Cat Gets Tongue
I’m Dan Piraro, the creator of the Bizarro newspaper comic. Each week, I post my Sunday Bizarro comic, then a short essay, then the past week’s Monday-Saturday Bizarro comics written and drawn by my partner, Wayno whose weekly blog post I recommend highly.
Here’s the ANSWER KEY to this week’s Secret Symbols in the Sunday comic, above.———————————————————————————
As I write this, Olive Oyl and I are in a metal tube thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean. We’ve been in Europe for three weeks and are now happily heading home. We loved virtually every moment of our trip but we’re the sort that need a home base and can only be unmoored for so long. And we miss our cat and two big dumb dogs terribly. Fingers crossed that they will remember us and be as happy to see us as we will be to see them.
In last week’s post, I spoke of the downside of European tourist cities like Rome and Florence. The crowds were so suffocatingly huge that when we were anywhere near a church, museum, or archeological site, we felt as though we were battling the Tokyo subway during rush hour. I say that not from experience but because I’ve seen videos of the people employed to forcibly push the last few humans into the cars so they can close the doors. I believe those people may be called “pushers,” which is something American school teachers warned us about back in the 60s and 70s. I can see why.
I also wrote about the many young women primping, posing, and vogueing for their cell phone cameras in front of great art, architecture, and monuments of antiquity, and how the contrast between their fleeting few years of youthful beauty and things that truly approach being called “timeless” is laughable. To attempt to look sexy in front of Michelangelo’s statue of David—an almost impossibly beautiful rendering of a human being—is like trying to look ancient and deep in front of the Grand Canyon. It is clear that most tourists don’t really appreciate or understand what they are seeing—they seem mostly to want to document that they have been near it.
While pondering that fact it occurred to me that this is tied to our obsession with celebrities, which I believe is a function of our evolution.
Humans are highly organized, pack animals. We are not independent and solitary like Bengal tigers, we depend on societies to thrive. As such, we need leaders; human groups don’t work well in anarchic situations. (Sorry, anarchists!) And because we need leaders to organize and protect us, we tend to worship the person in charge and imbue them with faith that we do not give to strangers. Once a society proclaims a person as important, the rest of us are quite naturally impressed by being in their presence; being near someone important makes us feel more important.
I believe this is where our lust for any tidbit of information about a “celebrity” comes from. We don’t give two craps about what some random plumber in Arkansas eats for breakfast, but we’re fascinated by Taylor Swift’s favorite flavor of jam on toast. I remember being in a restaurant in Oklahoma when I was a teenager and seeing the local TV weatherman at another table. People were whispering, pointing, and giggling. He wasn’t a political or spiritual leader (he wasn’t even a meteorologist!) but we’d seen him on TV a thousand times and that made him seem exciting and important.
Chimps are the same, by the way. In studies, it has been discovered that if chimps are given the choice between two buttons that open doors, one that provides a snack and the other that provides a few moments to view a photo of their group leader, they’ll alternate between the two. Just like we do when we snack while watching news coverage of some royal wedding or another. Apparently, our almost subconscious obsession with celebrities is innate.
Watching tourists in Europe made me realize that humans are not the only thing we celebrate. (Celebratize?) Objects can become celebrities, too. When you’ve seen a building, statue, painting, or other inanimate object enough in photos or on TV, it becomes impressive to be in the presence of it. The Mona Lisa is a prime example.
I’m a huge fan of art and of Leonardo da Vinci but this portrait, which has literally become the most famous painting in the world, is simply not very impressive. The Louvre in Paris is full of thousands of amazing pieces of art of all kinds and while every room is filled with people enjoying all kinds of art, the Mona Lisa is as mobbed as The Beatles at JFK in 1964.
It hangs at one end of a room with more than a dozen other huge and amazing accomplishments in oil, but only Mona has so many people in front of her that they’ve erected a crowd-control labyrinth with nylon straps, the sort you find at the security line in an airport. You spend ten or fifteen minutes snaking slowly back and forth through the cattle chute to the front of the line for the privilege of being fifteen-or-so feet from the painting so you can take a picture of yourself in front of it along with the several dozen strangers packed like sardines around you doing the same thing. (Some trying to look sexy, of course.)
Why do we want this photo of ourselves with a lot of strangers and countless hands and phones in the air pointing at a small painting in the background that you can barely make out? It is a celebrity object. And now that we’ve ordained it as important, it makes us more important to be seen with it.
And why is this object so famous? Virtually no one in that room who isn’t a historian knows the answer. Sure, an art expert can give you all kinds of subtle reasons why the painting is masterful or historically important, but that’s not why it is so well known. In fact, it wasn’t well known or even discussed much until it was stolen in 1911. No one even noticed it was gone for quite some time, but once they did, the authorities publicized the theft and posted pictures of the painting all over Europe in an attempt to find it, which they did two years later. Its theft’s publicity is what made it famous, not anything magical about the painting.
Over one hundred years later, though most people have no idea why it is so famous, everyone who goes to the Louvre wants to see it and be photographed with it. The same is true for every celebrity object in the world. And, apparently, if you can look “hot” in your photo with it, all the better.
The knowledge that this is how the human mind works is what keeps public relations people and propaganda experts in business; if we see or hear anything enough times, we begin to believe it and pay attention to it, whatever it is. It is this quirk of our primate brains that has enabled FOX News to turn so many Americans against each other. The truth can be (and is) created by the repetition of a lie. It works every time.
I’ll end on a positive note: Despite the density of the crowds (often in both senses of the word) I still firmly believe that travel to foreign cultures is an invaluable exercise for everyone. If you are alive above the neck at all, in doing so we realize that our similarities are greater than our differences. Our common need the world over is to have a safe place to raise our children and enjoy our lives, to pursue our best selves and make something of our brief time in these bags of skin. Visiting other cultures opens our minds and hearts and reminds us that the way things are perceived in our microscopic corner of the world is not the only perspective from which to view life. Just because something has “always been that way” in our family, our church, or our country, it is not the only way to add beauty and meaning to our existence. The ways are infinite and each is valuable.
I’m still somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean and it just occurred to me that this is the highest I’ve been while writing a blog post. And since this is a 12-hour flight, I wish I meant that in both senses of that word.
Now let’s review the infinitely valuable cartoon perspectives of my worthy partner, Wayno. Here are his Bizarro cartoons from the week…
That ties up our little bag of comedy for the week, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for sticking around for the knot. If you like what we we do and that we do it without paywalls, pop-ups, or clickbait, please consider helping us keep it that way via one of the links below. We’ll love you metaphorically for it.
Until next week, get close to a celebrity object and feel its mojo.
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