Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [97]
“Jimmy!” I called out as he avoided my glance. “Don’t be mad at me! Jimmy! Come on! Come back here. Please? Jimmy?”
Cautiously he turned and looked me in the eye. I extended both my arms toward him. “Jimmy!” I called to him again, and again. “Jimmy! Come on now! I’m sorry. Don’t be like that. Don’t be mad! Jimmy!”
Now I pulled out all the stops. I raised my voice up two octaves and extended his two-syllable name to eight syllables. “Jimmy, come over here,” I tried once more. “Can’t we have a truce?”
Unable to resist a two-handed arm extension and an eight-syllable, opera-quality “Jimmy,” he sneezed, then thought for a second and trotted to the side of my chair. Once again he sat bolt upright, staring at me attentively, his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth, his tail thumping against the floor.
“So you accept my apology?” I asked. “You’re not too deeply hurt by the fact that I spoke so hastily when I said that …?”
“Yes,” he said as I scratched him behind the ear. “The answer is yes. Yes to all three questions.”
Celebrity Criminals and Criminal Celebrities: Celebrity 2.0
You can predict the trends of tomorrow’s middle class by looking at what is taking place right now in bohemia and in the prisons.
—my college criminology professor, 1970
IN 1995, DURING THE RIVETING DAILY BROADCASTS OF THE O.J. trial, I made an appearance as a talking head on a CNN program, where I remarked that I was enjoying the televised trial show so much that I hoped, when it was over, some other screwed-up, narcissistic celebrity would have the decency to step up to the plate and commit an equally amazing world-class crime that broadcast television would feel compelled to cover.
I was kidding.
I thought I was making a laughably absurd statement.
But the live audience on CNN didn’t take it that way. Instead, they got very upset with me for encouraging celebrity lawlessness. Later, I rolled my eyes and made fun of those people to my friends. I never imagined that someday I would look back and realize that those audience members were already tuned in to the trends of the future. Because as I write this, in 2011, I realize that to understand the joke I made that day, you had to also understand the archaic mid-twentieth-century model of celebrity and fame that was the standard when I was growing up.
The way the old model worked was that when someone rose from that petri dish of crime, poverty, and obscurity known as “the gutter” to be shellacked by the glow of the spotlight and its accompanying benefits of wealth and privilege, they did so on the wings of special abilities they had carefully cultivated. The possibility of this blessed rise was the very foundation of our superior American way of life: the dream that you could float all the way to the top on clouds of hard work and talent. Once you got there, you would have your heart’s desire; you would automatically go to the head of every line, and they would name sandwiches after you!
But the bargain you made to preserve your elite new position was that you also had to do whatever was necessary to safeguard your “good reputation” because now you were a positive role model for everyone else. The American middle class was prudish and judgmental. They expected you to be above reproach. Since everyone knew this, no sane celebrity would risk losing his or her place in the sun at the altar of poor impulse control, especially once they learned that the secret reward of fame was permission to partake of a smorgasbord of sin. All you had to do was keep the sin buffet a secret.
Back in those olden days of 1995, when I was making jokes about O.J., it was difficult for me to imagine