You guys probably saw that there was a “Beyonce mass” at a church in, I believe, San Francisco. I could Google it and confirm, but I find it too depressing, so I won’t.
Why do I find it depressing? This is yet another example––perhaps the most damning one of all––of our culture ceding morality and expertise to celebrities.
Listen, as far as celebrities go, Beyonce is a fine one. She donated all that money to historical black colleges for scholarships, she donates money for clean water in Burundi, she preaches female empowerment (although interestingly, often single female empowerment, over a period of time when she was coupled). But this is also an individual who likes to symbolically claim that high fashion is radicalism (it can be radical, but it isn’t principled), and who dresses her six-year-old in Gucci. This not someone who is qualified for the position of saint.
To be clear, I think Beyonce would dig the idea of the mass, but I don’t think she wants to be a saint. I think in this case, a lot of it is because we project onto her. A lot of celebrities-turned-something-elses actively portray themselves as fit for their other roles. Cases in point: Jenny McCarthy, whose medical advice people actually took (it still boggles the mind.). Less egregiously, Tom Hanks and Sean Penn, who offer up mediocre literary offerings and then are deemed “authors.” Of course, who could forget the leader of free world? Celebrities are now our pediatricians, politicians, clothing designers, childcare experts, and UN ambassadors.
“You should read this great new book about the true cause of depression,” my friend texts me. “Elton John gave it a fantastic blurb.” My first thought: why on earth would I care what Elton John has to say on a book about depression? When I think about who should be vetting a book on depression, the people who come to mind are doctors or cultural critics or sometimes both––Gary Greenberg, Allen Frances, Peter Kramer, Andrew Solomon, Daphne Merkin, and so on. When I say I’m not particularly interested in what Elton has to say on the subject, she responds, “If you don’t like him, Emma Thompson also gave it a blurb.” I don’t think she was getting my point.
Now, they are also our moral guides and our prophetic proxies. This is truly disturbing.
Shout out to a few people who saw this coming and said DOOM: Jarrett Kobek, author of I Hate the Internet. Here’s an excellent interview with him in which he sounds off on this topic for a long time. My favorite part is when he says to cure ourselves of this problem, we need to start thinking of celebrity as a disease: “If we think about the conflation of celebrity and politics, we start to understand this disease’s socially debilitating effects. We’re trying to use entities which are no longer human and thus no longer contained by our social constructs to have long and pointless discussions about major social issues defined, primarily, by those constructs.”
DFW also foresaw this, in Infinite Jest among other places.
And of course, my main squeeze, George W. S. Trow: “Celebrities have an intimate life and a life in the grid of two hundred million. For them, there is no distance between the two grids in American life. Of all Americans, they are the most complete.”
My fellow Americans (and everyone, because let’s be honest, many other societies are following us toward certain cultural oblivion): we can do better than this. We can see past the sheen and choose instead to look to the possibly unsexy but still better educated experts in their chosen fields. We can elect politicians (or the otherwise qualified!), read books by writers, trust in the medical advice of our doctors, and venerate our saints. Join me.
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