News and Celebrity, History and Myth, Admiration and Suffocation
Do you ever have the sensation that your mental processes are choked and suffocated by an ozone cloud of media? I worry that much of the information I receive, many ideas and issues I consider, and emotions I feel are not actually my own, but have entered my brain from the radio, television, newspapers and magazines to which I am exposed. Due to the support I get from a willing network of media-addicts, I am encouraged to go about my life and let the media think for me. It seems like a cozy arrangement, but the danger is apparent. I may be abuzz with thoughts, feelings, and opinions, and believe I am their author, when I am only their conduit. If I stop thinking on my own for any period of time, can I do it again? This is no cantankerous, luddite concern, but one based in physiology and pharmacology.
When a man has prostate cancer he can be given a course of luprolide acetate, an androgen blockade, more bluntly called “chemical castration.” This is how it works. By flooding his system with a drug that induces a surfeit of testosterone, the androgen blockade tricks the pituitary into shutting down the patient’s own testosterone-production, thus depriving the tumor of one of its favorite foods. But once the therapy is over, there is no guarantee that the patient’s testosterone factory will resume production. Good for the patient, not so good for the man.
A steady infusion of media can have a similar effect on a human brain. If I depend too heavily on the media to deliver food for thought, what happens when the power shuts down and the infusion stops? Will my thinking revive? Will I be able to produce one original idea? If no thoughts or feelings come, will I be lost? Or will I recall and recycle tatters of thoughts and feelings left over from media feasts and through repetition and fragmented memory remodel the information as my own? If so, I will be in the company of my ancestors, the cave painters and story-tellers, because this is a plausible model for how history and myth evolved in their minds aeons ago.
The media also fulfill this role. They serve--appropriate--a natural purpose, feeding and relieving our imaginations, reminding us always of what is real and possible. They are our collective shamanic storytellers, whose daily sap hardens into the amber of enduring truth. For this reason, I am less rancorous about media, its productions, deceptions, and creations. I am enthralled to witness history and myth being formulated from the news and celebrity gossip which media provide. The Hebrews, Greeks, Indians, Aztecs and other peoples created figures and stories and we cannot be certain how long it took them to devise. We call them myths, suggesting they were fictitious. But they must have been based on actual people and situations, like OJ's white bronco or baseball players' steroid use. Later Sigmund Freud gave the tales credence when he cited them as paradigms of behavior and relationships. Now, in the daily barrage of media news and celebrity making I see in real time how the history and myths were made.
According to Freud and other observers, America is a society whose culture suffers from a deficiency of history and myth. Yet, what America lacks in tradition, we more than compensate for with industry. Freud did not estimate the power of American media to create out of the immense, raw resources of America a history and mythology in the same manner that the robber barons laid rails and poured steel. In the venal and practical task of informing and entertaining us, the media serve a greater purpose than they know. They feed our bottomless appetites with the stuff of which our history and myths will be made--if we and our descendents remember them. Under the “truths” they sell is the truth they tell. Even their trivial stories bely a mundane profundity because they tell us what we want, what we fear, and what we are.
Today’s media makers may be no less than scribes of this culture’s sacred texts, inscribing for the ages what our culture holds most dear and most true. However, many thoughtful people have reasons to doubt it. They adduce the inordinate focus on the vacuous exploits of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, of Tom and Katie and Brangelina, and Bill and Hillary as worthless gossip that pander not to intelligence but stupidity, not to pyschic wealth but moral bankruptcy, Similarly, the generations who rolled out of the previous century as if it were no more than a teenager's dissheveled bed, roll their eyes at the Vietnam War and the 60s. The media critics in both cases deny, ignore or resist the transformation of news and celebrity into history and myth in real time.
Decadent pop stars will never need to rent a place in the pantheon; they own their spot. These mortal avatars of reckless gods bring us a new message of an old truth, that creativity is wrapped in destruction. Dissipation is the self-sacrifice artists make on the altar of society; their excesses spurn and confirm the restraints of an obedient public. It is the awful price of being different. By the same token, anyone who witnessed the transformation of Vietnam from news to history understands how history is made. We’ve been on the field trip, seen the documentaries and visited the monuments, spoken to the survivors and heard the testimony of a presidential candidate.
Vietnam’s historical prominence rests on its status as a template and taboo. America’s greatest test of virtue is competition; we venerate success and despise failure. By this token, Vietnam is a taboo event, a war lost at terrible cost. There is no larger tragedy in America than the paradox of giving so much for nothing, of crushing, irredeemable loss. Meanwhile, Vietnam is the prototype for a succession of similar conflicts—in Lebanon, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan—characterized dubious objectives, loss of life, and nebulous results. Vietnam fulfills a requirement of history—it is both factual and symbolic.
Equal to the immediacy and speed with which the news travels to us is the speed with which it degrades to trivia. The velocity of the present propels past events into distant memory. Ten years feels like a hundred and recent history by academic standards is prehistoric on the street. For this reason, history must be compiled, compounded, compressed from multitudes of reports and impressions. History results from a constant renewal of news—headline upon headline, bulletin by bulletin, story after story, repeated day after day and every decade.
History is no residue, but a chiseled imprint on collective memory. Interminable repetition is necessary to fortify memory since without it, information dies, leaving traces, but no voice. And with no voice, facts are mute artifacts. They no longer witness truth, but invite interpretation. Americans have been cited for having a short collective memory, and the media’s insistence on dumping tons of information on our minds each day places a huge burden of time, space, and energy on memory. The media gives us history by day, and forgetfulness by night. What are we left with? To maintain memory, and interpret history becomes an individual challenge and responsibility. Each of us must transmit what we remember to anyone willing to hear.
Our insatiable need for news and celebrity is the sensational, preliminary phase of a more powerful need to create myth and history. It is a relationship parallel to sex and procreation; ripping immortality from the loins of our titillated minds. Like any human I am fascinated by the process, yet fearful of how easily media bypass and override my thinking apparatus. Although the brain may be a permeable and interactive medium like the psychologist, Herbert Meade’s “Looking Glass Self”, in constant exchange with the media, the myth-and-history making machine is so loud and ubiquitous that it does not permit interaction and evaluation, but compels submission to its messages. It forces consciousness undercover for protection.
Alzheimer’s and dementia are duly frightening. Memory and consciousness determine who we are as other body organs do not. They define identity, individuality and freedom. Yet, physiological illness is not the only threat to our minds. The ways in which our thinking can be infiltrated and controlled are insidious. There are no blood tests, EKGs or stool samples to determine a loss of thinking or emotional autonomy. No doctor will ask if you have had an original idea or ask you to think into a cup. You must be able to diagnose it yourself, not with a stethoscope to your ear, but by waiting for the words that emerge from darkness.