Pop 89: Humble Endings
By Madonna Hamel
Watching a political convention these days is like watching a game show, or a celebrity roast or a talent contest. I'm not the first to say so; the cultural critic Chris Hedges referred to them decades ago as Wide World of Wrestling matches. In art school, I watched in horror and fascination as popular culture overtook "culture" as a definition of what defines taste, meaning, beauty and truth. And you went along with those definitions because, God forbid, you should be dismissed as a snob. (Never mind that snobs exist in all realms - there are farm machinery snobs as well as art gallery snobs.)
Popular culture's distinguishing feature is its dedication to entertainment - just keep things superficial and moving along at a speedy clip tailored to our collective attention deficit disorder. It also works at enhancing our enthralment with fame - ever placing personality above principles.
Social media is the machine that drives pop culture. Its methods facilitate not just fame but "infamy," requiring little depth or thought, just a consistent stream of outrageous behaviour focused on grabbing our attention. It treats us either as toddlers who lose interest in a toy as soon as another kid toddles past clutching a new one or as teens. Social media understands that a teen's needs are paradoxical. They need to assert their place in the world and, at the same time, not stick out too much, and social media offers them a space for anonymous outbursts.
When no effort is made to look beyond the tightly-edited, de-contextualized, cleverly tampered-with bites of infotainment tailored by our algorithmic choices, there's not much chance of maturing beyond adolescence. Hang around the flimsy world of social media long enough, and we succumb to hubris and call it self-esteem. We might even sneer at humble people, mistaking them as weak-willed, passive and humiliated. Conversely, we might call "rigidity" "backbone," mistake "acting out" behaviour as "acting on," and defend lies and slander "as freedom of speech."
You may once have had a calling to do noble things, but if it's fans you're after, your best bet is low blows, nasty quips, and outrageous displays. To be famous, you need not be kind or caring or smart or qualified; you just need to entertain.
The word most often paired with fame is fortune. Many of our ancestors came from "humble beginnings" to the New World in search of fame and fortune. If we had been less "ambitious," i.e., greedy, we might have been less murderous toward the folks already living here. But intoxicating no-holds-barred ideals of "exceptionalism" and "rugged individualism" had already taken hold, and the new era promised the end of poverty and hunger to all who were willing to "pull up their boot-straps" and "conquer the West."
Once the wheel of fortune began spinning, fame and fortune replaced simple wants and creature comforts. And now, here we are, listening to the rich and infamous tell us how to live and who to vote for. Some of them are running for office. And they are addressing us not as fellow citizens but as fans. And we listen because their fame earns them interviews, photo spreads and endorsements. Somewhere in the pop culture playbook, it is written that fame makes you an expert in subjects you have never studied and products you have never purchased or intended to purchase. Fame earns trust.
Along with fame comes hubris - the inflated sense of specialness, entitlement and infallibility formerly allowed to gods. And, like gods, famous people keep their distance from the very unwashed masses they deem to advise and before whom they preen and complain. Their specialness requires special transport, accommodation, catering and coddling. They grow to expect it. They have reached a place in their lives where others do their shopping, cleaning, and cooking.
But it's not just the inanity and absurdity of such thinking that's disturbing - it's the popular assumption that everybody wants the same kind of life. After all, what kind of fool would cook if they could pay someone else to do it for them? What loser would wash their own dishes if they didn't have to? Never mind that a culture that claims to be Christian had, as a teacher, a man who exhorted us to stay humble by putting the last first - which meant not only feeding them but washing their feet. (Never mind our own dishes.) The working poor of this world may be the only people who deserve to have someone else wash their dishes. For the rest of us - washing dishes is a good way to slow down, get grounded, contemplate the day. Not to mention warm-up on winter days.
The assumption that "prosperity" and "bounty" is measured by how little "menial" work we do only sets an overly materialistic standard for everyone else, it points the way to a kind of dissociation and compartmentalization that values product over process. And in steps AI to the recuse. Once we stop valuing "process" we yearn solely for the finish line. Forget the journey - get me to the destination. Forget the years of research, study, crafting, dreaming, imagining, labouring, the very necessary humbling experiences of rejection slips, part-time jobs, embarrassing mistakes - spit me out a best-selling novel fit to my specs.
It does seem that contemporary secular culture has little use for humility. In fact, humility, rather than a sought-after attribute, seems to be considered a hindrance to the kind of success that empires are built on. Humility was once considered a "virtue," a word synonymous with "character". But now the "virtuous" person gets conflated with the self-righteous and anyway, how can one claim to be virtuous? It's like bragging about being humble - a truly virtuous or humble person always feels they can do better. Draw less attention to themselves, not more, which is counter to the function of pop culture. Ultimately, no matter how humble our beginnings or middles, we are all destined for humble endings.