Lughnasa Lughnasa Moon
Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall, both dead. Celebrity is a harsh idea and exacts a penalty from both those who perceive it and those perceived to have it. Celebrity has to do stand in work in American culture for nobility, since the land of freedom and equality for all insists on not discussing its class system. As a result certain of us who become well-known thanks to athletic gifts or a handsome face or an ability to become someone else, perhaps also those who have a lot of money or political visibility, musical talents and in the rarest of cases here, literary ones, have an elevated stature.
In the same period, the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner point to a grimmer side of our passion for those seen to be above the culture’s average and that is our disregard for those seen to be below it. Seeing does not make it so, however, in either case. Lauren Bacall and Robin Williams are not more than the rest of us just as Michael Brown and Eric Garner are not less than the rest of us. But perception in a media saturated public square is often all we have to go on.
Who among you who read this knew Robin Williams or Lauren Bacall, Michael Brown or Eric Garner? If you did, you may have grounds for knowing what kind of persons they were, but for the rest of us, we “know” them only through news report in the case of Brown and Garner and their work in the instance of Williams and Bacall. Neither way of knowing comes close to the fullness of personal acquaintance.
Yes, this is obvious I suppose, except it isn’t. Celebrity carries its own luster, a stage light cast by approval or notoriety. Racism carries its own dimmer light which shades the person from full view, making them appear less than they are while celebrity luster makes people seem more. Both are inaccurate and do a disservice to the people effected.
Racism and celebrity might rarely be considered in the same paragraph, but together they reveal the deep chasm between what we think we know and what is actual. They both teach us to rely on secondary characteristics for taking the measure of a person. And, in both, we lose and so do those we see through those lenses.
