Empire of Illusion (8 page)

Her appearance, along with her mother Jackiey Budden and model boyfriend Jack Tweed, in the Big Brother house in January 2007, however, backfired. She bullied and taunted Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, and used crude, racist remarks to describe Shetty, calling her “Shilpa Poppadom.” The show received some 45,000 complaints about her behavior and racist language. Her perfume was yanked from shelves, and publishers dropped plans to publish the
paperback version of her autobiography. She apologized abjectly to Indian viewers and appeared on the Indian version of the show, called
Bigg Boss
. She might have faded from view, like most reality show contestants, but in 2007 she was diagnosed with cervical cancer, learning of the disease while being filmed for the Indian program. The new twist to the drama of her life propelled her back into the spotlight and allowed her a final chance to play a starring role in her life movie. The Living Channel commissioned a three-part series that documented her battle with cancer. The program drew an audience of more than 900,000 viewers in Britain when it aired. She milked her final days for money and celebrity, including making about $1 million by selling exclusive rights to cover her wedding. She died at the age of twenty-seven in March 2009.

Goody told the
News of the World
when she learned her cancer was probably terminal: “I've lived my whole adult life talking about my life. The only difference is that I'm talking about my death now. It's OK.

“I've lived in front of the cameras,” she went on. “And maybe I'll die in front of them. And I know some people don't like what I'm doing, but at this point I really don't care what other people think. Now, it's about what I want
.
”

Nothing is off-limits, including death. As long as it can be packaged and turned into drama, it works. The emptiness of those like Goody who crave this validation is tragic. They turn into clowns. This endless, mindless diversion is a necessity in a society that prizes entertainment above substance. Intellectual or philosophical ideas require too much effort and work to absorb. Classical theater, newspapers, and books are pushed to the margins of cultural life, remnants of a bygone literate age. They are dismissed as inaccessible and elitist unless they provide, as Goody did, effortless entertainment. The popularization of culture often ends in its total degradation. The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote:

We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. Most of us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of Pinocchio's Pleasure Island, where boys were lured with the promise of no school and endless fun. They were all, however, turned into donkeys—a symbol, in Italian culture, of ignorance and stupidity.

Functional illiteracy in North America is epidemic. There are 7 million illiterate Americans. Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, and 30 million can't read a simple sentence .
²⁴
There are some 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate—a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year. A third of high-school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book.
²⁵
And it is not much better beyond our borders. Canada has an illiterate and semiliterate population estimated at 42 percent of the whole, a proportion that mirrors that of the United States.
²⁶

Television, a medium built around the skillful manipulation of images, ones that can overpower reality, is our primary form of mass communication. A television is turned on for six hours and forty-seven minutes a day in the average household. The average American daily watches more than four hours of television. That amounts to twenty-eight hours a week, or two months of uninterrupted television-watching a year. That same person will have spent nine years in front of a television by the time he or she is sixty-five. Television
speaks in a language of familiar, comforting clichés and exciting images. Its format, from reality shows to sit-coms, is predictable. It provides a mass, virtual experience that colors the way many people speak and interact with one another. It creates a false sense of intimacy with our elite—celebrity actors, newspeople, politicians, business tycoons, and sports stars. And everything and everyone that television transmits is validated and enhanced by the medium. If a person is not seen on television, on some level he or she is not important. Television confers authority and power. It is the final arbitrator for what matters in life.

Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, we are bombarded with the cant and spectacle pumped out over the airwaves or over computer screens by highly-paid pundits, corporate advertisers, talk-show hosts, and gossip-fueled entertainment networks. And a culture dominated by images and slogans seduces those who are functionally literate but who make the choice not to read. There have been other historical periods with high rates of illiteracy and vast propaganda campaigns. But not since the Soviet and fascist dictatorships, and perhaps the brutal authoritarian control of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, has the content of information been as skillfully and ruthlessly controlled and manipulated. Propaganda has become a substitute for ideas and ideology. Knowledge is confused with how we are made to feel. Commercial brands are mistaken for expressions of individuality. And in this precipitous decline of values and literacy, among those who cannot read and those who have given up reading, fertile ground for a new totalitarianism is being seeded.

The culture of illusion thrives by robbing us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth. It reduces us to the level and dependency of children. It impoverishes language. The
Princeton Review
analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates of 2000, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln spoke at the educational level of an eleventh grader (11.2), and Douglas addressed the crowd using a vocabulary suitable (12.0) for a high-school graduate. In the Kennedy-Nixon
debate, the candidates spoke in language accessible to tenth graders. In the 1992 debates, Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did Perot (6.3). During the 2000 debates, Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Gore at a high seventh-grade level (7.6) .
²⁷
This obvious decline was, perhaps, raised slightly by Barack Obama in 2008, but the trends above are clear.

Those captive to images cast ballots based on how candidates make them feel. They vote for a slogan, a smile, perceived sincerity, and attractiveness, along with the carefully crafted personal narrative of the candidate. It is style and story, not content and fact, that inform mass politics. Politicians have learned that to get votes they must replicate the faux intimacy established between celebrities and the public. There has to be a sense, created through artful theatrical staging and scripting by political spin machines, that the politician is “one of us.” The politician, like the celebrity, has to give voters the impression that he or she, as Bill Clinton used to say, feels their pain. We have to be able to see ourselves in them. If this connection, invariably a product of extremely sophisticated artifice, is not established, no politician can get any traction in a celebrity culture.

The rhetoric in campaigns eschews reality for the illusive promise of the future and the intrinsic greatness of the nation. Campaigns have a deadening sameness, the same tired clichés, the concerned expressions of the sensitive candidates who are like you and me, and the gushing words of gratitude to the crowds of supporters. The metaphors are not empty. They say something about us and our culture. Changes in metaphors are, as the critic Northrop Frye understood,
fundamental
changes.

“Are we going to look forward,” asked candidate Obama at an “American Jobs Tour” rally in Columbus, Ohio, on October 10, 2008, “or are we going to look backwards?”

Celebrity culture has bequeathed to us what Benjamin DeMott calls “junk politics.” Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. It personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. “It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture,” DeMott notes. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes—“meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage.” It redefines traditional values, tilting “courage toward braggadocio, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains.” Junk politics “miniaturizes large, complex problems at home while maximizing threats from abroad. It's also given to abrupt, unexplained reversals of its own public stances, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized.” And finally, it “seeks at every turn to obliterate voters' consciousness of socioeconomic and other differences in their midst.”
²⁸
Politics has become a product of a diseased culture that seeks its purpose in celebrities who are, as Boorstin wrote, “receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness. They are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror.”
²⁹

Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not examine voting records or compare verbal claims with written and published facts and reports. The reality of their world is whatever the latest cable news show, political leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present. They do not understand the predatory loan deals that drive them into foreclosure and bankruptcy. They cannot decipher the fine print on the
credit card agreements that plunge them into unmanageable debt. They repeat thought-terminating clichés and slogans. They are hostage to the constant jingle and manipulation of a consumer culture. They seek refuge in familiar brands and labels. They eat at fast-food restaurants not only because it is cheap, but also because they can order from pictures rather than from a menu. And those who serve them, also often semiliterate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are usually marked with pictures. Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick, sensual gratification.

Celebrity images are reflections of our idealized selves sold back to us. Yet they actually constrain rather than expand our horizons and experiences. “One of the deepest and least remarked features of the Age of Contrivance is what I would call the mirror effect,” Boorstin wrote.