The Sadness of Brian Williams' Fall

Brian Williams' fall from grace and his six-month suspension--likely to become permanent--as anchor for the NBC Nightly News, saddens me.

While I haven't seen more than brief clips of his evening news broadcast for years, I always respected his reporting.

It isn't his reporting that has gotten him into trouble though. It's his celebrity that's done it. Or more accurately, his reaction to it. Williams' "misremembering" and exaggerations weren't told on his news broadcasts. They were parts of tales he recounted on late night talk shows and in other such entertainment venues.

There's good reason for anchors of network news shows to make appearances on talk shows. It's good for the ratings. It makes the individual who is the face of the evening broadcast accessible and, "real" to the public.

But when you get onto the celebrity circuit, you're given a platform on which you can make a fool of yourself without anyone suggesting that you stop. (At least for awhile.)

And, it seems, celebrity is like a drug. The applause, the adulation, and the laughs can, if one isn't careful, leave a person craving for more. So, the stories become more outrageous. Or the behavior does. You get too comfortable in the spotlight. As U2 puts it: "Some things you shouldn't get too good at/Like smiling, crying, and celebrity."

Celebrity can be deadly when it comes to someone at a young age. Elvis and Michael Jackson were addicted to it with horrible results throughout their lives. Celebrity can kill people. Or make them insufferable. Or unemployable. Or presumptuous.

According to The New York Times, Williams approached NBC executives about taking over The Tonight Show from Jay Leno. That probably should have set off alarm bells at 30 Rockefeller Center. But when "the talent" does or says something goofy, you do what you can to protect the cash cow by gently rebuffing them and sending them on their way, as NBC execs apparently did.

That works until the celebrity goes one goofy too far. That's what has happened to Brian Williams.

It's sad. Williams has been, from all appearances, a good journalist for years. And while in this hypermediated age in which people get their news constantly from the Internet, the nightly news broadcasts aren't as important as they were in the age of Cronkite and Huntley & Brinkley, Brian Williams was deemed credible and watchable by more viewers than his competitors. He was seen as the best at what he did. But it wasn't enough for him, apparently.

Once a person tastes celebrity, it seems, it rarely is.

[This has been cross-posted at The Moderate Voice]

The Right Kind of Fame

Here.

Then maybe, look here.

Who's Entitled?

Leonard Pitts, Jr. talks about the worst question a celebrity can ask.

It reminded me of this story I first heard recounted by John Maxwell, retold here by Paw Prints Anecdotes:

Entering a crowded restaurant with a companion, Gregory Peck found no table available. "Tell them who you are," murmured the friend. "If you have to tell them who you are, you aren't anybody," said Peck.

[From eight years ago: The Effects of Fame on the Famous.]



UPDATE, 5/3/2013: Discussing the incident involving Reese Witherspoon on CNN the other evening, Jeffery Toobin, a legal scholar and journalist, said that while the officer who arrested Witherspoon was within his bounds, in his judgment, he cuffed her too quickly. In looking at the video that went viral yesterday, I understand what he means. But, along with Toobin, I think that Witherspoon's apparent claim of entitlement to special treatment because of her celebrity status was unconscionable. It was also a taunt to the officer.

By the way, was her husband leaving Reese out there twisting slowly, slowly in the wind when he told the officer of her behavior, "I had nothing to do with that"?

Tyler Perry's Thoughts on Anniversary of Whitney Houston's Death

Here. Tyler Perry ends his remembrances of Whitney Houston with a call for prayer:

We can keep her daughter and her family lifted up in prayer. We can also pray for other people in this business, especially these young people who come in so bright eyed and eager, only to have it tear at their very souls.

I thank God I didn’t become successful until I was older. The younger you are when you start in this business, the more at risk you are.  Speaking of that, we can also pray for the children of these people. If you only knew what people in this business have to endure to sit in their seat. I’m not asking you to feel sorry for anyone. I’m simply asking you to pray for us all.

Makes sense to me. Can you imagine what might happen in our culture if not-famous Christians started regularly praying for all those people, famous and not famous, who have a part in the creation and production of movies, TV shows, video games, and books?

I'm not even advocating prayer requests to God for what we think these talented people should be producing.

Instead, I mean praying that God will give them a sense of His presence and love for them each day and that they would be protected from the trails of sycophants who want pieces of them or to sell them self-destruction, one-kilo, one-needle track, one bottle at a time.

Pray for the famous and the families of the famous that they may be protected from the dangers and the ills of fame.

Pray for those who help entertain us and inform us, that God will guide them and help them experience God's goodness, Lordship, and love every single day.

I'll pray that prayer, Mr. Perry! And thank you for your fine post.

[By the way, in 2005, I wrote a piece regarding the effects of fame on the famous here. Also see here.]

If You're Not Famous...Be Thankful

Rare is the person who can handle success, prominence, or fame. Fame often leads to a sense of entitlement and invincibility. Fame isn't good for a person's soul.

These lessons have been made clear as I, along with the folks of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church, as part of our Read the Bible in a Year project, have been recently reading about Israel's first king, Saul, in 1 Samuel.

Saul was, by turns, diligent in his duties one moment and arrogant in the abuse of power the next.

Saul never seemed to fully understand that, through his anointing as king, he had been made a servant of God and of Israel, not just of himself.

This lack of understanding once led him to quake among the baggage when his people needed him to command them in war. It also led him to disobey God, employing his own faulty judgment instead of depending on God, all in a gambit to win the favor of those he led.

In time, Saul came to view his fame not only as an entitlement, but as an extension of himself and his personal identity. That, in turn, fed a paranoia that--among other things--caused him to seek the murder of his best and most loyal military leader, David, and to treat the members of his own family as chess pieces to be moved around for his purposes.

As I watched an excerpt of the tearful press conference of Representative Anthony Weiner yesterday, I thought of Saul. Maybe if Weiner weren't a six term congressperson from New York, he wouldn't have done the things to which he admitted yesterday. But fame and prominence, even the smallest whiffs of it, can make the most stable and sober of us think that we're "all that."

A sense of entitlement--an idea that whatever might be vices in others really aren't vices in us--can actually come to any of us at any time, even if our name is known to only a handful of people.

Narcissism, total self-interested self-regard,  is something with which we are all born and which it's the job of every parent to wean out of their children.

This inborn trait is what the Bible is talking about when it teaches that we are all born in sin, sin being a condition of self-will over against loving consideration of God or others. (By the way, that's why Jesus says the Great Commandment is to love God and love others. And it's because we can't conquer the condition of sin that leads us to do all manner of stupid, hurtful things, that Jesus calls all people to turn from sin--or repent--and believe in, entrust their lives to, Him. Jesus can erase the power of sin over our lives and help us, in this lifetime, to be recovering narcissists, and in eternity, be utterly free to be the people God originally willed us to be.)

So, if you're not famous, be thankful. It can create such false notions of invincibility, power, and entitlement that it can close your conscience to heeding what's right or correctly identifying what's wrong at any moment in your life.

And if, like me, you're just another ordinary member of the human race, I hope that you can be honest enough to say that, even without fame, you've acted like a person of entitlement who treated God and others with contempt, as though they were bit players in the more important production of your life. If you can muster that level of honesty with God and with yourself, you'll be onto something. You'll be close to surrendering to Christ and His better will for your life.

Finally, if you're prone to join the late night talk show comics in laughing at Anthony Weiner, please don't. His actions are admittedly wrong, even childishly so. But what he needs more than our derision is prayer.

So do we all.

That, of course, doesn't mean that the people for whom we pray shouldn't be held accountable, if their actions are illegal or violate the ethics rules of their professions.

But we can pray for Anthony Weiner or any political leader of either party facing similar humiliation in the face of their own revealed bad judgments and hubris. In 1 Timothy, the first century evangelist Paul writes to a young pastor named Timothy:

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, ²for kings and all who are in high positions...

That's what I try to do for all political leaders on a regular bases. If you're skeptical about including leaders in government in your prayers, consider this: It can't hurt!

And while you're praying for them, you can also thank God that you're not famous.

LP Cover Parodies and Self-Deprecation

I was in a Virgin Records Store earlier this week. (It's a place through which I sometimes peruse, although I can't remember ever buying anything there.) As I looked around, this CD cover caught my eye:


Imitation is, of course, if not the highest, one of the highest forms of flattery and obviously, this LP cover art from Def Leppard, a band I have managed to totally avoid through the years, pays homage to the Beatles. The Sparkle Lounge, I've since learned, was released in April of this year.

In case you don't know which Beatles LP it mimics (How have you managed to avoid the Beatles all these years and why would you want to?), here's the cover for their 1967 release, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band:

One of my favorite knock-offs of this landmark LP's cover was on the 1973 release by Beatle Ringo Starr. It looks like this:

The Beatles always had a healthy sense of humor, concealing pride in their musical legacy beneath a willingness--most of the time--to deprecate and parody themselves. This was true of them from the beginning of their careers, when the Four Moptops appeared on a British variety show mocking their own then-signature, "Wooh!" while singing Moonlight Bay:



In later years, George Harrison appeared in the Eric Idle-created mockumentary, The Rutles.

But when it comes to LP covers, one of my favorite Beatles send-ups came from Beatle Paul McCartney. It mimics the cover that may be even more famous than that of Sergeant Pepper's: Abbey Road. Again, for those who've been living under large geological formations for all or parts of the last forty-five years, the original looks like this:

And here's Macca's send-up, a concert LP released in 1993, called Paul is Live:


The Paul is Live cover manages also to allude to at least two tidbits of Beatles lore. First, it hearkens back to the resilient rumor, which started in 1966 and was still going strong in some circles as late as 1970, that said that McCartney was dead. The Abbey Road cover was introduced as evidence for this assertion. (One probably believed by the same folks who think that UFOs are here from other planets, the Cubans or the Mafia killed Kennedy, and Milli Vanilli were talented.) The four Beatles crossing the street by the EMI studios where they'd recorded from the beginnings of their careers, were said to be forming an Indian funeral procession with Lennon as priest and Starr as undertaker. The bodies of the dead in India, we were told ominously, were always left shoeless in such processions. Note: Paul is barefooted! Harrison, in his jeans, was also said to represent lower-caste mourners for the departed. No, in fact, Macca was saying in 1993, "Paul is [a]live and performing live." (As he told Chris Farley in one of those wonderful faux talk shows Farley used to do on Saturday Night Live, "I wasn't really dead.")

On the 1993 cover, McCartney is being pulled along by an English sheep dog like the one he owned in the 1960s, a dog named Martha. Martha gave its name to the Beatles' 1968 tune, Martha My Dear.

Self-parody is the best way for celebs to inoculate themselves against others' putdowns and from the usually-plausible charge of taking themselves too seriously. (This was something George Harrison tried, to no avail, to teach Madonna and Sean Penn when he produced a movie in which the then-married couple starred for him.) JFK was a master of self-deprecating humor and the Beatles, who conquered America five months after Kennedy's assassination and who were not short on ego, have been as well.

Here and here are sites that display LP covers imitating Sergeant Pepper's and Abbey Road.

I suppose that the real question about these and other parodies or all artistic imitation, for that matter, is why it happens. There are probably several reasons. One is that some works of art, whatever the idiom, are touchstones. They grab us by the lapels--assuming we have lapels--and won't let go. Musically, Sergeant Pepper's and Abbey Road did that, as did their cover art. Both were celebrated and are viewed as iconic.

Secondly, not everybody is as creative as the Beatles or the LP cover artists with whom they closely worked once Beatlemania hit. The Beatles' monstrous success allowed them to roam like kids in the candy shop through the entire musical process--production, arrangements, packaging. Before Beatles LPs like Revolver or Rubber Soul, album covers were fairly boring and predictable. The Beatles changed that.

But, of course, few can match the Beatles for creativity or the freedom accorded them by the suits. For four-and-a-half decades now the Fab Four have been imitated and parodied, but never matched.

[Also see here.]

[UPDATE: Go here to see something totally unnecessary: a live webcam transmission from the Abbey Road studios, now seventy-seven years old and still a site that attracts artists from around the world.]

"The important thing is being remembered not by others, but by God"

See here, then here.

"If you want a title, what's wrong with Mr.?''

The speaker was British actor Paul Scofield, who died today. He posed the question in response to queries as to why he didn't want to be knighted, gaining the privilege of being called, "Sir."

In spite of being in a very public profession, Scofield felt no need to be a public personality, a celebrity.

Scofield's decision for ordinariness, in spite of his extraordinary talent, is a bit damning, however unintentionally, of those marginally talented celebrities with which the tabloids become so obsessed these days. It also damns those more talented persons who, once their sizzling fame has abated, can't be content with simply continuing to do work, instead spending millions to tell us that they're still around and still talented.

Scofield's stance reminds us that there is a difference between success, on the one hand, and prominence, on the other. Scofield was a successful actor who received an Academy Award for his incredible performance as Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. Yet he never became a celebrity.

His example might well be heeded beyond the field of entertainment. Politics, for example. Gore Vidal, a curmdudgeon whose inventive, if destructive, violations of historical fact have sometimes angered me, is often cited as having said, "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so."

Vidal's point, of course, is that if anyone has that peculiar combination of megalomania and gnawing insecurity necessary to say, "I want to be President," they probably aren't well-suited for the office.

I'm inclined to agree. And these months of watching the 2008 nominating races, in processes that combine elements of a new car show and WWF bouts, complete with the inauthenticity of both, have heightened my inclination to agree even more.

Of course, the Christian world view to which I subscribe is nothing if not realistic. Christian anthropology derived from the Bible is unflinchingly honest about human beings. Nobody is perfect and it would be silly to expect perfection in our political leaders.

But what's bothersome is that, in their desire--their need?--for prominence, pols will often portray themselves as something like perfect and their opponents as something considerably less.

I only hope that the desire for titles, vindication, and power isn't so great as to cloud the judgment of the chief remaining candidates. I hope that they don't believe the nearly-messianic ways in which they portray themselves and their candidacies.

On the day before he announced his candidacy for president in the 1988 race, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis visited a prominent presidential historian over lunch. The historian had known every US president from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan. What, Dukakis asked him just before leaving, did all those presidents have in common? The historian thought for a moment, then said, "They were all very strange."

It may be a bit more than we have a right to hope for that our next president won't be strange, driven by the desire for titles, accolades, and Air Force One, nor inflated by a weirdly outsized sense of self-importance. But if those characteristics can be mitigated by a smidgen of both humility and an appreciation of their inherent worthiness as human beings apart from accomplishments or honors, that may be okay.

I might also suggest that they spend some time studying Paul Scofield's approach to his work and to the alluring demon of prominence.

[Scofield's statement, by the way, is the perfect quote for this Maundy Thursday, commemorating the day when Jesus, God-in-the-flesh who came not to be served, but to serve, washed the feet of His disciples.]

[You might be interested in these ruminations on the effects of fame on the famous here and, in its original incarnation, here. And here and here I look at David Bowie and Pope John Paul II, I consider prominence and its uses]its uses]

[I promise that this will be last Paul Scofield-related post of the day.]

By the Way, Why Are We So Hard on the Famous?

Here's an oldie.

"I hope she can find what will satisfy her soul"

That's Pastor Jeff, in a thoughtful piece on Britney Spears, which might as readily have been written of Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Paris Hilton, and a host of showbiz types who've scaled Celebrity Heights only to melt down.

Also, delving into the Better Living time capsule, you might be interested in this column on the effects of fame on the famous, a piece triggered by Michael Jackson's appearance in his pajamas in a California court room.

"It's a turn-around jump shot, it's everybody jump start...

...It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts. [Paul Simon, The Boy in the Bubble]

I think of that line relative to former Senator Fred Thompson today. A fawning media, blogosphere, and core of GOP activists seem to view him as the savior who will soon ride into the 2008 presidential race and make all things right. Discussion of him these days is almost universally positive. He's getting a high toss up the "pop charts."

All of this adulation will likely suck Thompson into the campaign. It's at that moment that we'll see the pop star begin to plunge. It happens to everyone. Voters will learn that they don't agree with him on everything. Bloggers will complain that he isn't really charismatic, whatever that nebulous term means when used by political observers. Reporters will begin to probe and report that Thompson, contrary to the heady expectations being voiced today, is human.

None of this is to say that Fred Thompson won't be nominated. He might be. And, in spite of the fact that 2008 is the Democrats' to lose, given that party's penchant for lemming-like self-destruction at the polls, Thompson might even win. And, more importantly, he may be qualified to be President.

But it is a predictable element of fame in America--and probably the rest of the world--that we love the famous until we decide that it's time to knock them down. It's then that we find some new "saviors," we can boost, then bash.

"There’s talk on the street, it sounds so familiar. Great expectations, everybody’s watching you.
People you meet they all seem to know you, Even your old friends treat you like you’re something new...There’s talk on the street, it’s there to remind you that it doesn’t really matter which side you’re on. You’re walking away and they’re talking behind you. They will never forget you till somebody new comes along." [The Eagles, New Kid in Town]

It's okay to respect those who attain prominence or power. It's also okay to question their decisions, motives, and abilities. But a little bit of realism at either end of the sorry "adulation or savaging" cycle would be a good thing.

For example, the McCain-haters who want Thompson in this race right now would do well to remember that during the two senators' overlapping tenures, their voting records were strikingly similar.

The bottom line is that neither Fred Thompson, the flavor of this month, Barack Obama or Rudy Giuliani, the flavors of last month, or John McCain, the flavor a few years back, are as perfect as the adulation and media coverage accorded them at the tops of their cycles or, most likely, as imperfect or as bad as the reports from the trash cycle indicate.

Of course, this phenomenon is nothing new. Thirty years ago, John Lennon wrote, with more than a little self-pity and a lot of self-aggrandizement, yet insightfully, "All the world's a little town. Everybody wants to bring you down." (John Lennon, Isolation)

Secretly, I think, we all believe that we're more worthy than the people who reach or climb close to the heights of politics, music, literature, movies, academia, or our own fields. Ultimately, it's a personal thing that goes back to human beginnings: We boost one hero and then resent their success because, truth be told, we all want to be the hero. We want to be God.

[Also see here.]

"He wanted to be successful without being famous"

That's what someone said of the late George Harrison after his untimely death from cancer. It was the singer-songwriter's second bout with the disease, the interregnum between them punctuated by a middle-of-the-night assault by a knife-wielding man that nearly ended Harrison's life. Pop music was too central to popular consciousness for Harrison to be able to realize his desire for success without fame.

For forty-six years, Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, has been able to be successful without the uncomfortable accoutrements of fame. But now, at age 79, portrayed in an Oscar-nominated movie and about to be portrayed in another film by Sandra Bullock, one wonders if Lee can continue to live in relative obscurity.

Human beings, no matter if they're religious or not, universally display an impulse to worship something or someone. To refer to cults of personality, the way we do, as "idol worship" is more than just idle talk. I take a very little interpretation of the phrase. We put the famous on pedestals, preferring the gods we can see--and ultimately knock off their pedestals, if we so choose--to worshiping the one God beyond our physical sight and beyond our control.

It's the presumption of control that makes celebrity idol worship so dangerous. The worshiper--the fan--begins to believe that they control the object of their worship. The famous chafe under such treatment and then are dismissed as being surly, temperamental, or difficult.

For the particularly insecure celebrity, the worshiping fans really can come to call the shots. One tragic example of this is Elvis Presley. Instead of growing as an artist the way his one-time Sun Record-mate Johnny Cash did, Presley, in spite of enormous talent and huge potential, followed a formulaic route that led not only to his artistic demise, but perhaps his personal fall as well. He was a prisoner of his fan base.

The pressure on Lee to write another Mockingbird must have been intense at times over the past four-and-a-half decades. But she seems to have opted for the solid success of a classic book rather than a profusion of bestsellers. One wonders what might have happened had her Alabama friend, Truman Capote, remained at home as Lee has. Lee can rightly be considered a great writer although she's published only one book in her lifetime.

She's been successful while shying away from fame. Just some lunchtime musings.

[Read today's New York Times profile of Lee here.]