Phonies...

In honor of Salinger, who with Holden Caufield created one of the greatest social critics in modern America, I would like to take the time to point out America's "phonies." How long will we swallow the dungwater of modern elite culture?

Let us today focus on a particular manifestation of our existential narrative; America's High School Royalty. How long must we digest the rancid meat of the modern slave drivers in the music and movie industries?

Last night, while prerusing through some photos of the Grammy awards I became aware of another manifestation of the modern herd morality. Showiness; attention mongering; all done to uphold an 'image' whatever each star or starlet wishes to put out there. Hollywood is the epicenter of Goffman's theory that we put on our persona for different people on different occasions. I am certainly okay with eccentricity -- no one wants a dull Marxist atheist world -- except for the very Hollywood uneducated elite.

This is the rub, they think that personality is outward eccentricity; they think that to be someone, you have to be the show. I can appreciate art, where artists have a public persona, but only when they are up front about who they really are. The slave morality peddlers in Hollywood and music, one by one, try to blur the line between reality and art; they make themselves the art in their High School drama. For some reason, as herd members, we inbibe the pretended eccentricity; the phoniness of these "individuals" that are the weakest of the herd. It is but one more example that we live in an existentialist era; our royalty are self-creators of personality seeking to "look" eccentric so as to win praise.

I am willing to admit it is artistic and even intriguing. It wouldn't be problemetic if they actually had to make an apology -- if they weren't such herd members to the latest fashion and trend. The Hollywood eccentric are really peddlers of the Nietzschean slave morality and they don't even know it. Following the latest trend and the latest religion that will die with them. History will see them as the phonies they are; as the slaves they are; as the self-creators they are. We need merely wait.

The problem with modernity is we are all great artists, but we've confused art with life -- just like Nietzsche.