Fanning the fame: How celebrities and/or heroes are made today

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Sometimes it isn’t the books we read that matter. Now and then it’s the books we re-read. For me, Daniel Boorstin’s “The Image” is a recent case in point. Originally published in 1962, it has an intriguing subtitle: “A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” In many respects it’s also a guide to pseudo-personalities, otherwise defined as celebrities.

In fact, one of the great lines in the book is Boorstin’s definition of a celebrity: someone who is “well-known for his well-knownness.” That line has stayed with me for many, many years. The rest of the book, as one might expect, had become pretty much a blur. At least that was the case for me until I had occasion to re-read it.

With a granddaughter in college and interested in the media, I remembered enough of the general thrust of the book to think this might be something worth her reading at least once. So it was off to do an Amazon search — and to discover this promotional blurb, courtesy of the editors of the Atlantic: “The book that explains Trump’s dominance may well have been published in 1962.”

A few clicks later the book was on its way to her, and I was on the lookout for my ancient copy, languishing and long-ignored somewhere in my highly disorganized “library.” What follows is less a belated book review than a commentary on that borrowed blurb.

It must be noted, review-style, that the book in many respects is a history of what Boorstin labeled the “Graphic Revolution,” meaning the explosion in the modern era of everything from print to photography to film to television to advertising. Yes, it was the conclusion of this eminent historian — who later was librarian of Congress — that the image had come to reign supreme long ago. More than that, and worse than that, images not only were shoving reality aside, but were also eclipsing American ideals.

So just what were pseudo-events? They were not quite false events, but they were created events, perhaps even invented events. In Boorstin’s day, prime examples would be news conferences and/or the Sunday morning interview programs during which news reporters did their best to make/create news.

Then came the first series of presidential debates, the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960. For Daniel Boorstin, this was the classic example of a pseudo-event in action. If Boorstin was right, and he was far from alone, John Kennedy “won” those debates, and presumably the election, because of television. Those who watched these pseudo-events (as opposed to those who listened to them) thought that the photogenic JFK had prevailed.

In any case, it would not be an accident that “The Image” arrived in bookstores on the virtual heels of that election. Nor would it be an accident that John Kennedy turned out to be our first celebrity president. He would be far from the last.

Clearly, Boorstin was worried about this shift in our public consciousness. Would he be as worried if he were with us today? More specifically, would he be worried in the way that the editors of the Atlantic are worried? Perhaps so; then again, perhaps not.

To be sure, Boorstin labeled Kennedy a celebrity president and not a pseudo-president. And yet his presumption seemed to be that the distance between a celebrity and a pseudo-personality, president or otherwise, was — and is — not a very large one.

Of course, Boorstin could not have known that we would have two types of celebrity presidents since JFK. And yet he might have predicted as much. We have had presidents who were celebrities before becoming president (Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump), and we have had presidents who, Kennedy-like, became celebrities as a result of being president (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama).

The key chapter for the purposes of these speculations is titled “From Hero to Celebrity: The Human Pseudo-Event.” Since the dominance of the Graphic Revolution, Boorstin contended, “much of our thinking about human greatness has changed. Two centuries ago when a great man appeared, people looked for God’s purpose in him; today we look for his press agent.”

There was a time, Boorstin continued, when “famous men and great men were pretty nearly the same group.” But no more, thanks largely to publicity manufactured by the Graphic Revolution, which has given us the means of “fabricating well-knownness.” As a result, we now have personages, men and women, whose fame has nothing at all to do with greatness. Nor does fame necessarily have anything to do with anything truly heroic. That surely was Boorstin’s conclusion better than six decades ago.

More than that, “in a now almost forgotten sense, heroes are self-made.” Celebrities, however, are not. Instead they are simply beneficiaries of the Graphic Revolution. After all, concludes Boorstin, “we can make a celebrity, but we can never make a hero.”

Almost as an aside, Boorstin adds that our “democratic beliefs” had gradually “nibbled away” at the heroes we had inherited from the past. To be sure, “our passion for human equality” could be a virtue, but it had also bred “distrust and suspicion of human greatness.”

That noted, Boorstin quickly returned to his larger point and persistent theme: the decline of true heroes and the rise of celebrityhood, otherwise defined as the “human pseudo-event.” In other words, once there were debates over what qualifies as true heroism, but post-Graphic Revolution debates dwell on what, if anything, is true about a celebrity or celebrityhood. More than that and worse than that, our “new model ‘heroes’” are essentially “receptacles into which we pour our purposelessness. They are nothing but ourselves in a magnifying mirror.”

Then there is the peculiar American phenomenon of actual heroes who had been transformed into “mere” celebrities. For Boorstin, exhibit A was Charles Lindbergh, defined here as an “authentic hero” who had been “degraded into a celebrity.” Never a tragic hero, Lindbergh became a tragic celebrity. First there was this: “In a dreary, unheroic decade Lindbergh’s flight was a lightning flash of individual courage.” Then there was this: Being an “authentic hero was not enough [for] he was destined to be made into a mere celebrity.”

Mention of the leader of the original America First movement compels mention of the leader of today’s America Firsters. Charles Lindbergh and Donald Trump, the taciturn Minnesotan and the voluble New Yorker, one a hero transformed into a celebrity. And the other? Maybe, just maybe, his story winds up being the reverse of Lindbergh’s.

As of 2015, Trump was merely a celebrity. A successful businessman and television personality, he nonetheless could have made anyone’s short list of those who are well known for little more than their well-knownness. And that might have been that. Except that it isn’t.

Having transformed himself from a celebrity into a consequential political figure, having survived assassination attempts (while claiming to have been saved by God, rather than a press agent) as well as court battles, not to mention the ridicule and disdain of a felony conviction, having experienced defeat and victory, he is now poised to transform the Washington deep state as a prelude to returning the country to its constitutional roots.

In addition, our mere-celebrity-turned-potential-heroic figure seeks to restore the very American ideals that Boorstin accused our image makers of driving out of American life. This isn’t exactly the trajectory that Boorstin had in mind while contemplating “The Image.” And yet … what might be the thrust of a Boorstin sequel were he on hand to provide one? Perhaps it might begin something like this: “Only in America could a mere celebrity … .”

John C. “Chuck” Chalberg writes from Bloomington.