Pop89: Home Truths
By Madonna Hamel
Why want to be rich and famous? I used to ask my friends in art school. Isn't that a hindrance to freedom? If you get caught up in what gets attention, what gets sold for big bucks, don't you start making anticipatory art - a kind of creativity based on popularity and not the dictates of your deeper creative yearnings, the promptings of your soul? Art-making is not a supply and demand profession.
Perhaps we want to be rich and famous because it's the only way to be seen and heard. Is this our technological-cultural inheritance? The establishment of a new tradition? Now that there's a computer in every pocket (which is basically what a cell phone is ) billionaires and movie stars establish our world view with their opinions and philosophies and realities as far from our own as the moon from planet earth, which is why I read books. I prefer to form my opinions on information formed by authors who have dedicated their lives to a subject.
Just this morning, I checked out a book on the Enlightenment. The Age of Enlightenment was the precursor to our present age of progressivism. "We are enlightened, let us enlighten you," pronounced by the likes of Voltaire, Kant, and Descartes. I was struck how similar their words echo the self-proclaimed awakened pronouncement of the "woke" world.
But who am I? Well, I am not the guy in the bar repeating the latest 2-minute clip on Fox or CNN and believing I've got a handle on the world. As a former broadcaster, I know how to cut a clip. A reporter can change the entire context and meaning of a person's words by clipping carefully to fit the ideology of the news station. This is not new. What is new is: We have come to count on careful clipping tailored to our opinion so we won't be forced to consider, contemplate, think about each situation on a case-by-case basis. That's just too much work. Don't make me think- just convince me with your talk, which is why the rich and famous get so much air time. They are actors and salesmen; they entertain and convince us at the same time.
And yet, the majority of North Americans have more in common with each other than they do with the rich and famous. We never rub elbows with highly paid CEOs, Silicon Valley millionaires, media broadcasters, tenured professors, Hollywood actors, tele-evangelists and politicians. The rich and famous live in worlds so hived off, so radically different and separate from the pay-check-to-pay-check world, that they are able to maintain the illusion that they actually DO connect with, understand, represent, portray, and care for us. When Covid hit, we witnessed stars bragging about washing their own dishes, cooking their own meals, and styling their own hair. It became evident that "home" and "home life" were radically different for them than they were for us. In fact, most of them have more than one home, while some of us rent one-room apartments.
I recall another catastrophe when the press fell short of relating to the world at large. It was Katrina. I was touring with my ex, a blues musician. We'd just finished a show and were watching the news while we packed our suitcases to head out to our next gig. On the screen came images of cars streaming out of New Orleans. Newscasters in air-conditioned big city studios passed on warnings about an oncoming hurricane, advising people to get in their cars and leave the city. "And go where?" mumbled James. Forget disposable income for hotels; some folks don't own cars.
When I entered journalism through the non-lucrative portal of spoken word performance, I was taken aback by how eager younger reporters were to own their own homes in a tony part of town before they reached the age of thirty. They also owned new cars. God forbid you should sit in a subway car alongside the great unwashed masses. Even though those are the same people we, as journalists, are meant to serve, inform, give voice to. Being out of touch with the public surrounding them was of no concern.
I was surprised, also, how, fresh out of J School, they expected fame any time now. It wasn't their ambition that bothered me, but that fame was an end goal. A thirst for celebrity moves motivation from "What story needs to be told?" to "What story gets attention and makes headlines?" In the performing arts, I witnessed this thinking repeatedly manifested in young women looking for new ways of exposing more of their bodies in stranger and more "shocking," "edgy," and "transgressive" ways. Decade after decade, new troops adopt the age-old postures of temptress or masochist or dominatrix or nubile virgin. And every time, the salivating press assures them they're doing something new. Something ground-breaking and radical. It's a surefire attention grabber until you get fat or sick and, eventually, old.
The rich and famous are so out of touch with the rest of the world that they constantly insult us without knowing it. Recently, I watched an interview with the actors in Oppenheimer, the Oscar-clinching movie about the man who invented the atomic bomb. One of the actors joked about how they had to stay in the Holiday Inn Express, as if families didn't save all year to afford a few nights there. The joke went on for some time - you'd think they were forced to sleep in tents at the local campground.
So, who do we trust to give us insight into the world? Who are our guides? To whom do we turn to put First Things First and practice Sober Second Thought? Are we the elders - elders' cranky grandfathers hooked on porn and grandmas whining about the neighbour's lawn? Where are the wise ones closer to home?