[THS] !!!! Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Sweet Celebrity

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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175331/tomgram%3A__lewis_lapham%2C_sweet_celebrity/

Tomgram: Lewis Lapham, Sweet Celebrity
Posted by Lewis Lapham at 4:43pm, December 12, 2010.

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