Why We Are a "Celebrity-Riddled" Culture

Can you stand one more plug for Chris Hedges' weighty tome, Empire of Illusion? And a few more facts about how the banksters are stealing us blind (still)? I can't urge you enough to read it (and tell your friends). (Emphasis marks and some editing inserted - Ed.)

Celebrities are skillfully used by their handlers and the media to compensate for the increasingly degraded and regimented existences that most of us endure in a commodity culture. Celebrities tell us we can have our revenge. We can triumph. We can, one day, get back at the world that has belittled and abused us. It happens in the ring. It happens on television. It happens in the movies. It happens in the narrative of the Christian Right. It happens in pornography. It happens in the self-help manuals and on reality television. But it almost never happens in reality.

Celebrity is the vehicle used by a corporate society to sell us these branded commodities, most of which we do not need. Celebrities humanize commercial commodities. They present the familiar and comforting face of the corporate state. Supermodel Paulina Porizkova, on an episode of America’s Next Top Model, gushes to a group of aspiring young models, “Our job as models is to sell.” But they peddle a fake intimacy and a fantasy. The commercial “personalizing” of the world involves oversimplification, distraction, and gross distortion.

“We sink further into a dream of an unconsciously intimate world in which not only may a cat look at a king but a king is really a cat underneath, and all the great power-figures Honest Joes at heart,” Richard Hoggart warned in The Uses of Literacy. We do not learn more about Barack Obama by knowing what dog he has bought for his daughters or if he still smokes. This personalized trivia, passed off as news, diverts us from reality.

In his book Celebrity, Chris Rojeck calls celebrity culture “the cult of distraction that valorizes the superficial, the gaudy, the domination of commodity culture.” He goes further:

Capitalism originally sought to police play and pleasure, because any attempt to replace work as the central life interest threatened the economic survival of the system. The family, the state and religion engendered a variety of patterns of moral regulation to control desire and ensure compliance with the system of production. However, as capitalism developed, consumer culture and leisure time expanded. The principles that operated to repress the individual in the workplace and the home were extended to the shopping mall and recreational activity. The entertainment industry and consumer culture produced what Herbert Marcuse called ‘repressive desublimation.’ Through this process individuals unwittingly subscribed to the degraded version of humanity.

This cult of distraction, as Rojeck points out, masks the real disintegration of culture. It conceals the meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It seduces us to engage in imitative consumption. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, and economic collapse and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status and wealth has destroyed our souls and our economy. Families live in sprawling mansions financed with mortgages they can no longer repay. Consumers recklessly rang up Coach handbags and Manolo Blahnik shoes on credit cards because they seemed to confer a sense of identity and merit. Our favorite hobby, besides television, used to be, until reality hit us like a tsunami, shopping. Shopping used to be the compensation for spending five days a week in tiny cubicles. American workers are ground down by corporations who have disempowered them, used them, and have now discarded them.

Celebrities have fame free of responsibility. The fame of celebrities, wrote Mills, disguises those who possess true power: corporations and the oligarchic elite. Magical thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but of totalitarian culture. And as we sink into an economic and political morass, we are still controlled, manipulated and distracted by the celluloid shadows on the dark wall of Plato’s cave. The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep us from fighting back.

Read on (please) here. And from Swiftspeech! we have the following bankster getaway reporting: (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo today published a report entitled "'The Heads I Win, Tails You Lose' Bank Bonus Culture". The numbers tell their own story.

In 2008:* JPMorgan Chase: $25 billion in TARP funding, earned $5.6 billion, paid $8.69 billion in bonuses;* Goldman Sachs: $10 billion in TARP funding, earned $2.3 billion, paid $4.8 billion in bonuses;* Morgan Stanley: $10 billion in TARP funding, earned $1.7 billion, paid $4.5 billion in bonuses;* Citigroup: $45 billion in TARP funding, lost $27.7 billion, paid $5.33 billion in bonuses;* BoA/Merrill Lynch: $45 billion in TARP funding, lost $23.6 billion, paid $6.9 billion in bonuses.

In total, 4613 bankers and traders received bonuses of more than $1 million at these 5 financial institutions, all of which would in all probability have collapsed if not for taxpayer assistance. The TARP funding is by no means the only way they got access to the public trough. While some have returned TARP funds, the other types of funding, while there's no doubt they add up to a far higher total than the combined $135 billion in TARP funds, exist in a much more opaque territory. There are numbers available of what the banks received from the AIG bail-out: Goldman Sachs, for example, was handed $13 billion.

Suzan ________________

Empire of DisIllusion?

Chris Hedges' latest book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, is being discussed all over the literary universe right now and it's beautifully written and full of wonder. I recommend that you pick up a copy and read it. Be public spirited and request your local library to buy a few too. The following paragraphs spoke to me so loudly that I thought I'd share them with you. When I used to teach Business Administration management courses, I would point out the similarity of the traits of successful business people to those of raging psycho/sociopaths. My students would laugh out loud at the idea. In 2005, courtesy of a friend's largesse, I saw an enormously entertaining movie, Thank You For Smoking, which had been made from the book by Chris Buckley, directed by Jason Reitman and starring the winning Aaron Eckhart, whose M.O.D. (Merchants of Death) Squad made the point about who salespeople really were so well that I pledged to include it in my course the next time I got a teaching gig. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Celebrity culture plunges us into this moral void. No one has any worth beyond his or her appearance, usefulness, or ability to “succeed.” The highest achievements in a celebrity culture are wealth, sexual conquest, and fame. It does not matter how these are obtained. These values, as Sigmund Freud understood, are illusory. They are hollow. They leave us chasing vapors. They urge us toward a life of narcissistic self-absorption. They tell us that existence is to be centered on the practices and desires of the self rather than the common good. The ability to lie and manipulate others, the very ethic of capitalism, is held up as the highest good.

The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape. This cult shares within it the classic traits of psychopaths; superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked. It is this perverted ethic that gave us Wall Street bankers and investment houses that willfully trashed the nation’s economy, stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these corporations for retirement or college. The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation. In his masterful essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin wrote: “The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity.”

Click here to read an excerpt from Empire of Illusion. Those psychopathic traits speak so clearly to me about the world we inhabit today, delineating the news about Goldman Sachs', et al., scandalous financial chicanery bringing on our latest economic devastation, their right to bonuses for a job well done and their grateful acceptance of these hard-earned rewards without blushing in the slightest.

Stomach turning.

There is lots more to admire and reflect on in this tome. His views on wrestling give us a lot to, well, wrestle with. Suzan __________________