Well, the unthinkable has finally happened. It seems the American public has finally gotten off it's collective mental sofa and decided that perhaps it does matter after all what is going on in Washington. It may have been an unprecedented moment, one I haven't seen in my lifetime.
Americans have the attention span of a gnat, unfortunately, [or The Cowardly Lion on a bad hair day, for the very literary, this is an allusion,] so I don't hold out a lot of hope that it will last. That's not just because I'm a die hard cynic, although, of course, I am. But we have been down the yellow brick road before. Oz turned out to be just another city, and the wizard was a charlatan in a green suit, more interested in his toys than in the country he was supposed to be running.
Although the events of September 11, 2001 got our attention ever so briefly, we didn't pay attention for long. We haven't paid attention to elections, recessions, bad bills, bad policy, or bad politicians, either. We have watched corruption, greed, avarice, sexual misbehavior, and immature conduct on a scale not seen since the fall of the Roman Empire. And yet, we still have not cared enough to really get interested, much less involved, even to send an application to vote by mail in advance, because it's too much effort to find a stamp and it's not going to matter, anyway. What's one vote?
But in the last few days, the American public has finally awakened and used its power to force democracy into action. Our nation of shoulder shruggers has finally found something that made it worth taking our eyes off American Idol and focus instead on Wall Street, where the real drama can be found virtually any weekday all year long. Fortunes can be won or lost in a moment's time, and the denizen of Wall Street today can be the next country club prison inmate tomorrow.
I read today that the server for the congressional offices has been repeatedly overwhelmed in the past few days. There has been so much interest in the bill to bail out the Wall Street firms that they have had to put a traffic stop on the server to prevent a total collapse of the system. This is democracy in action, and my opinion is, better late than never. Welcome electorate! Nice to have you engaged. Please stay awhile, and join the funeral.
Ironically, despite the unprecedented level of voter attention in the presidential election this year, [which is not the same as actual interest, let us be frank,] the White House has not received the attention in this financial melt-down. It appears that at least some portion of the populace has finally recognized that the Congress does, indeed, run the country. The President of the United States is, in many ways, an everyman who is representative of us, but does not hold the purse strings, and it is, as always, the money that matters.
I have thought for a long time that we are a nation of dilettantes. We worship the reality star of the moment, not because they have any actual achievements, but because they are on television. They are famous for being famous, and they hold us mesmerized. We pay hundreds of dollars to watch people run up and down the football field, and in the case of the Chiefs, mostly lose.
I have been watching People magazine the last few weeks, out of curiosity to see what is engaging the interest of the American public. While the economy is melting down at an unprecedented rate, the big news on the cover of one of the most read magazines in the country is that Heather Locklear was arrested for a DUI. This is news? Really? I have some sympathy for her, suffering from anxiety and depression while living life in the public eye has to be an incredible strain on the nerves, but why do we care in the first place?
This is something that has fascinated me for some time now. The celebrity culture in America is so endemic, we don't even think about it any more. Celebrities are no longer famous for doing anything, they are simply famous for being... well... famous. We build people up so that we can tear them down. It happens over and over again, in politics, in Hollywood, and in our own lives. Hillary Clinton was the woman of the hour until she wasn't. Tom Cruise was the untouchable celebrity until he jumped up and down on a sofa like a toddler proclaiming his feelings for a girl half his age, and we couldn't wait to tear him apart. Our sports heroes are falling farther and lower than they ever have, while steroids and bad behavior land them in jail or in the morgue. Is there honestly anyone who would consider Paris for more than five seconds if her last name weren't Hilton?
I find this fascination with famousness alarming in its seductiveness. We have journalists who become the story because they are so famous they overshadow all else. It is rare that either Larry King or Bill O'Reilly interviews someone more famous than they, so are they really the backdrop, or are they now part of the story? When Anderson Cooper goes to New Orleans or Galveston or Iraq, are we more concerned about what is happening in the part of the world he is reporting from, or are we worrying about what is going to happen to him?
We have politicians so famous they become caricatures of themselves without even meaning to. Sarah Palin was recently parodied on Saturday Night Live, but what it made it unique was that Tina Fey used the candidate's own words to create the sketch. I think it could be argued that Jimmy Carter is a caricature of who he used to be, as is Newt Gingrich. I don't imagine most people could tell you a single Carter presidential success [Camp David Accords, Sadat and Begin, Nobel Peace Prize, ring a bell?] but everyone recognizes him for his Georgia accent and his ears and toothy smile. He has changed the world for a lot of people with his Habitat for Humanity work, and his traveling around the world to observe elections and work for peace [something he is a lot better at than being president, so he definitely should stick with it,] but people think of peanuts and his brother Billy as much as they do of the loftier parts of his life's work.
We have recently had the interesting experience in Kansas City of watching the latest American Idol, David Cook, win the whole pot at the end of the rainbow. His is a true American success story. He was a Good Kid in high school, playing in a band on weekends and participating in the school musical during the week.
He ultimately ended up in Tulsa, but came home to support his brother's bid for the American Idol audition in Omaha. On the spur of the moment, he entered the contest as well, and as fate would have it, his brother was knocked out, and David ended up in Hollywood on the world's stage. He handled it with a grace that was very becoming and spoke well of his mother, [as a fellow single parent, I love to see a success story,] and his fextended amily has been a pleasure to watch on the local news as they supported him and made him a real person. He seems, and appears to genuinely be, a nice young man, and it's impossible not to cheer for him when you have seen him go from nobody to someone.
But does it really make sense that he had more people watching his Idol finale than watched the final State of the Union Address of George Bush's presidency? [A disclaimer here, I didn't watch either one. I prefer to read political speeches in transcript, if I'm interested, where you can't get caught up in the moment and you read it for what it really says. Or doesn't say. And you don't want to know my opinion of reality television.]
I am closely associated with a celebrity. That's right. We are a celebrity family. See how that got your attention? Suddenly, where you were dozing off just moments ago, you are waiting breathlessly for me to expound on how I know someone famous.
The reality is, I don't. But my son, the fledgling journalist, is a celebrity on his campus. It has given him, and thus me, some insight into what a bona fide celebrity life must be like. The most interesting thing, to me, is not the random marriage proposals or the odd comments made by people who think they know him because they have read what he writes. What interests me most is the fact that people actually want his opinion on things so they can set their own opinion based on his. That is celebrity culture at its worst. Without knowing how he comes to his conclusions, without having thought for themselves at all, people make decisions based on the opinion of someone they know only through the newspaper, or worse yet, online.
The next time you are asking yourself why things are such a mess in this country today, think about where your own opinions come from. Do you find the facts for yourself? Or do you wait for your favorite talking head to give your position so you don't have to think about it too hard?
We had a very unique opportunity to see democracy, in the very best sense of the word, at work in our own capitol yesterday. I hope it wasn't a passing fancy, because we need people to engage for our democracy to remain viable. A government by the vocal minority is not democracy, it is oligarchy, and it is doomed. We, the people, need to demand less talking points and more action points. We need to be skeptical of those who tell us we don't need to know, or that it's over our heads. We need to demand answers to the hard questions, and then we need to hold people accountable for their words. I don't expect C-Span viewers to outnumber the American Idol faithful any time soon, but if you want to see the real action, watch the Congress try to pass a bill that will bail out Wall Street four weeks before a national election.
I'll bring the popcorn, you can bring the soda. Let's have a party and celebrate the rebirth of democracy.
