LEWIS COSER
In
the best chapter of his book, Boorstin contrasts the hero to the
celebrity. The hero is a man or woman of great deeds. "The celebrity
is a person who is known for his well-knowness." He is neither good
nor bad. All human qualities are leveled here, since the only common
denominator which counts is whether one is a "big name." Hence the
recently compiled
Celebrity R egister
shows
in
alphabetical order Mortim–
er Adler followed by Polly Adler, the Dalai Lama listed beside TV
comedienne Dagmar, Dwight Eisenhower preceding Anita Ekberg, Pope
John XXIII coming after Mr. John the hat designer, and Bertrand
Russell followed by Jane Russell.
The hero made himself ; the celebrity is made by the media. And
the celebrity, like a battery, needs continuously to be "recharged" by
the media because the passage of time, which creates the hero, destroys
the celebrity. The celebrity hence always must be anxiously concerned
with staying in the news. Once the spotlight is turned off, he becomes
passe;
he is out of the picture. Whenever it is asked of someone "What–
ever became of. . . ?" he is no longer a celebrity, in fact he is nothing.
Thus, as Boorstin cleverly observes, the m,an who formerly needed a
private
secretary to build a barrier between himself and the public,
nowadays needs a
press
secretary to keep him properly before the public
eye. He who does not get into the synthetic news is irrevocably con–
demned to the commonplace station which should have been his in the
first place. Absence of news about him creates the same horror and
anxiety as an announcement of impending death. Boorstin recalls the
New Yorker
cartoon showing father and son leaving a movie house
where they had just seen
The Spirit of St. Louis.
"If
everyone thought
what he did was so marvelous," the boy asks his father, "how come he
never got famous?"
The modern American, his palate jaded by predictable pseudo–
events, argues the author, has attempted to escape from the familiar to
the exotic. This is the Age of Travel. But the tourist, as distinct from
the traveler, has lost the capacity for real experience. The whole world
now becomes for him a stage for pseudo-events. Foreign travel no
longer involves an encounter with new experience, it has become in–
nocuous as it comes in neatly packaged form ; it becomes a commodity.
"When the traveler's risks are insurable, he has become a tourist." On
the packaged tour the natives are insulated from the tourists; they
might otherwise be a source of moral or material contamination; and
shipmates now replace them as a source of adventure. The best at–
tractions are those travesties of rituals, folk festivals and the like which
are put on for the benefit of the tourists in the best season and the
