively go into a tattoo parlor and get matching tattoos...belly buttons! They return to the Jeep and pause to examine each other's tattoos. It is a tender bonding moment that ends with a kiss and the turn of the ignition key. But no sooner do they take the next corner, but what they run into a Road Closed sign nailed to a barricade. And it has flashing red lights that we see as pulsing reflections on their faces as they look at each other with puzzled expressions.
XXVII
Heather wisely pulls up Mapquest on the Jeep's navigational thingey. She says, "There's some railroad tracks under construction." He says, "What are railroad tracks?" She says, "I don't know." Bubba points to a dot on the other side of the tracks. "What's that?" Heather clicks on it. "Ummm...it says 'You are approaching Will Town'." Bubba says, "I don't know, baby..check out the Road Closed sign." Heather says, "Yeh, that looks like His handwriting...could be a forgery though." They look at each other with that same puzzled expression and fall into silence. They glance at each other's lips as the camera slowly zooms in. We see the kiss in flashes of black and red. Fade to black. Cut!
XXVIII
It is a never ending story, the way love can step into the driver's seat and take the wheel. And it all started with Bubba and Heather at a threshold of sorts. A turning point. A railroad crossing. A convenience market. They pull in to reflect. Bubba talks Heather into asking the guy behind the counter about Will Town. He is of little help, "No know dis pwace 'Will Town'," he says. They sit outside on the curb sipping on a couple of Icees. They are thinking it over. They have never heard of paradoxes before, no less been in the middle of one. But they do know You are known far and wide for Your sense of humor. They reflect back on that long line of crazy looking animals You kept filing in front of them, and how hard it was to keep coming up with names for them. They knew You were capable of anything!
XXIX
For all they knew You might be the dashboard computer in disguise. You might even be the convenience store clerk. "God could be anything." Bubba says. Heather laughs, "He might even be an Icee!" "Or even two Icees!" Bubba replies, leaning over to kiss Heather's cherry coated lips. They giggle. But it really is all confusing to them. You could be anything. Bubba knew it. Heather knew it. I know it. And You know it too. So, what do they do? They hop into the Jeep, high on cherry syrup, and peel out! "Hey, maybe's He's trying to tell us something." "Yeh, maybe we should go down this road." "Maybe there's a new mall we've never seen before." "Or, a new make-out place!" "Yeh, let's go baby!" And so off they went. Can You blame them, really?
XXX
It's a long winding road once they cross the tracks. And the twinkling lights get fewer and dimmer until at last they are in total darkness. And it seems like they are moving through some long tunnel. At last they see a light ahead. And then some hazy creatures like from another world, waving to them, beckoning them in some way that seemed other-worldly. But no, it's just another mugging at an ATM machine. And lo and behold, Bubba and Heather emerge from the tunnel stark naked in their Jeep, smack-dab in the middle of Manhattan!
XXXI
Embarrassing? You bet. And it gets worse! They get pulled over by a cop on a motorcycle. He issues them a citation for driving without plates on the Jeep. They had never even heard of plates, not even the kind you eat on. Back at the mall, it had all been finger food. They get another citation for public indecency. The Jeep is impounded. and things go from bad to worse as they huddle at day's end on a park bench hugging discarded pages of The Wall Street Journal to their bodies. Oh, they really screwed up this time! They should have stayed at the mall. But it's too late now. Why they screwed up is anybody's guess. Maybe it's just another one of those paradox things. Maybe Attention Deficit Disorder brought on by too much syrup in the Icees. Or the way love can cloud one's thinking. But the real question, God, is what are we going to do about this messy situation?
XXXII
Reconsidering misbehavior and it's consequences. That's what we are talking about here. What should we do about this incident, God? Take the car keys away? Kick them out of the mall? Forever? Bubba and Heather and their future kids...and their kids? And their kid's kids? And their kid's kid's kids and so on, all the way up the who begat who... to me? ,,,in the barn...with a gun in my face? So this is where it gets personal. I really don't care to be shot today. I mean, pardon me, but it seems so ego-maniacal, to decide to damn humanity unless they fall on their knees in front of You. What is Your problem? If You are God, it seems like You wouldn't have this intense need to be worshiped. Are You a Narcissist? Go ahead and kill me if You want. I am sorry if this is hurting Your feelings. But I have feelings too. And one of them is that You are a figment of my imagination, or some other part of my brain.
XXXIII
OK, so go ahead. I am ready to act. And not ready to die. Thaw us out. I will handle this myself. "Buddy! Buddy! Buddy! Put the gun down Buddy. Let's have breakfast. Two over easy? Bacon?" Oh, yes! Every thing is cool...and we don't need You. I have only two requests. Do You have Heather's phone number? And will You see that my grave is kept clean? Actually, I don't care if my grave is kept clean. But, do you have Heather's number?
...................................................................................................
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Food for Thought for Those That Want to Keep Eating
Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Sweet Celebrity
By Lewis Lapham
Posted on December 12, 2010, Printed on December 12, 2010
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175331/
Let’s consider for a moment the fates of two men who took unique paths in military life and whose careers were once intertwined: General David Petraeus, now our Afghan War commander, and his former subordinate General Stanley McChrystal, our former Afghan War commander before he became the first general since Douglas MacArthur to be axed by a president -- in his case, for a Rolling Stone version of “loose lips sink ships” (or administrations). Petraeus, the most political U.S. general in memory, dusted off the failed counterinsurgency doctrine of the Vietnam era, made it bright and shiny again, built fabulous relationships in Congress and in militarized Washington think tanks, and then rode it all to the heights in Iraq and at U.S. Central Command. Now, in Afghanistan, without the slightest compunction, he's left his beloved counterinsurgency doctrine in a ditch as conditions on the ground worsen. Instead, he’s called in the firepower and the propaganda, both in double measure. (Oh, and in case you hadn't heard, we’ve finally achieved glorious victory in the godforsaken village of Marjah in southern Afghanistan where a senior Marine general recently announced that the battle against the Taliban there is “essentially over.” Huzzah!)
Thanks to such a string of dazzling “successes,” Petraeus has scaled the heights of American celebrity. Just the other day, he reached Mount-McKinley-esque elevations (with Everest still ahead) when ABC’s Barbara Walters declared him not just an “American hero” (though that, too), but the Most Fascinating Person of 2010! He topped a list which included Justin Bieber, Sarah Palin, and future British princess Kate Middleton, possibly because he has so much more bling than they do.
McChrystal might not seem such a happy story. Running teams of Special Operations assassins for years from the shadows in Iraq and Afghanistan -- hardly the sort of thing likely to lead to American celebrity -- he became Afghan War commander under Centcom commander Petraeus in 2009. The Taliban, however, seemed to surge faster than his forces did and he was even saddled with responsibility for approving Afghan peace talks with (and “goodwill payments” to) a Taliban impostor. Then, of course, he presided over a group of hard-drinking aides, deeply frustrated by the war they were so unsuccessfully fighting, who mouthed off to that Rolling Stone reporter about the Obama administration, et voilà, he was out on his ear. Open to him, then, it seemed was only the usual grim route for retired generals: a quick trip through that fast-twirling military-industrial revolving door, pension in hand, to a lobbying job at an elevated salary with a defense contractor and maybe even a “senior mentorship” at the Pentagon.
But such a man was not Stanley McChrystal. Pulling himself up by his combat boot straps, he took another path. He started by accepting a post at Yale University teaching a seminar in “leadership”; then, he signed on with a "world class" speaker’s bureau called Leading Authorities, and next thing you know he’s on the talk circuit offering “Four-Star Strategy Lessons” for a fee that can hit $60,000 a pop (plus travel expenses and lodging for three). Alright, it’s not all glory like in Marjah. He does, for instance, have to grit his teeth and give the keynote address at the International Sign Association’s Expo 2011. (“While the majority of our educational and networking events are directly related to the sign industry, Gen. McChrystal will offer valuable insight into leadership during difficult times,” says ISA president Lori Anderson enthusiastically.) Nor does he always fill all the seats when he speaks, but this is what sacrifice is all about, right? And his message is surely invaluable. To wit:
"One of the things I learned about communications is you need to keep it very direct, very straightforward, simple, and you need to be repetitive with it. People need to hear a consistency in your message over time. Don’t worry about trying to say something dramatically different every time you talk to people because if they hear the same message enough times it’s actually very reassuring that you are consistent in the direction you’re trying to take the organization."
Think of Stanley McChrystal, then, as the military version of a self-made celebrity. Next year Barbara Walters?
Lewis Lapham, who for years edited and introduced each issue of Harper’s Magazine, now does the same at Lapham’s Quarterly, a gem of a publication that, four times a year, unites around a single topic the most provocative, original voices in history. (You can subscribe to it by clicking here.) Its newest issue focuses on celebrity, now evidently almost as available to generals as to movie stars, and is introduced by a longer version of the following essay. We thank that magazine’s editors for allowing us to preview it at TomDispatch. Tom
Domesticated Deities
About Messiahs Come to Redeem Our Country, Not Govern It (and Don’t Forget Marilyn and Elvis and Jackie O and Diana and Oprah and Brangelina and David Hasselhoff)
By Lewis Lapham
[A longer version of this essay appears in "Celebrity," the Winter 2011 issue of Lapham's Quarterly and is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]
Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.
-- William Shakespeare
Label celebrity a consumer society’s most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society’s art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion. Such a society is the one that America has been attempting to make for itself since John F. Kennedy was king in Camelot, and the collective effort -- nearly 50 years of dancing with the stars under the disco balls in Hollywood, Washington, and Wall Street -- deserves an appreciation of the historical antecedents.
Associate celebrity with the worship of graven images, and not only is it nothing new under the sun, it is the pretension to divinity that built the pyramids and destroyed both Sodom and Julius Caesar. The vanity of princes is an old story; so is the wish for kings and the gazing into the pool of Narcissus. The precious cargo that was Cleopatra, queen in Egypt, was carried on the Nile in a golden boat rowed with silver oars, its decks laden with the music of flutes and lyres, its sails worked by women dressed as nymphs and graces.
The son et lumières presented by Louis XIV in the palace of Versailles and by Adolf Hitler in the stadium at Nuremberg prefigure the Colorado rock-star staging of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential nomination. Nor do the profile pictures on Facebook lack for timeworn precedent. During the three centuries between the death of Alexander and the birth of Christ, the cities of Asia Minor were littered with tributes to an exalted self. Wealthy individuals aspiring to apotheosis in bronze acquired first a prominent vantage point and then a prefabricated torso representative of a goddess or a general. A flattering hand fitted the custom-tailored head; as with the cover photographs for Vanity Fair, prices varied according to the power of the image to draw a crowd.
The Rule of Images
The historical variables testify to the presence of the constant, which is the human hope or dream of immortality, but they don’t account for the broad-spreading glory that disperses to nothing. That achievement was reserved for the mechanical genius of the twentieth century that equipped the manufacturers of celebrity with the movie camera, the radio broadcast, the high-speed newspaper press, and the television screen. The historian Daniel Boorstin attributed the subsequent bull market in “artificial fame” to the imbalance between the limited supply of gods and heroes to be found in nature and the limitless demand for their appearance on a newsstand.
Perceptions of the world furnished by the camera substitute montage for narrative, reprogram the dimensions of space and time, restore a primitive belief in magic, employ a vocabulary better suited to a highway billboard or the telling of a fairy tale than to the languages of history and literature. The camera sees but doesn’t think. Whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, the object of its affection doesn’t matter; what matters is the surge and volume of emotion that it engenders and evokes, the floods of consciousness drawn as willingly to a blood bath in Afghanistan as to a bubble bath in Paris. As the habits of mind beholden to the rule of images come to replace the structures of thought derived from the meaning of words, the constant viewer eliminates the association of cause with effect, learns that nothing necessarily follows from anything else.
In place of the gods who once commanded the heights of Mount Olympus, the media present a repertory company of animated tropes enthroned on a never-ending talk show, anointed with the oil of sweet celebrity, disgorging showers of gold. It doesn’t matter that they say nothing of interest or consequence. Neither did Aphrodite or Zeus.
Celebrity is about being, not becoming. Once possessed of the sovereign power to find a buyer, all celebrity is royal. The images of wealth and power demand nothing of their votaries other than the duty of ritual obeisance. The will to learn gives way to a being in the know, which is the instant recognition of the thousands of logos encountered in the course of a day’s shopping and an evening’s programming.
The multitasking accelerates the happy return to the old-school notion of fauns and satyrs concealed within a waterfall or willow tree. Celebrities of various magnitudes become the familiar spirits of insurance policies and shaving creams, breathe the gift of life into tubes of deodorant, awaken with their personal touch the spirit dormant in the color of a lipstick or a bottle of perfume. The wishful thinking moves the merchandise, accounts not only for high-end appearance fees ($3 million to Mariah Carey to attend a party; $15,000 for five minutes in the presence of Donald Trump), but also for the Wall Street market in nonexistent derivatives and the weapons of mass destruction gone missing in Iraq.
Smiles of Infinite Bliss
Transposed into the realm of politics, the greater images of celebrity bestow an aura of stability and calm upon a world disfigured by the frown lines of death and time. The headlines bring word of earthquake in Haiti, banditry in Washington, famine in Somalia, but on the smooth and reassuring surfaces of People and Extra, the smiles of infinite bliss, as steady in their courses as the fixed stars, hold at bay the threat of change and the fear of Mexico and Allah.
There they all are -- Marilyn and Elvis and Jackie together with Oprah and Brangelina and Barack -- a little company of domesticated deities standing in for the lares and penates who sheltered the households of ancient Rome. What get lost are the lines of reason and a faith in government administered by mere mortals.
Einstein once observed that the beauty as well as the truth of science consists precisely in its impersonality; the same can be said of law and government. The founders of the American republic assumed that otherwise ordinary men -- if given the instruments of law and institutions governing the uses of those laws -- can be trusted to conduct the business of the state. Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop expressed the eighteenth-century sentiment accurately if somewhat condescendingly when he described President Richard Nixon as “a workable plumbing fixture.”
The sentiment didn’t survive the Watergate scandals and the disgrace of the Vietnam War. The less that it is understood what politicians do, the more compelling the need to clothe them in an aura like Andy Warhol’s, one that “you can only see… on people you don’t know very well or don’t know at all.” In congressional committee rooms, as on Hollywood banquettes and Wall Street tip sheets, names take precedence over things, the private story over the public act. On air and online, the news from Washington for the most part consists of gossip, suggesting that politics is largely a matter of who said what to whom on the way out of a summit conference or into a men’s room.
Barbara Walters adopted the tone and pose of a rock band groupie when interviewing the newly elected President Jimmy Carter in the fall of 1976. “Be wise with us, Governor,” she said. “Be good to us.” Not a request addressed to a fellow citizen, but as with the begging of a golf ball from Tiger Woods or the offering of a pudendum to the members of Mötley Crüe, the propitiation of a god.
Carter acknowledged the petition with the benign smile befitting the image that was the entire substance of his campaign, that of the Messiah come to redeem the country, not to govern it. Four years later Ronald Reagan mounted a cowboy-hatted variant of the same message on a white horse. Barack Obama in 2008 scored the apostolic music for gospel choir and guitar, but to notice that he failed to work the miracle of the loaves and fishes is to miss the point, like noticing that David Hasselhoff can neither sing nor dance. The author of two best-selling book-length self-promotions, Obama was elected by virtue of his celebrity, a commodity meant to be sold at the supermarket with the cosmetics and the canned soup, elevated to the office of a totem pole.
Modern Monarchs Eaten Alive
So too the nineteenth-century kings of England after the British throne had been shorn of its political strength and reduced to an expensive ornament. Remarking on what remained of the reverence for monarchy in 1823, William Hazlitt likened it to “a natural infirmity, a disease, a false appetite in the popular feeling, which must be gratified.” The dream-buying public wants a “peg or loop to hang its idle fancies on, a puppet to dress up, a lay figure to paint from.” The idol is best made from poor or worthless raw material because it is then subject to the whim of its manufacturer.
The bargain is a Faustian one. The media affix price tags to carcasses of temporary divinity, but in return for the gifts of fame and riches, they require the king of the month or the queen for a day to make themselves available to the ritual for the public feast. What was once a subject becomes an object, a burnt offering placed on the altar of publicity.
Diana, princess of Wales, died in Paris shortly before dawn on August 31, 1997, and less than an hour later in Cape Town, South Africa, the news media sought from her brother, Charles, 9th Earl Spencer, a truffle of marketable grief. He refused the request, saying instead that he always knew “[t]he press would kill her in the end,” that “[e]very proprietor and editor of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her… has blood on their hands today.”
The earl knew whereof he spoke. Having once worked as a correspondent for NBC in London, he would have guessed that in Tokyo and Madrid the news media already had begun to cut and splice his dead sister into strips of videotape and fillets of twelve-point type. Diana was a celebrity of the most nourishing type, a born nonentity avid for the limelight because she hoped to find the needle of her self in the haystack of her press clippings. Together with her brilliant smile and despite her having received a fair share of fortune’s party favors -- youth, beauty, pretty dresses, a prince for a husband, Elton John for a pet -- she projected a sense of loneliness and loss. Her fans cherished her neediness, which was as desperate and as formless as their own.
Maybe the earl also remembered something of his reading of the Homeric poems. He had attended Eton and Oxford, two schools still acquainted with the study of classical antiquity, and it’s conceivable that in the media’s terms of endearment he recognized the debt owed to the very ancient Greeks, who allowed their sacred kings to rule in Thebes for a single triumphant year before putting them to death in order that their blood might fructify the crops and fields.
The last 3,000 years have brought refinements, the editors of The National Enquirer improving upon the old ways of preparing the sacrificial meats and arranging their distribution to the suppliants crowding around the entrails. Before noon on the day of Diana’s death, a thousand gossip columnists had spitted her memory on skewers of solid-gold cliché. By nightfall the television producers assembling the long goodbyes had wrapped up in two-hour segments the images that had been the empty shadow of her life -- Diana in her wedding carriage, Diana carrying a black child or riding a white horse, Diana in the harbor at Saint-Tropez on an Egyptian’s gilded barge.
At the hour of the rising moon it remained only for the anchorpersons, Barbara Walters among them, to step forward into the studio light and pour out the wine of glistening bathos. It didn’t matter what anybody said, because even the tellers of the most intimate tales were talking not about a human being but about a golden mask behind which they were free to imagine themselves dressed up as Cleopatra or Snow White.
Celebrity Is Money with a Human Face
Akin to the making of sausage or violin strings, the manufacture of celebrity is not a pretty sight -- as was noted by Bob Dylan in the midst of an adoring crowd, “I felt like a piece of meat that someone had thrown to the dogs” -- but not all the contracts exact a pound of flesh. Sometimes the fatted calf need only consent to a loss of freedom, of mind as well as movement. Incarcerated within the packaging of an image, the commodity in question loses the capacity for anything other than prerecorded speech, goes nowhere except in the company of a telephoto lens.
The fallen idol sells as many papers as the rising star, but God forbid that the product should lack the ingredients listed on the label. Were Sarah Palin to suffer a change of heart -- maybe read a history book, possibly take instruction from a dictionary or an atlas -- her image would lose its currency, risk being shelved in a supermarket aisle with the soda water and the bathroom fragrance.
Like the camera, the market moves but doesn’t think, drawn as willingly to the production of nuclear warheads as to the growing of oranges or grapes. It doesn’t recognize such a thing as a poor celebrity. Celebrity is money with a human face, the “pegs” and “loops” on which to hang the dream of riches. Bipartisan and nondenominational, the hero with a thousand faces unfortunately doesn’t evolve into a human being. Let money become the seat of power and the font of wisdom, and the story ends with an economy gone bankrupt, an army that wins no wars, and a politics composed of brightly colored balloons.
To accept the price of a thing as certificate of its character and worth is to substitute the word for the deed. A further proof of Gresham’s law, the bad money driving out the good, degrading the distinction between the life courageously lived and the life heroically publicized. Because the lesson of an exemplary life unfolds over a period of time that doesn’t fit between the Viagra commercial and the top-of-the-hour station break, the constant viewer accustomed to the handling of disposable goods learns to discount the currency of human greatness, to distrust the tenders of mortal truth and beauty, loses sight of the nondisposable stars that might prompt a looking up from the wonder of his or her own navel.
Too much of Boorstin’s “artificial fame” in the atmosphere lastly can be compared to carbon emissions leaking from a volatile organic compound that is by its nature toxic. Given the media’s personal devotion both to the golden and the fatted calf, I don’t think we can expect enactment of a clean-air standard or some sort of system of cap and trade.
On the national cultural circuits, as among the political camp followers feeding on the spectacle of a presidential election campaign, the mere mention of money in sufficient quantity (a $100 million divorce settlement, a $787 billion federal stimulus) excites the same response as a sighting of George Clooney. Eventually the society chokes itself to death on rancid hype. Which probably is why on passing a newsstand these days I think of funeral parlors and Tutankhamen’s tomb. The celebrities pictured on the covers of the magazines line up as if in a row of ceremonial grave goods, exquisitely prepared for burial within the tomb of a democratic republic that died of eating disco balls.
Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Lapham’s Quarterly. Formerly editor of Harper’s Magazine, he is the author of numerous books, including Money and Class in America, Theater of War, Gag Rule, and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire. The New York Times has likened him to H.L. Mencken; Vanity Fair has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe has compared him to Montaigne. This essay introduces "Celebrity," the Winter 2011 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
Copyright 2010 Lewis Lapham
© 2010 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175331/
By Lewis Lapham
Posted on December 12, 2010, Printed on December 12, 2010
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175331/
Let’s consider for a moment the fates of two men who took unique paths in military life and whose careers were once intertwined: General David Petraeus, now our Afghan War commander, and his former subordinate General Stanley McChrystal, our former Afghan War commander before he became the first general since Douglas MacArthur to be axed by a president -- in his case, for a Rolling Stone version of “loose lips sink ships” (or administrations). Petraeus, the most political U.S. general in memory, dusted off the failed counterinsurgency doctrine of the Vietnam era, made it bright and shiny again, built fabulous relationships in Congress and in militarized Washington think tanks, and then rode it all to the heights in Iraq and at U.S. Central Command. Now, in Afghanistan, without the slightest compunction, he's left his beloved counterinsurgency doctrine in a ditch as conditions on the ground worsen. Instead, he’s called in the firepower and the propaganda, both in double measure. (Oh, and in case you hadn't heard, we’ve finally achieved glorious victory in the godforsaken village of Marjah in southern Afghanistan where a senior Marine general recently announced that the battle against the Taliban there is “essentially over.” Huzzah!)
Thanks to such a string of dazzling “successes,” Petraeus has scaled the heights of American celebrity. Just the other day, he reached Mount-McKinley-esque elevations (with Everest still ahead) when ABC’s Barbara Walters declared him not just an “American hero” (though that, too), but the Most Fascinating Person of 2010! He topped a list which included Justin Bieber, Sarah Palin, and future British princess Kate Middleton, possibly because he has so much more bling than they do.
McChrystal might not seem such a happy story. Running teams of Special Operations assassins for years from the shadows in Iraq and Afghanistan -- hardly the sort of thing likely to lead to American celebrity -- he became Afghan War commander under Centcom commander Petraeus in 2009. The Taliban, however, seemed to surge faster than his forces did and he was even saddled with responsibility for approving Afghan peace talks with (and “goodwill payments” to) a Taliban impostor. Then, of course, he presided over a group of hard-drinking aides, deeply frustrated by the war they were so unsuccessfully fighting, who mouthed off to that Rolling Stone reporter about the Obama administration, et voilà, he was out on his ear. Open to him, then, it seemed was only the usual grim route for retired generals: a quick trip through that fast-twirling military-industrial revolving door, pension in hand, to a lobbying job at an elevated salary with a defense contractor and maybe even a “senior mentorship” at the Pentagon.
But such a man was not Stanley McChrystal. Pulling himself up by his combat boot straps, he took another path. He started by accepting a post at Yale University teaching a seminar in “leadership”; then, he signed on with a "world class" speaker’s bureau called Leading Authorities, and next thing you know he’s on the talk circuit offering “Four-Star Strategy Lessons” for a fee that can hit $60,000 a pop (plus travel expenses and lodging for three). Alright, it’s not all glory like in Marjah. He does, for instance, have to grit his teeth and give the keynote address at the International Sign Association’s Expo 2011. (“While the majority of our educational and networking events are directly related to the sign industry, Gen. McChrystal will offer valuable insight into leadership during difficult times,” says ISA president Lori Anderson enthusiastically.) Nor does he always fill all the seats when he speaks, but this is what sacrifice is all about, right? And his message is surely invaluable. To wit:
"One of the things I learned about communications is you need to keep it very direct, very straightforward, simple, and you need to be repetitive with it. People need to hear a consistency in your message over time. Don’t worry about trying to say something dramatically different every time you talk to people because if they hear the same message enough times it’s actually very reassuring that you are consistent in the direction you’re trying to take the organization."
Think of Stanley McChrystal, then, as the military version of a self-made celebrity. Next year Barbara Walters?
Lewis Lapham, who for years edited and introduced each issue of Harper’s Magazine, now does the same at Lapham’s Quarterly, a gem of a publication that, four times a year, unites around a single topic the most provocative, original voices in history. (You can subscribe to it by clicking here.) Its newest issue focuses on celebrity, now evidently almost as available to generals as to movie stars, and is introduced by a longer version of the following essay. We thank that magazine’s editors for allowing us to preview it at TomDispatch. Tom
Domesticated Deities
About Messiahs Come to Redeem Our Country, Not Govern It (and Don’t Forget Marilyn and Elvis and Jackie O and Diana and Oprah and Brangelina and David Hasselhoff)
By Lewis Lapham
[A longer version of this essay appears in "Celebrity," the Winter 2011 issue of Lapham's Quarterly and is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]
Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.
-- William Shakespeare
Label celebrity a consumer society’s most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society’s art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion. Such a society is the one that America has been attempting to make for itself since John F. Kennedy was king in Camelot, and the collective effort -- nearly 50 years of dancing with the stars under the disco balls in Hollywood, Washington, and Wall Street -- deserves an appreciation of the historical antecedents.
Associate celebrity with the worship of graven images, and not only is it nothing new under the sun, it is the pretension to divinity that built the pyramids and destroyed both Sodom and Julius Caesar. The vanity of princes is an old story; so is the wish for kings and the gazing into the pool of Narcissus. The precious cargo that was Cleopatra, queen in Egypt, was carried on the Nile in a golden boat rowed with silver oars, its decks laden with the music of flutes and lyres, its sails worked by women dressed as nymphs and graces.
The son et lumières presented by Louis XIV in the palace of Versailles and by Adolf Hitler in the stadium at Nuremberg prefigure the Colorado rock-star staging of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential nomination. Nor do the profile pictures on Facebook lack for timeworn precedent. During the three centuries between the death of Alexander and the birth of Christ, the cities of Asia Minor were littered with tributes to an exalted self. Wealthy individuals aspiring to apotheosis in bronze acquired first a prominent vantage point and then a prefabricated torso representative of a goddess or a general. A flattering hand fitted the custom-tailored head; as with the cover photographs for Vanity Fair, prices varied according to the power of the image to draw a crowd.
The Rule of Images
The historical variables testify to the presence of the constant, which is the human hope or dream of immortality, but they don’t account for the broad-spreading glory that disperses to nothing. That achievement was reserved for the mechanical genius of the twentieth century that equipped the manufacturers of celebrity with the movie camera, the radio broadcast, the high-speed newspaper press, and the television screen. The historian Daniel Boorstin attributed the subsequent bull market in “artificial fame” to the imbalance between the limited supply of gods and heroes to be found in nature and the limitless demand for their appearance on a newsstand.
Perceptions of the world furnished by the camera substitute montage for narrative, reprogram the dimensions of space and time, restore a primitive belief in magic, employ a vocabulary better suited to a highway billboard or the telling of a fairy tale than to the languages of history and literature. The camera sees but doesn’t think. Whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, the object of its affection doesn’t matter; what matters is the surge and volume of emotion that it engenders and evokes, the floods of consciousness drawn as willingly to a blood bath in Afghanistan as to a bubble bath in Paris. As the habits of mind beholden to the rule of images come to replace the structures of thought derived from the meaning of words, the constant viewer eliminates the association of cause with effect, learns that nothing necessarily follows from anything else.
In place of the gods who once commanded the heights of Mount Olympus, the media present a repertory company of animated tropes enthroned on a never-ending talk show, anointed with the oil of sweet celebrity, disgorging showers of gold. It doesn’t matter that they say nothing of interest or consequence. Neither did Aphrodite or Zeus.
Celebrity is about being, not becoming. Once possessed of the sovereign power to find a buyer, all celebrity is royal. The images of wealth and power demand nothing of their votaries other than the duty of ritual obeisance. The will to learn gives way to a being in the know, which is the instant recognition of the thousands of logos encountered in the course of a day’s shopping and an evening’s programming.
The multitasking accelerates the happy return to the old-school notion of fauns and satyrs concealed within a waterfall or willow tree. Celebrities of various magnitudes become the familiar spirits of insurance policies and shaving creams, breathe the gift of life into tubes of deodorant, awaken with their personal touch the spirit dormant in the color of a lipstick or a bottle of perfume. The wishful thinking moves the merchandise, accounts not only for high-end appearance fees ($3 million to Mariah Carey to attend a party; $15,000 for five minutes in the presence of Donald Trump), but also for the Wall Street market in nonexistent derivatives and the weapons of mass destruction gone missing in Iraq.
Smiles of Infinite Bliss
Transposed into the realm of politics, the greater images of celebrity bestow an aura of stability and calm upon a world disfigured by the frown lines of death and time. The headlines bring word of earthquake in Haiti, banditry in Washington, famine in Somalia, but on the smooth and reassuring surfaces of People and Extra, the smiles of infinite bliss, as steady in their courses as the fixed stars, hold at bay the threat of change and the fear of Mexico and Allah.
There they all are -- Marilyn and Elvis and Jackie together with Oprah and Brangelina and Barack -- a little company of domesticated deities standing in for the lares and penates who sheltered the households of ancient Rome. What get lost are the lines of reason and a faith in government administered by mere mortals.
Einstein once observed that the beauty as well as the truth of science consists precisely in its impersonality; the same can be said of law and government. The founders of the American republic assumed that otherwise ordinary men -- if given the instruments of law and institutions governing the uses of those laws -- can be trusted to conduct the business of the state. Syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop expressed the eighteenth-century sentiment accurately if somewhat condescendingly when he described President Richard Nixon as “a workable plumbing fixture.”
The sentiment didn’t survive the Watergate scandals and the disgrace of the Vietnam War. The less that it is understood what politicians do, the more compelling the need to clothe them in an aura like Andy Warhol’s, one that “you can only see… on people you don’t know very well or don’t know at all.” In congressional committee rooms, as on Hollywood banquettes and Wall Street tip sheets, names take precedence over things, the private story over the public act. On air and online, the news from Washington for the most part consists of gossip, suggesting that politics is largely a matter of who said what to whom on the way out of a summit conference or into a men’s room.
Barbara Walters adopted the tone and pose of a rock band groupie when interviewing the newly elected President Jimmy Carter in the fall of 1976. “Be wise with us, Governor,” she said. “Be good to us.” Not a request addressed to a fellow citizen, but as with the begging of a golf ball from Tiger Woods or the offering of a pudendum to the members of Mötley Crüe, the propitiation of a god.
Carter acknowledged the petition with the benign smile befitting the image that was the entire substance of his campaign, that of the Messiah come to redeem the country, not to govern it. Four years later Ronald Reagan mounted a cowboy-hatted variant of the same message on a white horse. Barack Obama in 2008 scored the apostolic music for gospel choir and guitar, but to notice that he failed to work the miracle of the loaves and fishes is to miss the point, like noticing that David Hasselhoff can neither sing nor dance. The author of two best-selling book-length self-promotions, Obama was elected by virtue of his celebrity, a commodity meant to be sold at the supermarket with the cosmetics and the canned soup, elevated to the office of a totem pole.
Modern Monarchs Eaten Alive
So too the nineteenth-century kings of England after the British throne had been shorn of its political strength and reduced to an expensive ornament. Remarking on what remained of the reverence for monarchy in 1823, William Hazlitt likened it to “a natural infirmity, a disease, a false appetite in the popular feeling, which must be gratified.” The dream-buying public wants a “peg or loop to hang its idle fancies on, a puppet to dress up, a lay figure to paint from.” The idol is best made from poor or worthless raw material because it is then subject to the whim of its manufacturer.
The bargain is a Faustian one. The media affix price tags to carcasses of temporary divinity, but in return for the gifts of fame and riches, they require the king of the month or the queen for a day to make themselves available to the ritual for the public feast. What was once a subject becomes an object, a burnt offering placed on the altar of publicity.
Diana, princess of Wales, died in Paris shortly before dawn on August 31, 1997, and less than an hour later in Cape Town, South Africa, the news media sought from her brother, Charles, 9th Earl Spencer, a truffle of marketable grief. He refused the request, saying instead that he always knew “[t]he press would kill her in the end,” that “[e]very proprietor and editor of every publication that has paid for intrusive and exploitative photographs of her… has blood on their hands today.”
The earl knew whereof he spoke. Having once worked as a correspondent for NBC in London, he would have guessed that in Tokyo and Madrid the news media already had begun to cut and splice his dead sister into strips of videotape and fillets of twelve-point type. Diana was a celebrity of the most nourishing type, a born nonentity avid for the limelight because she hoped to find the needle of her self in the haystack of her press clippings. Together with her brilliant smile and despite her having received a fair share of fortune’s party favors -- youth, beauty, pretty dresses, a prince for a husband, Elton John for a pet -- she projected a sense of loneliness and loss. Her fans cherished her neediness, which was as desperate and as formless as their own.
Maybe the earl also remembered something of his reading of the Homeric poems. He had attended Eton and Oxford, two schools still acquainted with the study of classical antiquity, and it’s conceivable that in the media’s terms of endearment he recognized the debt owed to the very ancient Greeks, who allowed their sacred kings to rule in Thebes for a single triumphant year before putting them to death in order that their blood might fructify the crops and fields.
The last 3,000 years have brought refinements, the editors of The National Enquirer improving upon the old ways of preparing the sacrificial meats and arranging their distribution to the suppliants crowding around the entrails. Before noon on the day of Diana’s death, a thousand gossip columnists had spitted her memory on skewers of solid-gold cliché. By nightfall the television producers assembling the long goodbyes had wrapped up in two-hour segments the images that had been the empty shadow of her life -- Diana in her wedding carriage, Diana carrying a black child or riding a white horse, Diana in the harbor at Saint-Tropez on an Egyptian’s gilded barge.
At the hour of the rising moon it remained only for the anchorpersons, Barbara Walters among them, to step forward into the studio light and pour out the wine of glistening bathos. It didn’t matter what anybody said, because even the tellers of the most intimate tales were talking not about a human being but about a golden mask behind which they were free to imagine themselves dressed up as Cleopatra or Snow White.
Celebrity Is Money with a Human Face
Akin to the making of sausage or violin strings, the manufacture of celebrity is not a pretty sight -- as was noted by Bob Dylan in the midst of an adoring crowd, “I felt like a piece of meat that someone had thrown to the dogs” -- but not all the contracts exact a pound of flesh. Sometimes the fatted calf need only consent to a loss of freedom, of mind as well as movement. Incarcerated within the packaging of an image, the commodity in question loses the capacity for anything other than prerecorded speech, goes nowhere except in the company of a telephoto lens.
The fallen idol sells as many papers as the rising star, but God forbid that the product should lack the ingredients listed on the label. Were Sarah Palin to suffer a change of heart -- maybe read a history book, possibly take instruction from a dictionary or an atlas -- her image would lose its currency, risk being shelved in a supermarket aisle with the soda water and the bathroom fragrance.
Like the camera, the market moves but doesn’t think, drawn as willingly to the production of nuclear warheads as to the growing of oranges or grapes. It doesn’t recognize such a thing as a poor celebrity. Celebrity is money with a human face, the “pegs” and “loops” on which to hang the dream of riches. Bipartisan and nondenominational, the hero with a thousand faces unfortunately doesn’t evolve into a human being. Let money become the seat of power and the font of wisdom, and the story ends with an economy gone bankrupt, an army that wins no wars, and a politics composed of brightly colored balloons.
To accept the price of a thing as certificate of its character and worth is to substitute the word for the deed. A further proof of Gresham’s law, the bad money driving out the good, degrading the distinction between the life courageously lived and the life heroically publicized. Because the lesson of an exemplary life unfolds over a period of time that doesn’t fit between the Viagra commercial and the top-of-the-hour station break, the constant viewer accustomed to the handling of disposable goods learns to discount the currency of human greatness, to distrust the tenders of mortal truth and beauty, loses sight of the nondisposable stars that might prompt a looking up from the wonder of his or her own navel.
Too much of Boorstin’s “artificial fame” in the atmosphere lastly can be compared to carbon emissions leaking from a volatile organic compound that is by its nature toxic. Given the media’s personal devotion both to the golden and the fatted calf, I don’t think we can expect enactment of a clean-air standard or some sort of system of cap and trade.
On the national cultural circuits, as among the political camp followers feeding on the spectacle of a presidential election campaign, the mere mention of money in sufficient quantity (a $100 million divorce settlement, a $787 billion federal stimulus) excites the same response as a sighting of George Clooney. Eventually the society chokes itself to death on rancid hype. Which probably is why on passing a newsstand these days I think of funeral parlors and Tutankhamen’s tomb. The celebrities pictured on the covers of the magazines line up as if in a row of ceremonial grave goods, exquisitely prepared for burial within the tomb of a democratic republic that died of eating disco balls.
Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Lapham’s Quarterly. Formerly editor of Harper’s Magazine, he is the author of numerous books, including Money and Class in America, Theater of War, Gag Rule, and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire. The New York Times has likened him to H.L. Mencken; Vanity Fair has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe has compared him to Montaigne. This essay introduces "Celebrity," the Winter 2011 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
Copyright 2010 Lewis Lapham
© 2010 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175331/
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