Anti-fame

“Do you ever thank God for making you short?”

Fr. Justin, not a quite tall man, asked this at a homily last week. This led the kinutil man, seated near the end pews, to remember a short conversation he had nights before with a former student, now all grown-up and with a family of her own.

He remembers her as a teenager, 17, once, coming to him strangely furtively as if overcome by weakness and self-doubt. She asked if she might enroll into the fine arts program. He was taking admissions into this program at that time. And immediately he worried if she might really and truly be an artist. He was a young and inexperienced teacher at that time. The young and inexperienced always put an inordinate trust on self-assuredness and outward confidence even from people so young. He too had his doubts.

But he did his job as an admissions officer. He instructed her to take the talent-determination tests. And then he explained to her why they were both taking a big chance with this decision. Yet, despite both their doubts, she turned out very well, graduating from being his student to a masters degree in design in a foreign country. She is now a teacher and a professional designer, one of the first designers here to have graduated from their own fine arts program.

But the conversation between them went into the issue of fame and branding theory; in the course of which topic, she said, quite with obvious finality and resolve: “I don’t want to be famous. I just want to do things with my hands.”

This statement silenced the kinutil man. And he is seldom, ever, silenced. Why should anyone, after all, not want to be famous? Isn’t it obvious that in the art and design world, fame equals fortune? Isn’t fame the first requirement of survival not only for the artist but also for the art? Isn’t that what we are all after?

This bothered him for days thereafter along the way of reexamining himself. He was still doing this when Fr. Justin asked: Do you ever thank God for making you short?

As the news this week was all about ISIS and the killings in Paris, in Africa, both recalling over 200 dead from the bombing of a Russian passenger plane over Egypt, he could not help asking if this is what all the victims died for: someone’s, or some group’s, fame?

And then he saw, somewhat as a sad and unbelievable vision, the Republican candidates vying for GOP nomination, clawing and biting into the meat of the American people’s fear of Syrian refugees and everything connected with them. He thought it easy to understand why the Republican candidates would go on something of a feeding frenzy over this issue. They know there is a xenophobic fear rising in the world now. Feeding this collective fear and frustration is a tried and tested formula for demagogues over history, from Herod, to Hitler, to Mussolini. It is the secret to staying in the game and  improving one’s ratings.

And then he realized this is exactly the same thing ISIS kills for: to get into the news, to increase their stature in the social networks, to be somebody, to put their name in the altar of people’s attention: fame.

It cannot be for God that they kill. Otherwise, why kill so much? Why kill even themselves? And then, do what they do. And yet, he had come to thinking that ISIS is only part of a global infection.

That indeed, there is a systemic disease which has affected not just ISIS, but all of us, something of a Zombie pandemic. (Now we are sure what the US will do in a worldwide pandemic: Close its borders.)

Except that even for them, it’s too late. The primary symptom of this disease is the need to be famous, to come out in the news, to have one’s self in the social networks, to be famous like Donald Trump.

Fame has become the new true religion. It is the new one-true-god, to which god sacrifices of blood and lives must be made. Fame is the true mark of success, the true measure of self-worth.

Branding has become a theology; the self-promoting blurb, a prayer. This god’s icons are everywhere, flexible, interchangeable. He hides behind iconic disguises of things we have always worshipped since time immemorial, existing deity, religions; and if not that, money, shining cars, opulent lifestyles. All these percolate and feed on each other inside an infectious soup called fame.

All partake of the cup. We all have to, or die.

Even the kinutil man who thought he might have inoculated himself from it by referring to himself as “he” instead of “I” is infected. It didn’t work. And now, as it comes to pass, only his former student has the immunity, the natural resistance, to this disease; this immunity marked by a single simple statement of fact and belief. He must study more closely from hereon: “I do not want to be famous. I just want to do things with my hands.”