By Paul Beston on 6.12.09 @ 6:07AM
Inside the struggle not to know.
Recently I began noticing on tabloid covers and website homepages
frequent stories involving two people named Jon and Kate. I don't
know who they are. The brief headlines and teasers I've seen
don't identify them, as in, "Former Olympians Jon and Kate" or
"Philanthropic power couple Jon and Kate" or "TV watchers and
squabbling lovers Jon and Kate," for example. They seem to be
having some kind of marital trouble, one of those celebrity
divorces in the making, complete with lurid hints of bad
behavior. Or the divorce itself has made them celebrities; or
they're not married but just "breaking up," since getting married
today is not worth the bother.
Such stories are always tabloid staples, but Jon and Kate won't
go away. They've been in the headlines for what seems like weeks.
At some point, "Jon and Kate" reached critical mass in my mind
and I became conscious that I still didn't know who they were. My
hand glided over the mouse to click on a story and find out, but
then I stopped myself. As the days passed and I refused to click
links or read home-page teasers -- only headlines, which are
unavoidable -- my ignorance remained unsoiled.
Now it has become a project: I will strive not to discover who
Jon and Kate are, though there are limitless opportunities for
finding out involuntarily -- whether through a random television
playing in the next room, my car radio, or an Internet headline
that gives the game away before I can avert my gaze. But so far,
I have been successful.
Obviously it is not important to know anything about Jon and Kate
beyond this: they are evidently the latest sorry fools to feed
their lives into the maw of 24/7 media culture. As tabloid
subjects, they are contemptible by definition, so knowing how
they came to be contemptible is purely incidental.
The Jon and Kate story interests me only in how it illustrates
the conscious effort one has to take to avoid absorbing, even
unconsciously, whatever pablum the ubiquitous media machinery
chooses to shovel out. Now, don't get me wrong: I, like all
proper-thinking people, bow my head in thanks each day for this
wonderful machinery, with its proliferation of choices and
channels -- the Internet, cable TV, email, tabloids, talk radio,
cell phones, iPods -- that allow us to customize our lives and
guard against the scourge of silence that so haunted less
fortunate Americans in earlier times. It is truly the liberation
of the republic and I agree with all of the proper-thinking
technologists that the machinery is Madisonian in its diffusion
of faction and Jeffersonian in its decentralization and
Lincolnian in its determination never to perish. And I am old
enough to remember those gray days of the old regime, when
citizens were left unplugged to think their own thoughts.
So it is with sadness that I oppose the great machinery, though I
cannot hope to prevail in any meaningful way. Such is the state
of the mismatch that continued ignorance about Jon and Kate
counts as a kind of victory. It's one of my great achievements,
in fact. But it will be temporary. The machinery wants me to know
who Jon and Kate are, and sooner or later it will teach me. And
I'll be grateful, as I should have been all along. I'll have won
the victory over myself. I'll love Jon and Kate.
topics:
Tabloid Media, Reality TV, Instant Celebrity
