Joan of Arc, by Hermann Stilke, 1843A while ago reporter Shelley Fralic lamented in the Vancouver Sun over 'Generation Me', which she characterized as being bloated and blighted with 'selfishness and runaway egoism'. A couple of days later the Sun ran a front page photo of a family of five, racing around their back yard like crazed druids, who had set themselves on fire. The headline read: North Van Family's burning desire to be on TV.
Hmmm! There are dots that need connecting here.
What is it with all this reality TV stuff anyway - people engaged in activities that range from weird to utterly deranged, all in an effort to get their 15 minutes of fame? What possesses a family to hoax the world by claiming their child is marooned on a runaway balloon that's careering over the bleak landscape of Colorado with half the state's emergency services in hot pursuit and the whole world watching on the Internet and CNN?
The phenomenon of stunt celebrity has grown in direct proportion to the monster egos that have been created by mass-entertainment culture, and the burgeoning ability of individuals to project their antics into the world through new communications media like the Internet and cell phones. At least that's my theory.
It goes something like this:
We plebeians are so dwarfed by the athletic, political and theatrical titans of the mass media that there's no point even trying to muscle in on that game. Yet all anyone talks about these days are the doings of the rich, famous and remote heroes of popular culture. So instead of playing by their rules, we move in the opposite direction to attain the notoriety we crave: we make ourselves stupid in sensational ways, spurred on by the very media that alienated us in the first place.
We eat buckets full of worms, engage in extreme sports of all kinds, invent new games to be good at on camera... and so on.
If it was just a few people running around like idiots, setting themselves on fire, it wouldn't be such a big deal. But when absurd and pointless approach something like the norm, we're in trouble. We're feasting on the spiritual equivalent of empty calories!
Compare the burning bozos depicted in the Vancouver Sun with Joan of Arc - or a thousand other martyrs who suffered agony and death because they really believed in something - and you begin to get a sense of just how shallow and meaningless our antics are. A heroic figure like Joan of Arc sacrificed her worldly life for an ideal she believed was much greater than herself; the typical attention seeker on any one of a million specialty channels can't conceive of an idea bigger than his own ego.
