Vicarious

I'll never escape!

Try as I may, I just can't seem to escape some things.  Death, taxes, and episodes of NCIS anytime a television with a cable hookup is playing anywhere near me are but a few examples.  This post is, I suppose, about me how I relate to myself, but I'm going to tell it in the most convoluted and roundabout way I can think of, which has to do with celebrities.  First, though, my inescapable curse.

I have a story which has roots deep within my psyche from long, long ago which I have never satisfactorily completed.  It involves my Jennifer persona, and it was the root for both The Academy and a number of other stories.  It's had a lot of names over the years--so many I can't even keep track of them.  As far as my writing goes, this is like that one drunken abusive ex you keep breaking up with only to make up again a few months later.  Our latest make-up cycle started last week.  Why do I mention this?  It's not that it poses a particular problem.  If the story is that important to me that I keep coming back to it again and again. then I should write it and see what I can learn from it.  It is, however, by this roundabout route that I am now going to talk about my on-again/off-again perverse fascination with Avril Lavigne, whose album The Best Damn Thing features prominently in several incarnations of the story.

Oh yes, we're back to Ms. Lavigne again.  With a vengeance.  But here's why, and it's not the reason you might think.

In the course of rewriting this story, wanting a reference point for what I was writing and not actually possessing any photos of Ms. Lavigne on my hard drive other than the one I used on my previous post about her, I decided to be a creep and see what was out there, and stumbled upon a rather perverse fan site that shall remain nameless.  In a literal sense, it had what I want, but the entire experience left me feeling rather disturbed, and so I made it the subject of my meditation that night.  The more I thought about it, the more the entire concept of a celebrity seemed, well, very strange to me.

I've always found peoples' relationships with celebrities a little weird, but I find relationships with pop stars to be especially bizarre.  Let me see if I can break it down.  So here you have somebody famous (Whether Ms. Lavigne or Justin Bieber, or some hypothetical pop star X), who produces a product that excites your emotions (and probably some other things) by creating a vicarious experience that you then submit yourself to as a way of escaping the dreariness and monotony of your life.  Middle school pretty much sucks balls, I get it.  I was once in middle school too.  So you have this famous person, who supposedly lives a much more interesting, glamorous, and above all else much less painful life than you do, and by religiously following this person as if they were the prophet of your own personal religion, you vicariously experience their supposedly hunky-dory life in place of your own and you feel better.  Before I'm accused of making this up, I know this because I have at various points in my life felt this before.  In her own way, that's what Jennifer was to me, and since Jennifer and Ms. Lavigne were strongly-paired stimuli, it's only natural that I would feel some of that too.

How can you say no to that?  The smile, the arms.
She wants you to live vicariously through her.

I suppose on the face of it, it may not seem that strange.  But I've always found mental escape mechanisms to be a little odd, and this is a relationship I have unwittingly found myself on both ends of in my own small way.  I should make myself clear: while I may have wanted to be famous for a while, fame and fortune aren't really my goal anymore in life, especially as it pertains to my writing.  Fame is a tricky thing.  Over the years, as I've put more and more of myself online as I treated myself for all my various problems, I've found myself with less and less privacy.  What remains private in my life has grown tremendously in intensity, and I'm not sure how comfortable I am with that.  This is exactly the paradox that I imagine being someone like Ms. Lavigne produces.  Every once in a while I'll be on Jezebel and I'll see some photograph (the one I'm thinking of was of Leighton Meester a couple of years ago when Gossip Girl was at its peak) with some comment or caption about her clothes.  Meester was looking quite stylish in the photograph, but on the same day I checked out at the grocery store and saw a "Fashion bloopers" edition of Star or one of the other tabloids, and I had to remind myself that being stylish only ever really seems fun when it's voluntary.  Imagine having to be turned on like that all the time, lit up and self-conscious, your every move scrutinized.  Unless you're a born attention whore like Lady GaGa, who already possessed the confidence and poise to wield her fame properly when she got her break, it will destroy you.  You need only look to Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan to see how that goes wrong.  And then your consolation prize is to be used and abused as a masturbatory means of letting others feel better about themselves through your failure.  Which only makes the image I have of Ms. Lavigne even more bizarre, because not only does she seem confident and poised, she seems utterly nonchalant about the whole thing.  Make no mistake, either, Avril is actively exploiting this paradox.  As soon as the whole Abbey Dawn label came into the picture, this was nothing more than a business, if it hadn't been already from the start.  She sells a lifestyle that young girls want to buy.  It's a form of subservience packaged and sold as empowerment.

I suppose empowerment is what this all comes down to.  I dislike the idea of buying an image.  I think if someone is truly empowered, they'll be able to take whatever they want and make it their own.  A vicarious celebrity experience (or even a religious one, to take the argument a step further) is the opposite of empowerment.  You are literally saying "I would rather be someone else."  If you can't accept and appreciate who you are, how are you supposed to have any power at all?  Where's the happiness in wishing to be someone other than yourself?

This experience comes about, I believe, from a misconception of both power and happiness.  Either Avril Lavigne is extremely unhappy, or she's so desensitized to her fame that she's essentially a sociopath.  Neither is who I'd like to be.  Look, my life isn't all that great.  I'm poor, and I have almost no savings, and I'm several tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt.  I get by by the skin of my teeth.  I wrote a book that a few people read and liked, and my blog gets a few tens of hits every post.  I'm not rich; I'm not famous.  But neither is a prerequisite to happiness.  I find happiness in being content with the way things are.  This doesn't mean that I give up on improving my condition.  That's resignation.  Acceptance is a beginning, not an end.  With acceptance comes nearly unlimited power to get what you want.  That's true power, not a million Twitter followers.  Twitter, MTV, Fox News--that's only a megaphone.  You still have to say something worthwhile.  I don't need this blog to say something meaningful.  This is why living vicariously, whether through celebrities, a religious figure, or your children is so dangerous.  It does nothing but push you down and step all over you.

I have a lot more to say on this subject.  If my life has become about empowerment over the past few years, then I have no choice but to answer the call and respond.  We build prisons for ourselves--every last one of us--and we lock ourselves away, because we think it's right and proper and we deserve it.  But we don't like it.  Not at all.  So we invent ways of feeling like we've escaped it.  They can grow quite elaborate.  But in the end, all we've ever had to do was walk right out the door.

Don't want to be someone else.  All you'll ever be is who you are, and that's better than all the fame and fortune in the world.

Letting it Slide

RAGE!  RAGE AGAINST MINOR
INCONVENIENCE!

Yesterday the Facebook interface changed slightly.  If my newsfeed was to be believed, the world had just ended.  My entire social network was up in arms.  This was an outrage!  How dare they?  It was as if a couple of hundred otherwise intelligent and reasonable people had been suddenly and collectively personally affronted and decided to throw a hissy fit.  Oh, there would be hell to pay.  The jig was up.  It was all over now.  Threats were being leveled.

I looked at this yesterday, as I spent the less than a minute it took me to learn the new interface, and I thought to myself, "Something is very wrong with this picture."  Obviously, I'm not going to generalize an entire behavior based upon one specific instance, but part of my thing in life is to look for patterns, and I see how what happened yesterday is a symptom of something larger.  This larger pattern is what I want to talk about.

I was standing in line at the New Hampshire Highland Games waiting for a strawberry shortcake from the bakery tent when the whipped cream machine suddenly broke on the poor woman trying to serve us. After about two minutes of waiting while she fixed it (and did quite a heroic job of it too, I might add), the line began to grumble.  "We're never going to get it," one person said.  "We've been waiting forever!" complained another woman.  Even my own father-in-law said to me "I think you're going to be waiting a while."  The service was atrocious, claimed another.  The glaring and the whining were beginning to get to the poor woman, and when I got my strawberry shortcake after about three minutes of waiting, she apologized profusely to me.  I told her I knew it wasn't her fault, thanked her for the shortcake, paid her, and left.  But that didn't seem to stop the glares and glowering coming at her from the line.  What struck me the most as I exited the line with my shortcake and began walking back to the arena, where the rest of the family was waiting for us was how unnecessary the entire exchange had been.  Minor inconveniences are a daily fact of life.  Yet there are a substantial number of us who seem to treat them as the emotional equivalent of a deep personal crisis.

That's just slightly hyperbolic, of course, but I can't help but wonder what this says about our reactions to stress, and our relative stress levels.  At every large public gathering I've attended in the past year and a half, there has been a noticeable tension in the air.  It isn't loud; it's more of an atmospheric tinge, and very subtle.  Nobody speaks of it out loud, anyway.  But it's there in the little things: having to wait in line, something you wanted being sold out, a change to the Facebook interface.  I can't go a day without seeing a post with the acronym FML ("Fuck my life") attached to what seems to me to be a relatively minor setback.  What could be driving this discrepancy between the severity of our problems and our responses?

The greater part of this seems to be about our expectations, accompanied built-in sense of dread, like any difference in outcome, or really any change at all will inevitably be bad.  The two are closely related.  Let me offer a theory.  Expectations easily become self-fulfilling prophecies.  It works one of two ways.  If you expect to be disappointed, chances are you'll find a way to be disappointed in whatever happens.  Whenever human beings have a belief like that, we usually find a way to make it come true.  How could we not?  When you have a belief that you consider absolute, it doesn't matter what you experience.  Your experiences will be shaped to fit the belief and not the other way around.  But that's not the only way in which we can warp our perceptions to fit our beliefs.  Our expectations can also be too high--so unrealistically high that we can never satisfy them.  If that's the case, disappointment is inevitable and becomes self-reinforcing.

To continue the point, if there is anything Americans want more than anything these days, it's instant gratification.  Our entire culture seems to be based around it.  I'm reminded of a story sequence from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, in which Calvin mails away for a beanie cap he's convinced will let him fly, but that takes 4-6 weeks to arrive.  He waits and waits and waits and waits and slowly drives himself mad waiting, only to discover when it arrives that his beanie cap won't let him fly.  We want a miracle cure, a quick fix, and we want it now.  Think about that for a second.  Think about how that expectation affects how we view change.  People take changes to the Facebook interface very strangely personally.  I was once told off and unfriended when I commented on a friend's status that his excessive ranting about what was then a relatively minor change was perhaps a bit unreasonable.  He was, essentially, a junkie who couldn't get his fix.  This instant gratification culture is a culture of chronic masturbation.  His form of masturbation had been taken away.  That really pisses people off.  Same when you're waiting in line for a strawberry shortcake and it takes you more than thirty seconds to get it.  Or you wait for a beanie cap that you think will make you fly, and you discover that the wait was all for nothing.

It doesn't have to be this way, however.  We can, if we choose, ignore these feelings and let these inconveniences and irritations slide.  It's easy to say, but not so easy in practice.  By themselves none of these little annoyances amount to much, but they add up to big trouble.  And that is something that people struggle with.  I hadn't planned to write this post until last night, but it dovetails perfectly into what I want to talk about over my next arc.  Let me finish making my case.  Then, hopefully, I can show you how to find a way out from all the negativity I see pervading almost every place and person I encounter.  It's no big thing that put us in this mess we find ourselves in.  It's lots of little things adding up.  We need to recognize it for what it is.  Only then can we fix it.

Until such a time, though, I suppose I'm going to let the public panic over a few minor changes slide, myself.  After all, it's just people being people.  It's not the end of the world.

The Generation Gap, Part 3: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Quick!  Summon Bruce Willis!

Maybe around the age of twelve, I started to notice that adults really like to talk about the apocalypse a lot.  That was when I first started watching a lot of adult TV (though my relationship with 90s Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network would continue for some time), and whether it was science documentaries, the news, or network dramas, everyone seemed to agree: the jig was up, the party was over, and the world as we knew it was clearly and unequivocally about to end.  Well, in a way, we're getting our wish.  But why is that?  Were we really right, and our predictions came true?  Or did this fear itself somehow cause it?  I'm going to explain why I believe the latter case is true, and how.

Mind you, the end of the world is not a concept I am necessarily hostile to.  As I struggled with my illness and inner demons over the years, it became in a way a comforting belief to keep around.  If I've learned one thing about human suffering during that time, it's that suffering is relativistic, and so while mine is probably a more dramatic example, I can't help but think that the principle is the same for a lot of people.  Explaining why is not simple, and will require a a few more pieces of evidence before I can show exactly how.  So bear with me, and I'll take you through it.  Hopefully you've read my two earlier related posts, on Classism and what I call Taking Reality For Granted.  If not, here's a brief recap: segregated as we are by class and race and cloistered away in communities populated nearly exclusively by like-minded individuals (real or online), Americans, particularly my parents' generation the Baby Boomers, suffer from errors in perception and judgment that effect how they perceive others.  In particular, material wealth is seen as the primary scale of value to society.  This principle extends outwards to errors in perception and communication that lead to social hypocrisy and an ironic lack of self-awareness in which one's beliefs effectively become the opposite of one's actions and history and the world are rewritten to fit the beliefs.  For more details feel free to peruse the individual posts, but this is what matters to my point.

Americans have been convinced they were in decline and the end is just around the corner for a long time now.  Anxiety about status and financial insecurity is largely what drives it.  Just a little while studying basic economic data can show you how income has been declining relative to the cost of living and how wealth disparity has affected it for several decades (this is a nice summary of American economic issues over the past several decades, for reference).  This combined with skyrocketing personal debt and the costs of medical care has given many people a legitimate grievance that things are not as good as they once were.  Combine this with the culture shocks of the 60s and 70s if you happen to be conservatively-minded, and you have a recipe for discontent with the way things are.  Call it deep unhappiness, even.  You can even fairly call it hopelessness.  The rationally-minded who read this are probably right about now saying "Now how can that be?  People go about their days and they seem perfectly fine."  To make that assumption is to again assume that man has no inherent nature, one of the fundamental misconceptions I've mentioned again and again as behind Baby Boomers' dysfunction.  Whether cultural, familial, or vocational, people have a lot of obligations and responsibilities in life.  We're conditioned to put these above our own happiness.  The result is that we have a lot of really unhappy, irrational people who hide their unhappiness from their conscious minds day-to-day in order to get through it.  You don't have to be an ardent Christian or an office drone to feel that way: nearly everyone does it to some degree.

But of course, that will warp your thinking and your perceptions of the world.  Now the idea of the apocalypse, whether the Evangelical Dispensationalist vision of the Rapture or the peak oil/climate change collapse conspiracy theory so popular with liberals, it's all the same.  If the world ends, or at least so permanently alters itself to be unrecognizable, BAM!--you're released from your responsibility.  Either you're up in heaven kicking it with Jesus, you're one of the smart ones living in a Utopian, if humble post-oil community, or best of all you're really and actually dead.  Thus the death wish plays itself out right under our own noses.

Oil...need sweet, delicious oil...

The media, being interested in profits above all (including public service), reflects that sentiment, as that's what the market demands.  Pundits, authors, and producers alike give us what we want, which is a narrative of a world on the brink, about to slide off into oblivion.  This process feeds back on itself, and so what you get is a feedback loop of ever-escalating anxiety and pessimism.  Liberals like to blame Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh for causing problems in life, just as they in turn blame liberals.  The truth is that Hannity and Rush are effects, not causes.  Nobody wakes up one day and says "hey, I don't like [insert group or label here]!  Let's get rid of them!"  It unfolds organically as a reaction to experience.  Beliefs shape experiences and experiences shape beliefs.  Neither exists in a vacuum.  Baby Boomers' widespread ignorance of this is in part what drives their irrational beliefs about Millennials and the world, and greatly contributes to the social and political dysfunction in this country.

These ideas also become self-reinforcing.  If you believe the end of the world is going to happen in the near future, you're going to be looking for signs of it in order to prepare yourself.  Whether or not the world is actually going to end or not is largely irrelevant.  The logic itself is perfectly rational, it's the belief that's misguided.  You're also going to be acting as if the world is going to soon end, and that will change your behavior, which will in turn affect your experience.  So the whole thing feeds back on itself.

Now we're getting somewhere.  The Baby Boomer doomsday prophecy has become largely self-fulfilling.  If you're convinced everything is going to come crashing down around you, chances are you're going to find a way to make it happen.  Now take that principle and apply it en masse.  We've created a self-fulfilling doomsday prophecy society, one in which the future isn't valued, the past is rewritten to fit the ideal of a lost golden age, and the truth--whatever that may be--is completely obscured by the belief.

This is the world our parents have handed my generation.  They have blamed everyone but themselves for it, including us.  And why would they blame themselves?  They believe they're the victims in all this. I don't know what the future holds for them, or for us.  I like to think it'll be better than the way things are now, but I'm an optimist and that's my nature.  One thing is for certain, though.  This generation gap, this irrational delusion, and this self-fulfilling prophecy did not come about by any malicious intent.  It arose as a natural response to the environment and situation in which it was created, and continued reacting to the world as it evolved.  To call Baby Boomers evil is not just wrong, it completely misses the point.  Selfish?  Maybe.  Probably.  But you have to put that selfishness in some sort of context.  It's ironic for sure, given how this played out between them and their parents back in the 60s and 70s.  But it's also unfair to blame them entirely.  This mess we're in is everybody's fault, not just theirs, and was started a long time before they contributed their little piece of it.  Likewise, it will take everyone working cooperatively to solve it.  When and how that happens, I don't know.  But in order to start, we ought to at least recognize the problem.  It's my hope that these past three posts have contributed in some way to that.

A Quickie on Casey Anthony and Public Tragedies

The number one threat to America
(After bears, of course).

Casey Anthony is going to be released from jail tomorrow, and public hysteria shows no signs of abating over her acquittal.  I have no particular vested stake in her innocence or guilt; my gut says she's guilty, but in a court of law, particularly when the death penalty is on the table, it is imperative that the defendant's guilt be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and the prosecution in this case failed to do that.  There has been a lot of disgust directed towards Ms. Anthony, and not necessarily without reason.  She certainly didn't come out looking good.  But longtime readers know I am always skeptical of public hysteria, and as the article linked above cites, threats are beginning to be leveled against the jurors who acquitted her, which to me crosses an important line.  This will be a short post, but here are my observations.

I paid careful attention to who among my social networks was following the case.  Overwhelmingly, they were politically conservative females, many of whom were also either overweight or grossly out of shape, and many of whom were also young mothers whose pregnancies were not planned.  Indeed, most of the public commentary journalists have managed to acquire would seem to come from this particular demographic, though without hard data (like a poll or a survey), I can't say that conclusively.  The people who seemed to be the most moved and/or agitated by the case also tended to watch a lot of television, in particular partisan cable news and highly emotional crime shows (such as the ubiquitous Nancy Grace and networks like TruTV).  These shows and networks overwhelmingly appeal to viewer's emotions and gut instincts, and should Ms. Anthony's safety be challenged (either by physical violence or credible threats of such), it will be these media outlets and television personalities who I hold responsible.

The Casey Anthony trial is a curious case where what we think and feel give us two different answers.  Again, the gut instinct and a cursory look at the case practically scream that she's guilty.  However a closer examination of the evidence shows that it's largely circumstantial and somewhat underwhelming as evidence in a court of law, particularly in a death penalty case.  But that wasn't what we were told by the media.  We were given a highly hysterical, highly emotional zeitgeist that told us what we felt was more important than what we thought or even what we saw.  The trial did not have to be framed this way.  The media abdicated its responsibility to inform the public once again in exchange for the publicity highly histrionic sensationalism would produce.  Whether we would still have credible death threats against the jurors in the case without it, I don't know, but the media and opinion-makers, particularly the partisan ones, certainly did nothing to dissuade the behavior, and in many cases (such as Ms. Grace), openly encouraged it.  Thus, though the individuals who may make threats and/or potentially carry them out in the future should be held accountable for their individual actions, the people responsible for framing the argument and the reaction must also share the blame.

Lest you think that I believe this is anything new, I don't, but that doesn't make it any less true or any less wrong.  Implementing any change would take time (at least a generation) to work, and while that may or may not happen, I don't exactly see us starting tomorrow.  Of more interest to me is what leads someone to feel this way, and for that feeling to override their ability to reason.  We live in a society that affords us little opportunity to seek meaning in our lives, and so we try to replace it by acquiring physical possessions and following the lives of others who seem to be more meaningful than ours.  We use celebrities to build ourselves up, both by drama of their lives that ours may lack and by how we feel better in comparison when the public figures we idolize prove to be just as fallible, imperfect, and human as us.  Televised sports provide excitement where we'd otherwise have none; a surrogate for the human connection we crave.  Yet we have no control over these things, and so it only reinforces our feeling of emptiness, which to me seems like one of the reasons why the public backlash against Ms. Anthony's acquittal has been so fierce.  I have no doubt that a conviction would have been very cathartic for those OCFs (overweight conservative females) in my social networks and throughout the media--a validation of themselves and the choices they made.  But we didn't get that, and so we're left feeling angry and empty.

In many ways, then, this is a tragedy beyond just Ms. Anthony, her life, and the death of her child.  It's a reminder to all of us of just how little we seem to have.  I would hope that if there is a silver lining to this case, that it provokes in someone, somewhere, some kind of serious introspection, and that introspection can lead to awareness and some form of acceptance.  Maybe then some good will come of it.  Until then, a tragedy it will remain, for everyone involved.