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 Mà ¶tley Crà ¼e, 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."
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