I shouldn't be surprised when what is said in comic strips mirrors opinions expressed by essayists in more serious venues. After all, both get their inspiration from the same human condition, and humor is an efficient and effective way to make a point. Nonetheless, I always take note when I hear the same message from widely divergent sources, as happened when I read in close succession Francis Schaeffer's The God Who Is There and John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education. When an evangelical Protestant theologian living in Switzerland and a self-described lapsed Catholic schoolteacher from Pittsburgh, writing on issues that apparently differ markedly, make the same historical and philosophical point, perhaps I had better listen.
The conjunction of Mallard Fillmore and Mike Thomas, about which I wrote yesterday, is less portentous, perhaps, but today's has signficant social and philosophical implications.Safe Havens is one of the quirkier comic strips I like to read, but if the following strip is incomprehensible to you, it's not because you don't understand about the mermaid, the grandmother's ghost, the genetically-altered animals now serving as roadies. I follow all that and was still confused.
Yesterday's mail brought a letter from Ken Myers, whose Mars Hill Audio Journal I enjoy greatly. The purpose of the letter was an appeal for support, but the content shed light on the Safe Havens strip.
With my children grown, I have been blessedly even more clueless of pop kid culture than I was when they were young, but I did hear the name Hannah Montana thanks to a friend of Heather's who blogged about the effort she went through to secure concert tickets for her Hannah Montana-crazy daughter. That's all I knew though—she sings, and she's enormously popular with the younger set. Thanks to Myers' letter, however, I know—and worry—more.
So that's the Safe Havens strip, complete with "ironizing quotation marks."
- Miley Cyrus (now 15) plays the lead character on Hannah Montana, a character named Miley Stewart. Stewart has migrated west from her humble Tennessee origins to live in Malibu, to pursue her dreams as a superstar singer known to the public as Hannah Montana. Hannah Montana is thus a persona, an alternate identity assumed by Miley Stewart. Miley Stewart is also a character, performed by Miley Cyrus. What makes it even more reflexive is that Miley Cyrus performs in concert as Hannah Montana, bypassing Ms. Stewart entirely. One might ask if Miley Cyrus is really a celebrity pop sensation, or whether she just pretends to be a pop sensation when she’s in character.
- The image in Vanity Fair of Miley Cyrus [apparently nude, though provocatively draped in a sheet]…has evoked intense media scrutiny and widespread parental anxiety over the apparently important question: Has this wholesome role model been stained by this arguably provocative photo.
- The question moms (and dads) need to be asking is not whether Miley/Miley/Hannah is going to go all Britney on them, but whether their six- and seven-year-old daughters really benefit from having as a guide to growing up a performer playing a performer playing a performer. Just as the most important lesson taught by Sesame Street is that learning must be fun, so the most important lesson taught by Hannah Montana may be that growing up is about learning how to perform one’s life, how to define your identity as a desirable commodity, how to assemble and project the brand called Me.
- The culture of celebrity and personal performance which permeates our society is profoundly destructive. It’s not simply that being well-known for simply being well-known (in Daniel Boorstin’s classic formulation) is a thin and vapid achievement. More fundamentally disordering is the way in which the deeply sensed notion of “identity as performance” promoted in the culture of celebrity undercuts the very idea of reality or real life; more than the work of nihilistic philosophers, the prominence of performers in our society nudges us toward referring to “reality” (with the ironizing quotation marks) rather than to Reality.
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players."
If performance is indeed so prominent, we ought to give more thought to the reception and our abilities of receiving the performance as intended. Performance may free us to assume different alter egos as we make our way through life, but it also confines us to popularly understood and accepted shorthand codes, thus hardly being the sought-after route to self-expression many seem to be looking for.
Add to that the possibility that we may be unintentionally performing because we know other people's expectations better than we know ourselves and I have to wonder if we don't have to add ironizing quotation marks to most of our reality, or at least faint cautionary markings that remind us of our limited powers of perception.
Anyway, I thought I'd give you a comment for what your daughter tells me is your birthday - may it be a day of thanksgiving and rejoicing. See you in a week!
Thank you! For the wishes, and for the comment.
