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I’ve always wanted to be too cool to care about being in the presence of celebs, if and when I ever should find myself in that situation. Reason dictates that it’s both absurd and unbecoming to go ga-ga over people just because everyone knows who they are. But I’m too honest not to admit that I’m not completely immune to the hold fame has over us, that I casually covet my few direct and indirect brushes with those who occupy the stratosphere of social renown, and even a few who hover only slightly above the rest of us.

Here are the brushes (both direct and indirect) I remember: One of my brothers dated for a while (or was just good friends with, I’m never quite sure) Stephanie Zimbalist, who co-starred with the still-famous Pierce Brosnan in the television show Remington Steele a few decades ago; another brother was center screen for an incredibly long time as an extra on “Ali,” playing a reporter taking notes while Will Smith tried to look a hundred pounds heavier than he was; I chatted with Timothy Busfield (of  30-Something, Field of Dreams, and West Wing fame) in line to board a plane from Newark to New Orleans; I met Sam Elliot by the keg at the post-production party for High-Low Country in Santa Fe that I more or less crashed (by invitation from a friend of the host), not knowing anything about the film whose completion I was supposedly celebrating (so when Sam hung out with me, and asked me my name, I thought it only reasonable to ask him his as well, not recognizing him at all until later, retroactively; he seemed a little taken aback that someone presumably on the crew of the movie he had just completed not only wasn’t honored by his gift of a little attention, but had even failed to recognize him!); I had a brief encounter with Condoleezza Rice when she was either Secretary of State or National Security Advisor and living in the Watergate complex, when I was staying across the street and having my morning coffee in a little courtyard in the complex; I just saw Time Magazine icon and Chris Matthews Show panelist Joe Klein walk quietly into a candidate forum in Denver a couple of weeks ago, and kicked myself afterward for not slipping him my card with this URL on it…, and so on. I know there are at least a few other similar encounters that I can’t think of now, but you get the idea. Fame is all around.

I myself have managed to get my mug on local TV, and my mugless voice on radio, a few times over the years, most recently on Denver Channel 12 and some radio station or other on Mike Zinna’s TV and radio shows. The occasional op-ed. Little itsy-bitsy droplets of public recognition.

As a marginal state house candidate, or even just as a social activist, I’ve learned how easy it is to become familiar with political big-shots. I can’t help but play a little game with myself, gauging how well this U.S. Senator or that Congressman remembers me; and they play it as well, demonstrating that they recall my name (when they do), because they know that it’s appreciated. (One found a pretext to shout my name across a parking lot as I was leaving a function, because he clearly hadn’t remembered it the last time we had met).

But why? The last example is the easiest to use to demonstrate the answer: Because fame is social capital. I’m trying to make a career in public policy analysis and advocacy, and getting to know people who are hubs, and hopefully bigger hubs, in the hub-and-spoke social networks in which I want to work is good for my career ambitions. “Social networking” is a valuable skill, because social networks are valuable assets.

It’s primal, and it’s wired into us early in life. When we lived in bands of primates foraging on the savanna, you wanted the strongest to be your friend, and so the strongest was very popular. He had as many allies as he could handle, which made him just that much more formidable. His reputation soared, and the desire to be in his inner-circle soared with it. Life was just better if you could manage to be among the chosen, and you often could, because it served his interests as well as yours. Fame, charisma, the human rallying point of social organization, it’s all tangled together, though not always coextensive (there are famous people with no charisma, for instance).

As a child, if you’re not one of the cool kids, you sure want one of them to take you under his or her wing, because that’s a form of protection. Their local fame provides a penumbra under which you can shelter, and “bask in their reflected glory”. If you can’t be cool, you can at least be a mascot.

People who droolingly seek an autograph from a celebrity secretly dream that they’ll be noticed, have a chance to show how lovable or talented they are, and maybe actually become a friend of the celeb. That desire isn’t irrational (though the belief that it might be fulfilled may be): Elvis’s friends made a darn good living being Elvis’s friends, and becoming a member of a celebrity entourage has long been seen as an awfully good gig if you can get it. The fantasy that contact can lead to connection, like buying a lottery ticket, drives the desire to touch, to encounter, to have one moment to have a shot at striking it big.

But reason sometimes intervenes: I always had a stronger desire to meet and talk with people whose fame was based on accomplishments that impressed me than on non-accomplishments that didn’t. I sincerely have no desire whatsoever to meet the vast majority of today’s crop of celebrities, and even the one’s I respect I don’t care that much about meeting. I treasure my conversations with famous scholars far more than I treasure my chat about the New Orleans weather with Timothy Busfield, or my comical encounter with Sam Elliot.

And I treasure encounters with people whose fame is very minor indeed (or even non-existent), but have some admirable talent or achievements or social network location that make them more famous to me. When (Denver Channel 9 political reporter and talk show host) Adam Schrager emailed me to compliment a fund-raising poem I had written (the same one, with a different last stanza, now gracing the home page of this blog), and stopped by my table at a candidate forum to chat with me for a few minutes; or when (hopefully soon to be Colorado Speaker of the House) Rep. Andy Kerr, with whom I did a legal internship during the 2009 legislative session, treats me like the casual friend that I am; or when State Senator Moe Keller warmly greeted me at a “legislative breakfast” hosted by Mental Health America yesterday, and later emailed me that she “loved” my blog, I was as delighted as I could be, because the accessibility of local luminaries is more valuable, and more pleasant, than the “immensity” of national and international ones.

Andy and Moe and Adam will probably feel, on reading themselves referred to as “local luminaries,” and discussed in the context of the attraction to famous people, pretty much the same way I felt a couple of weeks ago at Summerset Festival in South Jeffco, where I spent the weekend at the Jeffco Dems booth, when a young fellow, probably in his late teens, upon learning that I was a state house candidate, took on the demeanor of someone talking to an important person, with a little bit of a tremor in his voice, not realizing how astoundingly unimportant I really am!

But that’s just it. Importance or unimportance is situational, and subjectively perceived. In this brave new world of ours, we don’t have to wait for gatekeepers to allow us to show our stuff; we can type it on our laptops and send it out there, for others to admire or disdain, letting our own qualities distill from the social continuum a little dew drop of fame, evaporating with the rising sun. The person who posts something witty, or insightful, or inspirational, is admired by all who read it, and admired in a more meaningful and substantial way than a Paris Hilton by a gushing fan. We all have gifts to give one another, a song, an insight, a gesture of goodwill, that we can share as broadly as we choose, and by doing so, generate something of lasting importance, flashing through our social networks, rapidly evolving as it goes. We can earn fame in small doses, for moments at a time, and let others earn it as well. And we can retract it from those who have only attracted attention, reserving it for those who have done something of merit.

Just like other forms of capital, fame can be earned, inherited, acquired by deception or chance, horded, spent, or invested. Celebrities who use their celebrity to promote causes and to raise money for charities are spending their fame. When they open a restaurant in their name, they are investing it. When the promote someone else (such as Oprah regularly did with her book club), they are giving some of it to others, though their own supply is not diminished by doing so.

Fame has become more diffuse, too often trivial, a circus of balloon boys and party goers, but also occasionally well deserved, such as the little girl whose brilliant operatic voice on U-Tube landed her on American Idol. We are no longer apes on the savanna, no longer needing to focus on centralized individuals toward which to gravitate and around which to form hierarchies. We are now a decentralized network of interconnected minds, the juice of fame coursing among us all, lighting up momentarily here or there, and moving on.

Like other forms of capital, it is increased by being dispersed, it flows rather than resides, and it should be invested rather than horded. Recognition from the recognized has value, and increases the quantity and quality of recognition to be bestowed.

Let’s be one another’s entourage, sharing a fame that belongs to no one in particular, bestowing on one another the respect that we can all strive to deserve, and creating together the penumbra under which to shelter ourselves. Let’s bask in each other’s reflected glory, in our collective glory, without burdening any one of us with its exclusive possession, or denying the rest of us its occasional delight.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

If America ever was an enlightened country, it hasn’t been in my lifetime. Shortly before I was born, we had congressional hearings and blacklistings to destroy lives on the mere insinuation that someone believed in a particular political economic theory. During my childhood, we had the hippy movement that, while more hopeful and positive in outlook, almost immediately became just another pretext for a symbiosis of glassy-eyed and opportunistic human folly (even more so in the case of its progeny, the “New Age” movement). Then we (over-)reacted to such utopianism with the Reagan years, which put into place an astronomical bloating of the national debt (while claiming to represent fiscal conservativism), a renewed (self-delusional) sense of moral superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the world, a cynical promotion of religious fanaticism and cultural tyranny for political strategic purposes, a deregulatory frenzy that we are still paying for in numerous ways, and a set of policies that created more economic polarization in this country than existed in the 19th century “gilded age” of the “Robber Barons.” (As of 2007, 34.6% of net worth and financial wealth, 42.7 % of financial wealth alone, was concentrated into the hands of the wealthiest 1% of the American population. The bottom 80% of the American population were left to divide among them 15% of net worth and wealth combined, and just 7% of financial wealth alone. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html).

After a brief respite under Clinton, we returned to insanity with redoubled enthusiasm. Like a reverse John the Baptist to Bush’s reverse Jesus, Newt Gingrich regaled us with his “Contract With America,” a grandstanding promise to be indifferent to the needs of our most vulnerable citizens. Then came George W. Bush himself, not merely an embarrassing dimwit, but the first president in American history to both engage in and try to advance as our national values the torture of prisoners, the pre-emptive military bombardments of other sovereign nations, the kidnapping of foreign citizens off of foreign streets on the barest wisps of evidence against them (a mere accusation from a neighbor perhaps miffed about some private dispute) and then holding them in secret compounds and torturing them, even after concluding that they’re innocent of any crime, or “rendering” them to other countries that will torture them with even less self-restraint. After eight years of that president who morally and financially bankrupted the country, squandering the economic surplus left by Clinton, catalyzing the worst economic crisis since The Great Depression, we finally, in a rare glimmer of sanity, elected Barack Obama.

But sanity never lasts long in America. Since after a year and a half he has failed to erase the mess that Bush (and his Republican predecessors) created, since though he stopped the hemorrhaging of jobs (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/02/a_very_revealing_chart.php) he has not turned around what economists almost universally admit no one can, since he has tried to address the disgraceful fact that the richest country in the world had the most expensive and least efficient health care system in the developed world (the only one that failed to cover a significant portion of the population), since he addressed the lack of financial regulation (insisted upon and advanced by all preceding Republican executives and legislators) that led to the financial sector meltdown in the first place, he is the devil incarnate (born elsewhere, foreign in every way), and we must return to the insanity that preceded him (and is reacting to him).

Yesterday, on “This Week” (http://abcnews.go.com/thisweek), Queen Rania of Jordan very eloquently and moderately captured the corrosive role of religious extremism, both at home (in the United States) and abroad, the multiple folly of opposition to the Muslim cultural center in Manhattan (which stands in opposition to the intolerance and extremism of 9/11, and which in turn is opposed by the parallel intolerance and extremism at home), and the need not to surrender to cynicism and pessimism regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Such a voice of reason! So certain to fall on deaf ears….

After all, she is speaking to the America of Florida pastor Terry Jones, who felt that responding to the hopeful building of a Muslim interfaith center in Manhattan (not at “ground zero”, in fact) by threatening to burn the Koran was the epitome of what it means to be an American (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100907/ap_on_re_us/quran_burning). While many even on the right denounced him (only because they knew it would end up costing American lives), the ironic similarity of such intolerant ethnocentric escalators of hatred to the terrorists whose acts they abhor, and the dissimilarity to those who preach tolerance rather than interethnic hatred, is lost on them.

The Republican “Pledge to America”, which even conservative economists admit will further increase the deficit (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=534), is being aggressively and successfully marketed by the right as fiscal responsibility which no rational person could oppose (though virtually all rational people oppose it). And it imposes debt on future generations only to benefit the wealthiest Americans, rather than those who need assistance, or to improve our human or material infrastructure. We should incur debt only as an investment in the future, not as a redistribution of wealth, across generations, to the uber-wealthy of today.

At South Jeffco’s Summerset Festival the weekend before last, for instance, I had numerous encounters which drove home the zeitgeist. One pleasant young woman told me she was a Republican, and responded to my suggestion that we should all agree to be reasonable people of goodwill and build on that by saying, “yes, just look at health care reform, that ruined the best health care system in the world.” Was she referring to the same health care system that, by every statistical measure, underperformed the systems of every other developed nation on Earth, and did so at far greater expense, while managing to cover a smaller percentage of the population than any other developed nation’s health care system? And another woman insisted that illegal immigrants never pay taxes and are purely a sap on our economy, though many pay taxes, often for services they can never collect on, and by all economic analyses are either an economic wash or a slight benefit nationally. Truth is the first casualty of war, and there is currently a war being waged on truth itself in America.

Examples abound. There are the Colorado ballot initiatives, 60, 61, and 101, that even fiscally conservative Republican politicians in Colorado oppose (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16158190), but that have a chance of passing, and are defended by earnest pseudo-economic arguments such as those presented by Debbie Schum in yesterdays Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16158191). This is what happens when insanity is cultivated, in the hope of it being harnessed for political gain. Those who cultivate it eventually lose control of it, and it is the insanity unleashed that prevails.

As I’ve often said, there are legitimate debates to be had, legitimate disputes based on the differing conclusions of sound reasoning applied to reliable data in service to mutual goodwill. But we’re not having those debates. Instead, public discourse and the political process that simultaneously tracks and exploits it, have been hijacked by the need to incessantly debunk the unsound reasoning, fabricated facts, and fundamental inhumanity of what is perhaps the most powerful social movement in America today. We are too busy fighting the sheer human folly incarnate among us to get to the legitimate debates, and the hard, information-intensive work of governing ourselves wisely and effectively.

I have long noted that, in many ways, America is Ancient Rome to Europe’s Ancient Greece, the more brutish inheritor of a cultural, economic, and political fluorescence. Unlike Rome, however, which coveted Greek slaves to tutor their children, America has come to disparage rather than respect the still more civilized originators of modernity across the Atlantic. We look at countries that have almost completely eliminated poverty, have universal health care, low infant mortality, a far more successful and higher functioning public education system, greater social mobility, and higher rates of self-reported happiness, and many among us dismiss them as “socialist” countries, which we arbitrarily claim, by definition, must be failures. (As one individual quoted in yesterday’s Denver Post said, health care reform is “a communist, socialist scheme. All the other countries that have tried this, they’re billions in debt, and they admit this doesn’t work” (http://www.denverpost.com/commented/ci_16175215?source=commented-news).

The western European countries have their defects, to be sure, and America has done better than them on some dimensions, but this absolute rejection of the possibility that we have something to learn from others, who have fared better than us on numerous dimensions, is the epitome of combined arrogance and ignorance, that unholy marriage that dooms any individual or social entity to self-destructive irrelevance. We are a country very much like the one we were when Elmer Gantry was written a century ago, a country of small-minded yahoos and those that exploit them, with the marginalized voices of sincere and well-informed analysts shouting desperately across the sound-proofed barrier that has been erected against us.

But the question remains: How do we defeat this persistent, deeply embedded insanity that has come to define us as a people? In a conversation with Adam Schrager (Colorado’s pre-eminent political broadcast journalist) last week, we both voiced our disgust that politics has become far too much about the acquisition of power, and far too little about the challenge of devising intelligent public policies. But I shared with him this thought: Politics is almost inevitably hostage to an evolutionary logic. That which works (in the competition of policies and candidates) is that which is reproduced, while that which doesn’t work is abandoned. As a result, politics has devolved into a competition of marketing strategies and raising the funds necessary to their effectiveness. It isn’t enough to bemoan this fact, because any attempt to reject it, unless embracing an alternative simultaneously less cynical and more effective (which, as much as we’d like to be the case, almost never is), is doomed to failure, and thus obsolescence.

The ironic challenge we face, then, is how to use what works to create a context in which it is no longer what works, or no longer an option. For, while extraordinary acts of self-sacrifice for the public good by political leaders are both admirable and meaningful, they are not a sustainable strategy. Ralph Carr (Adam Schrager’s favorite example), the Republican governor of Colorado during WWII, who refused to comply with Japanese interment, despite such refusal being political suicide, might be a great example to follow, but if universally followed by all reasonable people of goodwill in all instances, would succeed only in ensuring that only irrational people of ill-will ever remain in office once confronted with the choice to do what’s right or do what’s politically expedient. The somewhat empty admonition that elected officials (like the rest of us) should always do what’s right rather than what’s in their own interests does not get us very far, both because of human nature (one’s own interests are going to remain a powerful incentive, whether we like it or not), and because of the evolutionary logic of politics (to paraphrase a famous quote from Henry Kissinger, in politics, always doing what’s right rather than what’s politically expedient or strategically superior merely cedes the world to the less scrupulous).

We can afford neither to be “above politics,” nor to surrender completely to its dysfunctional logic. But here is the limit of my own cynicism: We most certainly can’t afford to make ourselves morally indistinguishable from those we oppose. We must find successful strategies, in pursuit of raw political power, but by finding resonance between our own better angels and those of the electorate, rather than bringing both us and them down by resorting to the same old political cynicism as a first rather than last resort.

People criticize Obama for having tried to take the political high road rather than jamming through whatever we could any way that we could, but I do not. He is looking at a longer-term agenda, and a deeper necessity, than his critics are. There is a balance to be struck between what reality demands of us, and what our ideals demand of us, and we must always subordinate the former to the latter in the final analysis. Health care reform may have been critically important to our collective welfare, but there are deeper and more essential reforms that should not be sacrificed in every instance to the exigencies of the moment. We cannot defeat our own ignorance by surrendering to a political strategic system that exploits and cultivates it.

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