Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 17, 2018)
Wednesday, January 17, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon 19 The Bunkhouse Chronicle Craig Rullman Columnist Sinatra at ground zero Our American obsession with celebrity is as interest- ing as it is potentially dan- gerous. It’s also hard to dis- lodge, as war correspondent George Weller discovered when he defied Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s ban on travel to Nagasaki after the Army Air Corps detonated Fat Man, a 21-kiloton nuclear weapon, over the city. Nearly 1,000 allied POWs were living in Nagasaki, interned as slave labor in the Mitsubishi war plants. Most of them were starv- ing to death, or being beaten to death, or suffering from curable diseases for which the Japanese, who routinely looted Red Cross packages meant for the prisoners, with- held even basic medicines. And if it was possible to make their tortured lives any worse, on August 9, 1945, they were also living at ground zero. Seven Dutch and one British prisoners died instantly when the bomb detonated at approximately 1,500 feet over the city, a blast of such magnitude that it seared the shadows of trees and human beings into con- crete. Most of the surviving prisoners were just plain lucky, but many of them had also had the foresight, after the Hiroshima bomb- ing — which they witnessed from their prison camps in Nagasaki — to realize the existence of some new weapon of unimaginable ferocity, and had dug what trenches they could for shel- ter against a similar event. Weller, encountering some of these survivors when he slipped into the city fol- lowing the formal Japanese surrender, encountered our American celebrity obses- sion in an interesting way. Interviewing Australians, he found they were mostly interested in which horse had won the Melbourne Cup. British prisoners wanted to know if Churchill was still prime minister, or if the gov- ernment had gone over to Labour. The Dutch POWs wanted to know if Princess Juliana’s third child was a male heir to the throne. But the Americans, like- wise starving, brutalized, and now nuked, had more press- ing concerns. One of them said: “B-29s dropping us food keep enclosing Saipan newspapers with stuff about some guy named Sinatra. Who is he and what’s his racket?” That kind of abiding interest in mere celebrity hasn’t waned much. One might even argue that in its ultimate expression — and celebrity worship has cer- tainly been refined over the years — it handed Donald Trump the keys to the White House. Worse — and proof that we truly are a stubborn and slow-learning lot — it appears poised to do it again, should the very stable genius pass the orb and scepter off to Oprah Winfrey. Who knows if she’ll actu- ally run, but as a policy it’s probably better to avoid drawing too much political inspiration from the well of celebrity narcissists. There are probably sound reasons to avoid leaning on celebrities for much of any- thing at all, actually. It would seem prudent, at least to avoid falling down a psychi- atric rabbit hole, to exercise extreme caution before mim- icking the opinions of people who spend most of their time pretending to be somebody else. Of course, being really good at pretending to be somebody else is also incred- ibly lucrative, and having a lot of money is still too often confused with the possession of excellent opinions about how better to inhabit the planet. Sean Penn, for instance, still believes the Chavez revolution was a great move for Venezuela, never mind the resulting starvation, food riots, government-sanctioned murder of political opposi- tion, the collapse of even basic government services, or 4,000 percent inflation. Chavismo! Exercises in self-ado- ration such as the Golden Globes, or that nauseating exhibition of preening called the Oscars, where no award- winner would miss a chance to re-educate a rapt global audience, probably help to cement the popular misun- derstanding that celebrity, all by itself, lends gravitas to whatever it is that celebrities say. It doesn’t, and sometimes even the most carefully man- aged and strategically mar- keted public persona devel- ops a revealing crack. Winfrey’s otherwise appropriate excoriation of sexual harassment, for exam- ple, would be a lot more con- vincing without the embar- rassing pictures of her fawn- ing over Harvey Weinstein at cocktail parties, and her opinions on racial relations would ring truer absent her suggestion to the BBC that generations of older people — one suspects she meant mostly white people — will need to hurry up and die in order to usher in the golden age of racial harmony. Probably the most annoy- ing part of these spectacles is the endless parade of narcis- sism — which often rivals Trump’s in its insistence on celebrity as the natural birth- place of wisdom. At any rate, back in Nagasaki, those starving and scarred POWs who endured years of terror at the hands of sadists, and who some- how even survived a nuclear thumping delivered by their own countrymen, were at least clever enough to sus- pect that Sinatra was part of some kind of celebrity racket. They were smart enough to see it even if — after everything they had learned about the darker heart of human nature — they couldn’t wait to get back home, eat a real meal, and dance those horrors away to the sound of his marvelous and modern voice.