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By Luke Robert C. Koehler
Read the tabs -- watch the tube -- if you want to know how a society that has lost its religiosity can still engage with the deities. The eerily appropriate term "celebrity worship" is evidence of the extent to which we've improved on Greek culture: We've invented disposable gods.
Tiger, Tiger . . .
I take our media obsession with Tiger Woods far more seriously than I do the specifics I've so far managed to learn, against my will, on the status of his marriage, facial injuries and mistress count. And the sad thing isn't the lonely get-a-lifers who eagerly consume the gossip and titillation, but the industry that feeds them, that creates the pseudo-immortality of fame in the first place.
"Tiger lifted up his shirt . . . so that the troopers could discern if he had any additional injuries after his SUV crash." Ah, our national right to know, as purveyed by hollywoodgossip.com. "The meeting took place four days after the post-
"The Greek gods may seem all-too human to us." This is how the phenomenon is described in a classical lit syllabus from
I'm starting to fear that Western civilization, of which
Even as we push forward technologically, we're thrashing about ever more desperately in spiritual stagnation. Tiger Woods, the latest demigod to fall to earth, to bleed blood instead of ichor, is a symptom of something we need to address collectively. We're at a cul-de-sac of empty cultural values. I don't think we can go much further without some sort of spiritual renewal, a reconnecting . . . with our fellow humans, our planet, ourselves.
Poor Brit Hume, the former
Start with ignorance and hubris, stir in a huge dollop of irony, and you, too, can make a fool of yourself just like Brit Hume. What I hear in Brit's faux-advice (you don't mind if I call you Brit, do you?) are all the symptoms of celebrity worship, beginning with the fact that we're always on a first-name basis with our disposable deities.
I also begin to discern a larger agenda at work here. Our Tabloid Olympus does indeed serve a higher purpose, or perhaps a variety of higher purposes. Remember when the Bush administration gave us a celebrity enemy named Saddam, whom we were encouraged to hate on a first-name basis? This was, of course, in lieu of actual (rational) foreign policy.
And consider: Just as many if not most of our celebrity heroes turn out, like Tiger, to have flies that buzz secretly around their pristine personas, Saddam -- the "Saddam brand," you might say -- had an opposite sort of flaw: no WMD, no link to Osama. But he served his purpose anyway, just as Tiger continues to do.
Whereas the creation of the Greek gods was a collective cultural enterprise, slowly evolving over the millennia in the embellishments of poets and storytellers, the creation of disposable gods is a sophisticated, cynicism-steeped business operation. The turnaround is quick and merciless.
How nice, but perhaps something deeper is driving their loyalty. The Sentinel quotes a professor in the
And at last we get closer to our One True (and non-disposable) God, whose name is Mammon.
© Robert C. Koehler
Tiger Woods and Disposable Gods