Goo Goo for Gaga? I Blame Bono (and Bush)
September 22, 2010
If the fact that the Senate did not repeal `Don't ask, don't tell' was a pleasant surprise, the tiresome role of celebrities (or, `slebs' as British journalist, Rod Liddle, calls them) in weighing in to campaign for such a repeal was not. This time it was `Lady Gaga,' who comes across as a cut-price knock-off of Madonna (as Camille Paglia has noted), speaking at a rally in Maine. Members of the crowd variously described her speech as "brave," "moving," and "touching;" I found it cliched, lacking in argument, and utterly lightweight. How a pampered celebrity, with a veritable army of bodyguards, playing to the gallery and going with the cultural flow is `brave' is somewhat unclear to me. Crossing a moderately busy road to buy a packet of cigarettes would seem in today's world to be a more physically, culturally, and professionally dangerous undertaking.
Listening to her on Monday, I was reminded of a comment made to me in the 80s about the student activism of that time: student politics is all about sincere people getting superficially involved in very deep issues. If that applied to relatively articulate and intelligent students at Cambridge in 1985, it would seem to apply in spades to the barely articulate synthetic celebrities who now consider themselves to have the right to lecture the rest of us (via ghost written speeches made up of emotive blather) on how society should be organised. Personally, I blame Bono. That you have the ability to wear ridiculous sunglasses with confidence and the ability to write lyrics that sound cool but do not actually mean anything should not qualify you to have any more significance in the shaping of society than the single vote your nation's constitution allows you come election time; and, in my opinion, as soon as rock music starts to take itself seriously, something crucial (I think it is called `fun') in the genre dies. Whatever one thinks of Bush's legacy, I trust that we can all agree that taking the U2 frontman seriously and giving him a platform was one of his least helpful actions during his tenure as US President.
Such celebrity authority brings to the fore a number of unfortunate aspects of the contemporary world. First, there is the assumption that what young people have to say is actually something to which it is worthwhile paying attention. Wrong, wrong, wrong. These are the same young people who think that the Twilight movies are actually watchable and that no English sentence is complete unless it contains the word `like' at least three times. And have you listened to their music? For Gaga, check out Christopher Walken's (we are not worthy!) exploration of her profundity and insight in an unanswerable fashion on British television. She sounds cool -- or so I am told -- but, as Walken shows, its really just an illusion, an aesthetic.
The unspoken wisdom of the day seems to be that those with less experience of the world, and thus presumably less `baggage,' are better equipped to solve its problems. That's theologically Pelagian and technically nonsense. I have no problems in my daily life -- from a leaking waterpipe to a serious illness -- that are not best addressed by consulting someone with experience in the field. When my toilet system breaks down, I want someone with `baggage' from the world of plumbing (I believe plumbers call it `appropriate training') to sort it out, not some ghastly sixteen year old with a record contract and a bizarre hairdo who just knows in their heart that, if we can all, like, totally get rid of nuclear weapons, prejudice, and Third World Debt and stuff, my loo will be, like, back in working order, you know, by nightfall. Awesome, as they say. Strange, therefore, how our culture seems to think that the really big problems in the world -- war, hunger, justice etc -- are always best solved by those with least experience of said world and little apparent ability to listen to the views of others who are older than themselves.
Second, there is the assumption that you must be good looking to count. Now, I confess that Lady G really does nothing for me -- she seems to me a rather plain girl with no real dress sense and a remarkably synthetic all-round demeanour -- but my opinion is apparently somewhat of an anomaly, for she would appear to have become almost overnight that most vacuous and overworked of concepts, an `icon.' And this style, this aesthetic appeal, apparently translates into having something worthwhile to say on just about anything you care to mention.
This aesthetic power is, interestingly enough, of a piece with the type of argument she, and other celebrity sources of wisdom, use, where the language of right and wrong is, by and large, subsumed by the language of taste and tastefulness. To be specific on the issue Lady G was addressing, those who disagree with her position were labeled `bigots,' and the idea that someone may have reasons for disagreeing with her that were rooted in anything other than mindless prejudice is not even an option. While I regard her arguments as stated on Monday as vacuous and emotive, I would at least like to give her credit for possibly holding her position for reasons other than mindless bigotry against social conservatives.
Goo goo for Gaga? Of course not. But the tough question is this: to what extent is this gagafication already at work in the church? Indeed, is the church already gagafied? To what extent has the assumption that youth has the answers captured the imagination of our churches? When we say we want to look for a `young, dynamic pastor,' is it not arguable that we intend the phrase as a tautology, that we are actually identifying the notions of `young' and dynamic'? Paul seems to assume that elders will be older men (to such an extent that he has to encourage Timothy precisely because he is young); that Pauline norm seems these days to have been lost in the fear of `losing the youth.' And I will not even bother touching the issue of ministers the wrong side of thirty who feel a compulsive need to dress like teenagers. Again, I blame Bono: he is older than me and he still wears leather trousers? Who is he trying to kid?
More broadly, how much of the language used by Christians in argument is really aesthetic in its power? Christian engagement in politics is an obvious example, where words like `liberal,' `conservative,' `Marxist,' and `Fascist' are thrown around with little regard to any philosophical content or actual analogy that may exist between the historic reference of such terms and the actual application in the here and now. All the force comes from the buzz -- the aesthetic resonances -- of such terms. Such words bypass the brain and pull straight on the emotional heart strings, short-circuiting real engagement. They also preempt any intelligent discussion. Ironic, is it not, that some of the most anti-postmodern figures in the Christian political firmament are, through their appeal to visceral, aesthetic language, among the most postmodern in their actual forms of argument.
Sadly, Christopher Walken is probably too busy to read our sermons, conversations, and speeches back to us; but, if he did, it might be an interesting exercise in demonstrating from whence the real power they contain comes.
Listening to her on Monday, I was reminded of a comment made to me in the 80s about the student activism of that time: student politics is all about sincere people getting superficially involved in very deep issues. If that applied to relatively articulate and intelligent students at Cambridge in 1985, it would seem to apply in spades to the barely articulate synthetic celebrities who now consider themselves to have the right to lecture the rest of us (via ghost written speeches made up of emotive blather) on how society should be organised. Personally, I blame Bono. That you have the ability to wear ridiculous sunglasses with confidence and the ability to write lyrics that sound cool but do not actually mean anything should not qualify you to have any more significance in the shaping of society than the single vote your nation's constitution allows you come election time; and, in my opinion, as soon as rock music starts to take itself seriously, something crucial (I think it is called `fun') in the genre dies. Whatever one thinks of Bush's legacy, I trust that we can all agree that taking the U2 frontman seriously and giving him a platform was one of his least helpful actions during his tenure as US President.
Such celebrity authority brings to the fore a number of unfortunate aspects of the contemporary world. First, there is the assumption that what young people have to say is actually something to which it is worthwhile paying attention. Wrong, wrong, wrong. These are the same young people who think that the Twilight movies are actually watchable and that no English sentence is complete unless it contains the word `like' at least three times. And have you listened to their music? For Gaga, check out Christopher Walken's (we are not worthy!) exploration of her profundity and insight in an unanswerable fashion on British television. She sounds cool -- or so I am told -- but, as Walken shows, its really just an illusion, an aesthetic.
The unspoken wisdom of the day seems to be that those with less experience of the world, and thus presumably less `baggage,' are better equipped to solve its problems. That's theologically Pelagian and technically nonsense. I have no problems in my daily life -- from a leaking waterpipe to a serious illness -- that are not best addressed by consulting someone with experience in the field. When my toilet system breaks down, I want someone with `baggage' from the world of plumbing (I believe plumbers call it `appropriate training') to sort it out, not some ghastly sixteen year old with a record contract and a bizarre hairdo who just knows in their heart that, if we can all, like, totally get rid of nuclear weapons, prejudice, and Third World Debt and stuff, my loo will be, like, back in working order, you know, by nightfall. Awesome, as they say. Strange, therefore, how our culture seems to think that the really big problems in the world -- war, hunger, justice etc -- are always best solved by those with least experience of said world and little apparent ability to listen to the views of others who are older than themselves.
Second, there is the assumption that you must be good looking to count. Now, I confess that Lady G really does nothing for me -- she seems to me a rather plain girl with no real dress sense and a remarkably synthetic all-round demeanour -- but my opinion is apparently somewhat of an anomaly, for she would appear to have become almost overnight that most vacuous and overworked of concepts, an `icon.' And this style, this aesthetic appeal, apparently translates into having something worthwhile to say on just about anything you care to mention.
This aesthetic power is, interestingly enough, of a piece with the type of argument she, and other celebrity sources of wisdom, use, where the language of right and wrong is, by and large, subsumed by the language of taste and tastefulness. To be specific on the issue Lady G was addressing, those who disagree with her position were labeled `bigots,' and the idea that someone may have reasons for disagreeing with her that were rooted in anything other than mindless prejudice is not even an option. While I regard her arguments as stated on Monday as vacuous and emotive, I would at least like to give her credit for possibly holding her position for reasons other than mindless bigotry against social conservatives.
Goo goo for Gaga? Of course not. But the tough question is this: to what extent is this gagafication already at work in the church? Indeed, is the church already gagafied? To what extent has the assumption that youth has the answers captured the imagination of our churches? When we say we want to look for a `young, dynamic pastor,' is it not arguable that we intend the phrase as a tautology, that we are actually identifying the notions of `young' and dynamic'? Paul seems to assume that elders will be older men (to such an extent that he has to encourage Timothy precisely because he is young); that Pauline norm seems these days to have been lost in the fear of `losing the youth.' And I will not even bother touching the issue of ministers the wrong side of thirty who feel a compulsive need to dress like teenagers. Again, I blame Bono: he is older than me and he still wears leather trousers? Who is he trying to kid?
More broadly, how much of the language used by Christians in argument is really aesthetic in its power? Christian engagement in politics is an obvious example, where words like `liberal,' `conservative,' `Marxist,' and `Fascist' are thrown around with little regard to any philosophical content or actual analogy that may exist between the historic reference of such terms and the actual application in the here and now. All the force comes from the buzz -- the aesthetic resonances -- of such terms. Such words bypass the brain and pull straight on the emotional heart strings, short-circuiting real engagement. They also preempt any intelligent discussion. Ironic, is it not, that some of the most anti-postmodern figures in the Christian political firmament are, through their appeal to visceral, aesthetic language, among the most postmodern in their actual forms of argument.
Sadly, Christopher Walken is probably too busy to read our sermons, conversations, and speeches back to us; but, if he did, it might be an interesting exercise in demonstrating from whence the real power they contain comes.
