The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  Trying to answer that question leads us into an area beyond nihilism, which at least had a kind of purity. But counter-productive terrorism looks to be mixed up with the dubious attractions of celebrity, self-realization and the desire of its practitioners to appear on screen, even if wearing a mask. The political analysts of the next generation, whose task one doesn’t envy, might have to face the possibility that the glamour-boy terrorist does what he does, not because he has a definite cause to pursue, but because he is exercising his one and only talent: the one talent which it would be death to hide, but which unfortunately expresses itself in the form of random death to others. This seems likely to have been true in the pioneering case of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, whom the press foolishly continues to romanticize with the name of Carlos, thereby infantilizing itself along with him. One Sunday afternoon Sanchez threw a grenade into the drugstore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He killed two people and wounded thirteen more. Apparently his reason for doing so was that the proprietor was a Jew. There is no reason to think that Sanchez’s anti-Semitism is any more fervent than his Marxism. Yet there are convinced anti-Semites who would never do such a thing. We can even distinguish his achievement from that of the Jewish ultra-orthodox madman who, when he massacred thirty defenceless Arabs in a mosque, was at least angry about something. Though putatively enraged by the unholy alliance between the US and Zionism, Sanchez has probably never been angered by anything except the occasional woman who turned him down. Few of them seem to do so. As of this writing, his French lawyer, a clear case of the sophisticated nincompoop, plans to marry him. It is hard not to hope that he will finish her off with suitable casualness when he moves on to his next triumph. Hard, but necessary. If we aren’t capable of seeing that the benefit of justice means nothing unless it is extended to those who are too stupid to be worthy of it, we should join the other side.

  SAVE US FROM CELEBRITY

  A speech delivered at the Australian Commercial Radio Conference, 16 October 2004

  I met Andy Warhol only once, and I wasn’t sure it was happening even then. Theoretically he was still alive at the time, but he had the handshake of a ghost. It was beyond limp – just a cellophane sack full of liquid, like the water bombs we made in school. But the hand was a miracle of vitality compared to his face. Transparent of skin and with the eyes of a salmon on a marble slab, he would have made Lazarus, emerging from the family vault, look more animated than Billy Crystal. Our encounter happened in London, not Palestine, but there was something biblical about the features thinly painted on the front of that balsa skull, under the canopy of stark white fibre-optic hair. There was a post mortem solemnity there, an intimate knowledge of the world beyond the tomb. Perhaps, after he had been shot a few years earlier by one of his bedraggled platoon of untalented actresses, he had journeyed through the netherworld while on life support. His smile – a computer-generated rearrangement of crumbling tissue – seemed to suggest that he had met me down there, and was as glad as a zombie could be to see me again. It was kind of him, because he had no idea who I was. And of course I wasn’t anybody. Everybody Warhol knew was a celebrity. Therefore he did not know me.

  For a fleeting moment I felt bad about that. I didn’t want it to be such a comedown for the man who had lunch with Jackie O to be having his hand squeezed by Clive Zero. Besides, I quite admired him. I didn’t think much of his paintings, which struck me as sheets of stamps designed by the semi-gifted daughter of a Third World despot. I couldn’t see why a silk-screen photograph of the electric chair should be more interesting than the actual electric chair, which at least transmits some kind of thrill, even if fatal. But I had been impressed by his much-quoted prediction that everyone in the future would be famous for fifteen minutes. The prediction was so obviously already coming true. And he had said it well, and saying something well is almost as good as doing something. Somewhere in what passed for my brain in those days, I was already struggling towards the conclusion that if somebody did something they had a right to be somebody, but merely being somebody meant nothing if being somebody was the only thing that somebody did. I wonder if I’ve made myself clear. Let me expand on that point, as the bishop said to the actress. No, wait a second, it wasn’t what the bishop said to the actress. It was what the Governor of Tasmania said to the Queen of the Netherlands.

  Not long after our encounter, Andy Warhol made another trip to the beyond, and this time to stay. He expired somewhere in the centre of a tangle of plastic tubes, most of them supplying his body with fluids it had never had in the first place. It wasn’t the way I want to die – I want to be knifed to death in an Elle McPherson lingerie commercial – but as I read the news of his passing I had already achieved my own fifteen minutes of fame and had started to wonder whether it was worth the trouble. I wasn’t world famous, which was the only degree of fame that had ever interested Andy. To be world famous you first have to be famous in America, which I would probably never have managed even had I desired to. Not that I have anything fundamental against America. I have detailed criticisms, but I don’t see how you can have those if you hate the whole place: if everything is always wrong, there is nothing they can change. And you have to admire a country so democratic that a mentally handicapped man can become President.

  Incidentally, I was in New York the weekend before last, having arrived just in time for the first debate between Bush and Kerry. Watching the debate with a deepening sense of awe, I thought: there is the spectacle of the two most highly qualified men in a great nation contending eloquently for the right to occupy its highest office, and then there is this. It wasn’t surprising that Kerry was generally thought to have won the contest. Being more articulate than George W. Bush is no challenge. So is my cat. In the debate, Bush once again proved that it is too early in America’s history to have a president for whom English is not his first language. Once again you could see the truth of the remark (I think it was my remark but other commentators have been borrowing it) that the British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s great advantage as a world statesman is his gift for putting President Bush’s thoughts into words. It’s even possible that President Bush has no thoughts at all, only emotions. When he searches for a word, he feels fear, and his face shows it. When he finds one, he feels triumph, and his face shows that. Almost always, the word he finds is the wrong one, but his look of relief arouses sympathy in the audience, as when a child, sent to fetch a spoon from the kitchen drawer, comes back with a fork. I was especially sympathetic when he announced that the ‘group of folks’, by which he meant the insurgents in Iraq, were fighting us ‘vociferously’. ‘That’s why they’re fighting so vociferously.’ He must have meant ‘viciously’ or perhaps ‘ferociously’, but he could scarcely have meant ‘vociferously’. If all that the insurgents were doing was shouting loudly they would be less of a problem. But Bush’s premature senile aphasia wasn’t the real story of the debate. The real story was that Kerry, even with his opponent disappearing into a semantic black hole, still managed to win only by a hair. In fact he won only by a hairstyle. Kerry’s hairstyle is worth a short digression, because it represents the chief reason why I could never have been famous in America.

  How did Kerry’s hair get like that? We must presume that it is real, or the Bush campaign would already have suggested that he received it as a bribe from Kim Jong-Il. And indeed Kim’s bouffant coiffure must be some kind of technological creation, separated from his elevator shoes by the length of a short lunatic. Kerry’s hairstyle, on the other hand, almost certainly started its life on top of his own head, instead of in the same laboratory that refines the uranium for North Korea’s atomic bombs. But Kerry’s hair would be far less frightening if it were fake. As all you women in the audience know, the amount of hair on top of a mature man’s head is governed by the amount of testosterone he secretes, but the proportion is not direct. The proportion is inverse. Testosterone attacks the hair follicles. It fries and shrivels them like noodles in a wok of acid. As a potent man co
mes to maturity, the testosterone begins to kill off the hair on top of his head. As he advances into vigorous middle age, his head rises through his remaining hair like a shining symbol of his virility. Meanwhile the displaced hair-growing capacity moves steadily down his body, cropping up, if that’s the appropriate phrase, in the strangest places, for which a healthily curious woman is glad to search. As a result, nothing excites an adventurous woman more than a bald man. Tom Jones may be pelted with women’s underwear, but the women’s underwear that used to be thrown at the bald actor Telly Savalas still had the women inside it. The American entertainment industry permits itself only one bald male star in a generation, and Telly Savalas drew the lucky card. Exercising the resulting sexual privilege to the full, he died with a gleam on his lips, and I hope to do the same. Ladies, I’ll be ready to discuss this theme in more detail later on, up in my hotel room with a bottle of Roederer Cristal and mixed sandwiches, but for now let’s just agree that Senator Kerry’s luxuriant hairstyle is incontrovertible proof that he doesn’t have a drop of testosterone in his body.

  Does the American army really want a man like that leading them into battle against millions of vociferous religious extremists? President Bush may be without a brain, but Senator Kerry lacks a gland that most men would agree is even more vital to existence. The only other possible explanation is that he has had a transplant. Perhaps the first plugs of extra hair were inserted during the Vietnam war, when he made his mystery trip into Cambodia. Somewhere beyond the Mekong Delta, a communist hair-scientist was waiting for him, ready to do a deal if he would go home and oppose the war. But the job could have been done in America, bit by bit over the course of all those years when we weren’t hearing a lot about him. What was he doing? He was growing younger.

  American cosmetic technology can restore to an ageing man everything he ever had, except credibility. In a recent issue of Vanity Fair there was a two-page spread devoted to Ralph Lauren products which featured a photograph of Ralph Lauren himself. A man of a certain age, he could be said to be wearing well. An Egyptian mummy wearing that well would still be walking. His hairstyle, an extravaganza in spun silver, looked as if it had been lowered onto his head by a crane. It reflected the light, and looked as if it could reflect bullets. The message being that if you buy clothes with his label on them you will look as casually stylish as he does. You and I might think that Ralph’s stylishness looks no more casual than that of Louis XV dressed for his coronation, but clearly the American consumers are convinced. Very thin American men, frantic with worry because their latest boardroom embezzlement is about to be discovered, wear Ralph Lauren clothes on the weekend in order to seem relaxed, just as very fat American men who can swallow a Big Mac like a canapé wear shorts and trainer shoes in order to seem athletic. Since their only conceivable means of rapid unassisted locomotion would be to roll downhill, the trainer shoes are purely symbolic.

  Why do the Americans find the incredible plausible? Sufficient to answer that they do. In the society that began the dubious work of raising the cult of celebrity to a world-conquering ideology, the intention is taken for the deed. It’s the nicest thing about America, even if it is also the most dangerous. America is the most ritualistic society since Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shoguns. In America, every event is a ceremony, nobody is allowed to be alone, and everyone thinks that a heart worn on the sleeve must be more sincere instead of less. The result is a superabundance of courtesy. When Americans are not busy bombing the wrong village, shooting down the wrong airliner or wiping out their allies with friendly fire, they are busy being polite. The waiter really does feel it incumbent upon him, when he delivers your main course, to issue the instruction: ‘Enjoy your meal.’ My sincere answer to that would be ‘Only if it’s good,’ but he would call the manager if I said so. Ritual must be observed. Worse, it has only to be observed in order to be taken as truly meant. To finish with the hair theme for the moment, take the case of that great actor William Shatner. In real life, William Shatner is a smart, funny and delightfully ironic man. But his real life is not his public life. The public William Shatner, after he left Star Trek, found that the hair on his head was growing thin. Instead of sensibly concluding that his abundance of testosterone was eating into his thatch, he must have decided that it was being eroded for another reason, perhaps because the stimulating effect of warp engine radiation had been switched off. Whatever his reasoning, when he came back to the screen as T.J. Hooker he was wearing on top of his head what is known in America as a ‘piece’. Three times as big as any natural hairstyle he had ever had, the piece looked as if a live dog had been nailed to his skull. You could have thrown chunks of raw meat to that thing. Yet somewhere underneath that ludicrous construction, he still had the same sharp brain. He must have known that he looked like a man crushed by a falling fox terrier. But he also knew that he was in America, where it is sufficient to make the claim in order to fulfil the expectation. Even unto death, an abundant head of hair is a requirement, along with a set of perfect teeth. If the hair is taken from an animal, even if it is the whole animal, and if the perfect teeth are blatantly a set of caps that jar with the tucked face like two rows of white plastic tombstones in the graveyard of a ruined church, still the requirements have been met. They are the requirements of celebrity, and to that extent millions of anonymous Americans behave as if they were famous. We must not let this happen to us.

  But it is happening to us, through the worldwide spread of reality television. Reality television actually started in Britain, when a series called Sylvania Waters elevated an otherwise painfully ordinary Australian family to tabloid fame. But now the Americans are doing it too, and when America does something everybody does it. One of the many nice things about being at this radio conference is that it’s much harder to do reality television on radio. I believe in popular culture, and I even believe that beyond a certain point it is useless to argue with public taste. Popular culture is one of the key transmitters of ethics to the young. After the school playground and the influence of parents, if they have any, children get their principles from popular culture. Hence the importance of keeping it within the bounds of civilized decency. Even when it has a foul mouth, it should not be allowed to speak evil.

  On a flight across the Atlantic last week, I was characteristically unable to operate the multiple choice in-flight entertainment system, and got stuck with a screening of the latest Harry Potter movie. I hadn’t seen the previous ones because Monica Bellucci wasn’t in them, and I expected to be bored. But I was thrilled. It was terrific: inventive, complex, witty and in the best sense fantastic. No wonder the kids love it, and play scenes from it to each other, and can recite every word. But imagine if such a mind-forming creation were preaching, say, racism. In Britain it has been black commentators, not white ones, who have been vocally worried about how so many hip-hop lyrics preach gun-nut violence, so I can safely say that anyone who is unworried about the effect of popular culture when it turns sour is living in a dream. But reality television is not as toxic as all that. Most of the people who appear on it seem to have the same problems with verbal communication as George W. Bush, but the relationships they form between themselves are often quite human and sometimes even touching. On a recent instalment of Britain’s biggest reality television show, called Big Brother, a young woman who in all her life had read nothing but magazines met a young man who had actually read a book. The look of wondering admiration in her eyes is with me yet. Her life was changing right there, and only a snob would begrudge the transformation.

  But the downside can be depressing. Just before I caught the plane here, the British tabloids were front-paging a story about two unfortunate young celebrities whose marriage was breaking up. The two young celebrities were identified by their first name – I think they were called Jane and Wayne, but it could have been Jean and Dean. They had met as participants on one of those reality TV shows in which a houseful of people chosen for their psychological disorders vo
te each week to expel one of their number. Basically the format is a re-run of a Nazi atrocity but without the machine-gunners waiting outside. In the future, and probably the near future, the machine-gunners will be waiting outside, but we haven’t quite reached that point yet, although if the current contestants only knew it, the newspaper editors and book publishers waiting outside will have exactly the same effect as a belt-fed MG-42 manned by the Waffen SS. Anyway, Jane and Wayne, or Jean and Dean, were either the first to be ejected or the last, I forget which. Perhaps one of them was the first and the other was the last. Whether in disappointment or triumph, however, they had cemented the profound relationship they had formed on the show by getting married immediately afterwards. Now the marriage was over. Since the whole of the front page was occupied by their photographs – she looking as if her car had been stolen, he looking as if he had stolen it – I had to turn to pages two, three, four and five to get the facts, which were scattered in tiny gobbets of prose among yet more photographs of the two quondam lovers in their chosen setting, a house whose decor aspired to the taste of Donald Trump, plus overtones of one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces as yet unlooted, with all its gold bathroom fittings still in place. This was the paradise they had built for themselves, and from which they would now be cast out. Apparently the pressure of fame had been too much for them. You could hardly get a more poignant case of people who had done nothing believing they were somebody. The only element of reality was the bit about the pressure of fame. They had certainly felt that.