Have you ever seen a family member, or friend, become fascinated by someone who turned out to be … less? An object of utter fascination who was not, in fact, fascinating?
At one time or another, we have all done this. With people in our lives who seemed heroic or demonic. Perhaps with troublesome colleagues. Only to find out they are ordinary. Maybe confused or frightened. But certainly not complex and inscrutable enigmas. The ogre was a nebbish.
I recall my mother being obsessed with an impossible student of hers and the ultimate revelation that the kid was simply a brat who had seldom heard the word “no.” He wasn’t a temperamental boy genius. He was a manipulative bully in a small package. The mistake was to make him “interesting.”
I thought of that kid when I listened to the tape of Citizen Donald Trump talking to sycophants without high security clearance about classified documents in his possession. What impressed me was not his criminality, but the utter shallowness of the man.
I thought of all the gallons of ink and hours of air time that have been spent on this guy through the years. And I thought, the joke is on us. This person is like the Wizard of Oz. The actual man, the real one, is just not that interesting. He’s less than ordinary — intellectually, spiritually.
Listening to him recently, I sense the same is true of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. He’s a nut who believes passionately in his own nuttiness. But the media is currently imbuing him with gravitas: Placing a snake oil salesman behind the curtain.
But we do this a lot in our culture. We imagine the sports hero, the movie or TV star, the corporate titan to have layers and layers; depths and depths, when in fact there may be only one layer, and barely that. It’s all “Oz,” or the old movie “10” — the pursuit of an ideal that is an utter chimera. And also a golden calf.
Mr. Trump called himself a “star.” Whatever that is and means, why would we expect a star to be a font of wisdom? Cary Grant, a real star, refused to go on Dick Cavett’s show because, he said, “They’ll find out how dumb I am.” No current Hollywood flashlight has such self-doubt, or such self-awareness.
The press and its bastard children, the media and social media, magnify our distractions, and infuse the banal with an aura of meaning so that we can no longer recognize a person of substance or a subject of importance. We obsess over the tragic loss of five people in a miniature submarine, but the drowning of hundreds of migrants barely dents our consciousness.
Why? Is it because most of us cannot imagine being so desperate or afraid that we get on a crowded raft and sail into the unknown, with no assurance of safety or good outcome?
Yet we can imagine paying to take a submerged tour to the wreck of the Titanic? Is this just blindness? Classism? Lack of clear thinking? I don’t know. But it’s worth talking about.
I am not sure we recognize the real questions any more than the real thinkers and leaders.
Why, for example, are people worried about the age difference of two stars in a new raunch rom-com but not the fact that, in the film, the female star finds prostitution the only way to keep her home? Or that the parents in the film think asking a woman to prostitute herself to their son is a good way to prepare him for life?
But here is a proposition: We live in a time when everyone feels he or she should take his stand. But few of us are certain of the platform. What do we stand upon?
We build our houses upon sand, not rock. And, like our dominant public personalities, our public philosophies turn out to be less than they seem and than we need. Less.
America is no longer a well educated society. Our math and reading comprehension scores are dropping. Kids spend $100,000 on college “educations” and useless majors and never read Shakespeare or the Constitution. (And we elect presidents who not only do not study or re-read it, but have never read it.)
America is no longer a church going society. So when we plead for tolerance, mercy, and justice, we don’t know why. Worse, my justice and mercy are not yours, nor yours mine.
A friend told me recently that when he suggested a “values day” to a local civic group, the group blanched. It smacked of religion, they said, and that could be controversial.
But without values we have only opinion, unmoored. And the unmoored people who spout those opinions. A lot of that turns out to be … less.
Keith C. Burris is the former editor, vice president and editorial director of Block Newspapers (burriscolumn@gmail.com). His previous article was “The Democrats must make a better argument for government.”
First Published: July 3, 2023, 9:30 a.m.
