The events that triggered more chitchat about all this were the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner in Washington and the gathering of the famous in Philadelphia for a conference on volunteerism. The White House Correspondents’ dinner is one of those formal-dress occasions in the capital where news organizations, including this one, have taken to vying to land the most celebrated guests, never mind if their celebrity was acquired because of some unspeakable crime or world-class personal squalor. It has been satirized by Michael Kinsley in the hypothetical post-dinner boast: we had Hitler at our table! The celebrity angle of the Philadelphia conference, at which heavy-duty politicians and movie stars mingled, was far from the whole of it. But it was real and could have had no better historian than George Bush. ““Wouldn’t you want to talk to Brooke Shields?’’ the 41st president of the United States mused. ““Or cuddle up to John Travolta? We’re talking heaven.''
Where did this novel theology come from? When did the big shots from these disparate worlds begin to find each other’s presence heaven? I remember the painful, adolescent-like awkwardness two decades ago when the Hollywood stars and movers and shakers who would make the film about Watergate first moved among us at The Washington Post. People in the Post city room, who were so blase as to seem positively comatose about being in the company of political leaders, went absolutely wide-eyed in the presence of Hollywood stars. It was the last moment of innocence in these matters I remember. We were about at the place where you are when you are willing to stand in line for hours to seek the beloved ballplayer’s or other idol’s autograph. This kind of encounter isn’t the sort of celebrity hobnob I’m talking about. Nor is the age-old, traditional endorsement fandango between various showbiz personalities and the candidates they favor or the public charitable causes that need them. Nor, for that matter, is the historic meeting, usually after many years of long-distance jousting, of world figures who are antagonists and have been profoundly curious about one another: Anwar Sadat and Golda Meir, Richard Nixon and Zhou Enlai. What is happening nowadays is something else, the creation of a kind of celebrity community in which celebrity itself, not what led to it or what good use it may be put to, is the primary value and measure of worth.
There is a sense in which all this is nothing more than a kind of peculiar human biology in action, a matter of well-known politicians’, journalists’ and entertainers’ being irresistibly drawn by one another’s public-relations musk. But I think the trend has pretty damaging consequences for those who get swept up in it. For politicians and government leaders the temptation has been indistinguishable from a temptation toward the glorification of personality over product. A strong personality is generally indispensable to a strong leader; but when the state and status of the personality overshadow other once relevant measures of success, you are headed for trouble. I recall how odd it seemed to me, a while after the Bay of Pigs, that insiders kept reporting on how the president was now feeling better, etc. That didn’t seem to me to be the right question or the right issue. But by now we are accustomed to measuring all White House success by how the president is doing (for himself) - importantly, not by what he is doing (for the country). The budget will be good for him or bad for him.
It is this elevation of the personal above the political or institutional that has led, inevitably, to another result that our leaders don’t like nearly so much: the feeling of reporters, political opponents and everyone else that we have a mandate to poke endlessly into their personal business, since they have conveyed to us in a million implicit ways that they themselves the person, the highly celebrated person - are what it is about. Journalists and others, too, have wandered into this same trap themselves. More and more we seem engrossed in image-enhancing, reputation-boosting, self-promoting enterprises, whose object is less to tell a story or analyze a situation or offer an opinion than to draw attention to our own cleverness. Much more is going on in this department than the familiar half-baked, sensational ““scoop.’’ There is as well, increasingly, the contrarian, show-off ploy, a burgeoning category of journalism in which the morally indefensible is defended for the fun and fame of it and in which I am fairly certain we can expect in time to see such titles as ““What Is So Terrible About Concentration Camps?’’ and ““Incest Works.''
It is these insidious ways of thinking and producing, not the glitzy, photo-op get-togethers, that represent the problem. They betray a kind of political and professional nihilism. I and my status are what matter, the infected ones in government, and out, seem to be saying - not the issues we are seen to be dealing with, which are really pretty much stage props by now. Celebrity, in this sense, can be fatal. It’s not just that it is, by nature, temporary. It’s that sooner or later people will ask what accomplishment, exactly, the great one was being celebrated for. Celebrity is different from fame, just as vanity is different from pride and esteem is different from respect. One set lasts; the other is cotton candy.
