boorstin2

y ^    From Hero to Celebrity: The Humań Pseudo-Event

hind every prize and the shenanigans in front of every effort to enshrine a celebrity or to enthrone a Queen for a Day. Despite our best intentions, our contrivance to provide substitute heroes finally produces nothing but celebrities. To publicize is to expose.

With our unprecedented power to magnify the images and popularize the virtues of heroes, our machinery only multi-plies and enlarges the shadows of ourselves. Somehow we cannot make ourselves so uncritical that we reverence or respect (however much we may be interested in) the re-flected images of our own emptiness. We continue surrepti-tiously to wonder whether greatness is not a naturally scarce commodity, whether it can ever really be synthesized. Per-haps, then, our ancestors were right in connecting the very idea of human greatness with belief in a God. Perhaps man cannot make himself. Perhaps heroes are bora and not madę.

Among the ironie frustrations of our age, nonę is morę tantalizing than these efforts of ours to satisfy our extravagant expectations of human greatness. Vainly do we make scores of artificial celebrities grow where naturę planted only a single hero. As soon as a hero begins to be sung about today, he evaporates into a celebrity. “No man can be a hero to his valet”—or, Carlyle might have added, “to his Time reporter.” In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person with solid virtues who can be admired for something morę substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, under-paid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs. Topsy-turvily, these can remain heroes precisely because they remain unsung. Their virtues are not the product of our effort to fili our void. Their very anonymity protects them from the flashy ephem-eral celebrity life. They alone have the mysterious power to deny our mania for morę greatness than there is in the world.

From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel

“You're just 15 gourmet meals from Europę on the worlcTs fastest skip."

ADYERTISEMENT FOR THE UNITED STATES LINES

During recent decades we have come to think that our new technology can save us from the inexorable laws of familiarity. By magical modern machinery we hope to elear the world of its commonplaceness—of its omnipresent tree sparrows, starlings, and blue jays—and fili it with rare Sutton’s warblers, ivory-billed woodpeckers, whooping cranes> and rufous hummingbirds. Every bird-watcher knows how hard it is to reconcile oneself to the fact that the com-mon birds are the ones most usually seen and that rare birds are really quite uncommon. Now all of us frustrate ourselves by the expectation that we can make the exotic an everyday experience (without its ceasing to be exotic); and can some-how make commonplaceness itself disappear.

The word “adventure” has become one of the blandest and emptiest in the language. The cheap cafeteria at the comer offers us an “adventure in good eating”; a coursćsin self-development ($13.95) in a few weeks will trans^brm our daily conversation into a “great adventure”; to .tide in the new Dodge is an “adventure.” By continual overuse, we