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Celebrating Inequality
by GEORGE PACKER
MAY 19, 2013
THE Roaring ’20s was the
decade when modern celebrity was invented in America. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
“Great Gatsby” is full of magazine spreads of tennis players and socialites,
popular song lyrics, movie stars, paparazzi, gangsters and sports scandals —
machine-made by technology, advertising and public relations. Gatsby, a
mysterious bootlegger who makes a meteoric ascent from Midwestern obscurity to
the palatial splendor of West Egg, exemplifies one part of the celebrity code:
it’s inherently illicit. Fitzgerald intuited that, with the old restraining
deities of the 19th century dead and his generation’s faith in man shaken by
World War I, celebrities were the new household gods.
What are celebrities, after
all? They dominate the landscape, like giant monuments to aspiration,
fulfillment and overreach. They are as intimate as they are grand, and they
offer themselves for worship by ordinary people searching for a suitable object
of devotion. But in times of widespread opportunity, the distance between gods
and mortals closes, the monuments shrink closer to human size and the
centrality of celebrities in the culture recedes. They loom larger in times
like now, when inequality is soaring and trust in institutions — governments,
corporations, schools, the press — is falling.
The Depression that ended
Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age yielded to a new order that might be called the Roosevelt Republic. In the quarter-century after
World War II, the country established collective structures, not individual
monuments, that channeled the aspirations of ordinary people: state
universities, progressive taxation, interstate highways, collective bargaining,
health insurance for the elderly, credible news organizations.
One virtue of those hated
things called bureaucracies is that they oblige everyone to follow a common set
of rules, regardless of station or background; they are inherently equalizing.
Books like William H. Whyte’s “Organization Man” and C. Wright Mills’s “White
Collar” warned of the loss of individual identity, but those middle-class
anxieties were possible only because of the great leveling. The “stars”
continued to fascinate, especially with the arrival of TV, but they were not
essential. Henry Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Jimmy Stewart, Perry
Como, Joe DiMaggio, Jack Paar, Doris Day and Dick Clark rose with Americans —
not from them — and their successes and screw-ups were a sideshow, not the main
event.
Our age is lousy with
celebrities. They can be found in every sector of society, including ones that
seem less than glamorous. We have celebrity bankers (Jamie Dimon), computer
engineers (Sergey Brin), real estate developers/conspiracy theorists (Donald J.
Trump), media executives (Arianna Huffington), journalists (Anderson Cooper),
mayors (Cory A. Booker), economists (Jeffrey D. Sachs), biologists (J. Craig
Venter) and chefs (Mario Batali).
There is a quality of
self-invention to their rise: Mark Zuckerberg went from awkward geek to the
subject of a Hollywood hit; Shawn Carter
turned into Jay-Z; Martha Kostyra became Martha Stewart, and then Martha
Stewart Living. The person evolves into a persona, then a brand, then an
empire, with the business imperative of grow or die — a process of expansion
and commodification that transgresses boundaries by substituting celebrity for
institutions. Instead of robust public education, we have Mr. Zuckerberg’s
“rescue” of Newark’s
schools. Instead of a vibrant literary culture, we have Oprah’s book club.
Instead of investments in public health, we have the Gates Foundation.
Celebrities either buy institutions, or “disrupt” them.
After all, if
you are the institution, you don’t need to play by its rules. Mr. Zuckerberg’s
foundation myth begins with a disciplinary proceeding at Harvard, which leads
him to drop out and found a company whose motto is “Move fast and break
things.” Jay-Z’s history as a crack dealer isn’t just a hard-luck story — it’s
celebrated by fans (and not least himself) as an early sign of hustle and
smarts. Martha Stewart’s jail time for perjury merely proved that her will to
win was indomitable. These new celebrities are all more or less start-up
entrepreneurs, and they live by the hacker’s code: ask forgiveness, not
permission.
The obsession with
celebrities goes far beyond supermarket tabloids, gossip Web sites and reality
TV. It obliterates old distinctions between high and low culture, serious and
trivial endeavors, profit making and philanthropy, leading to the phenomenon of
being famous for being famous. An activist singer (Bono) is given a lucrative
role in Facebook’s initial public offering. A patrician politician (Al Gore)
becomes a plutocratic media executive and tech investor. One of America’s
richest men (Michael R. Bloomberg) rules its largest city.
This jet-setting,
Davos-attending crowd constitutes its own superclass, who hang out at the same
TED talks, big-idea conferences and fund-raising galas, appear on the same talk
shows, invest in one another’s projects, wear one another’s brand apparel,
champion one another’s causes, marry and cheat on one another. “The New Digital
Age,” the new guide to the future by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen of Google,
carries blurbs from such technology experts as Henry A. Kissinger and Tony
Blair. The inevitable next step is for Kim Kardashian to sit on the board of a
tech start-up, host a global-poverty-awareness event and write a book on
behavioral neuroscience.
This new kind of celebrity is
the ultimate costume ball, far more exclusive and decadent than even the most
potent magnates of Hollywood’s
studio era could have dreamed up. Their superficial diversity dangles before us
the myth that in America,
anything is possible — even as the American dream quietly dies, a victim of the
calcification of a class system that is nearly hereditary.
As mindless diversions from a
sluggish economy and chronic malaise, the new aristocrats play a useful role.
But their advent suggests that, after decades of widening income gaps, unequal
distributions of opportunity and reward, and corroding public institutions, we
have gone back to Gatsby’s time — or something far more perverse. The celebrity
monuments of our age have grown so huge that they dwarf the aspirations of
ordinary people, who are asked to yield their dreams to the gods: to flash
their favorite singer’s corporate logo at concerts, to pour open their lives
(and data) on Facebook, to adopt Apple as a lifestyle. We know our stars aren’t
inviting us to think we can be just like them. Their success is based on
leaving the rest of us behind.
George
Packer,
a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author, most recently, of “The
Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.”
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