I think the connection is very different from that. For in innumerable other sectors of American life, unbeautiful, unglamorous and unfashionable people are nowadays living and behaving in the same distinctively strange and showy ways that mark the so-called ““celebrity culture.’’ What has happened is not that a bunch of enviably thin, rich and well-coiffed people have taken to living life in a kind of image-driven way, as if continuously onstage or under the lens. More important: so have a lot of other people–in the press and politics and government, to name a few. This awareness of and catering to the assumed presence of a watching audience at all times is, in my view, a central feature of our modern life and has had a huge and truly unfortunate effect on it. The self-aware staginess that affects the way people behave in every walk of professional life is far more important than the glitz subculture. It has tended to drain what immediacy, sincerity and seriousness there were from a wide range of transactions that now purport to be one thing but have become another.
I have been trying to remember, for instance, the last time I heard a member of a congressional so-called inquiry ask a question of a witness to which he or she did not already know the answer, an answer the opposition was also prepped to put down with a smart sound-bite riposte. The best I could do was the electric moment in the early 1970s when Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the taping system in Nixon’s White House. More usually the ritual of inquiry and response is sham. What is going on is a stage production for the benefit of an unseen audience, either televised or to be reached via the writing press. The phenomenon, of course, hardly originated in the ’90s. As long ago as the ’50s, with the televised Kefauver inquiry into organized crime and the army-McCarthy hearings, this competition for the sympathy and support of an unseen audience at large was in play. And so was a certain amount of playacting. But neither was anywhere near so comprehensive or all-enveloping as today.
The same is true when you put journalists asking their questions onstage–true for both the journalist and the one who is being asked the question. There’s a whole lot more going on than an attempt at getting information and an attempt at providing a response or evading one. The test often becomes which of them comes off best in the view of the presumed audience. It is as if everything we do in our professional lives these days we do in full view of a sea of undesignated others whose good opinion we are eager to win. I don’t mean to suggest that our behavior has become image-driven to the exclusion of all else, any more than that’s the case among politicians or others who nowadays perform in a much stronger and less sparing spotlight. It’s just that for everyone who operates even at the margins of public life these days, there seems to be a monitor working at all times that asks: how is this going to sound, how is this going to play–not with whomever the person is purportedly dealing with, but rather with the great ““out there.''
I think this has had a kind of unnerving, unhinging effect on people. And it has also in lots of cases simply overwhelmed their sense of responsibility to the primary role they are meant to play, if not their memory of it altogether. As an example I would offer the O. J. Simpson trial. Yes, it was in the first instance (or it was supposed to be) the jury that the lawyers were trying to win over and the judge to guide and instruct. But could anyone who watched any part of it doubt that it was equally a public pitch by prosecutors, defense lawyers, witnesses and judge for the admiration of the watching audience, an effort to project some kind of dazzling personal image?
As one who favors the admittance of television cameras into the courtroom, I realize I am skating pretty near to the abyss here. You could argue, after all, that the rigor, decorum and purposefulness of the McVeigh trial was a result not only of difference between the styles of Judge Matsch and Judge Ito, but also of the fact that one was televised and the other was not. Still, even though television plays a large part, I don’t think it is merely the presence of TV cameras in so many situations that used not to be covered that is responsible for the onstage quality of so much of our public life.
People who are rarely under the gaze of a television or other camera are hiring public-relations consultants to guide them in what to say and how to try to look and be perceived by that ever-watching, unknown audience. And often, even as they are doing something else–or at least seeming to–they will be viewing themselves on a split screen as they believe they are being seen by others. In Washington, there is a saying that is thought to be a piece of particularly useful wisdom: ““I never say anything in private conversation that I would not want to read in the papers the next day.’’ It is wise, in a practical sense. And it does come from a long time ago, when it was thought to apply mostly to important political figures. But there is something creepy and revealing about it, too. It has become a saying of people who are not center stage in American politics, just people who are willing to self-censor their conversations with professional colleagues and friends on the theory that protection of their image comes first. I don’t think this is all the doing of TV, in other words. I think it’s something that’s come over us.
What is important and discouraging about the ““celebrity culture,’’ finally, is not that in its narrowly defined incarnation it exists. What is important is that it is but a small and exotic component of a much larger descent of so much of our national life into performance art.
