They Airbrushed My Face

So I came across this story today about how the White House has been airbrushing pictures of the president to make him look younger and more fit.  I know that some people are going to have a field day with this...but if you looked like that, wouldn't you do the same thing? 

As one who came of age musically in the 80s and 90s this was the first thing that came to mind, the centerfold of an REM album liner notes. 


When I first came across that picture all those years ago I marvelled at the possibilities of something like that being possible.  Wow, I can now look younger, more fit, more attractive? 

Of course, today we live in a time in which we have great suspicion about any photo or image.  Whether it's dudes flexing phantom muscles or politically motivated shots of politicians appearing somewhere they aren't or hamburgers that look much, much better than they do in reality, we never know what really to believe anymore...so we choose to stop believing. 

Maybe this will be the death of sites like Instagram, with all of its beautifully filtered photos of people and places.  People will get tired of the delusion.  Or maybe we will just learn to no longer accept anything at face value anymore.  Part of the worldview of any future generation will be a general agnosticism about almost anything, even as they enjoy the cropped and airbrushed pictures.  Even as lines between virtual reality and real reality begin to fade, will we no longer believe even what we can touch, see for ourselves, or hear? 

And what will this do to matters of real importance, like faith in Christ?  Will more people hold to a form of Christianity even as they casually dismiss the idea of resurrection or spiritual power to be unreal or impossible?  Will future generations no more believe the Scriptures and rather read the many deconstructions about how it came together as simply a human book? 

It's a scary world out there when you can't even tell that our president looks like the fat orange guy that he is.  But it reminds me, that he's the perfect president for our fake world. 

The last of the heroes

As a young boy I grew up, like most kids, looking for role models.  Coming from a family in which sports was important I gravitated towards athletes.  Pete Rose, O.J. Simpson, and Dr. J were three athletes that I thought were the coolest of the cool.  Yep, a gambler, murderer, and a legendary philanderer were my heroes, though I didn't know any of their dirty secrets at the time.

But nobody compared to Bruce Jenner, 1976 Olympic decathlon winner.  Here was the greatest athlete in the world, a man among men.  He was forever on the box of Wheaties, the stud we all aspired to be.  He became a reporter, man about town, race car driver.  He was so manly that eventually he replaced Erik Estrada on CHIPS.  Sure, it didn't last...but even Estrada never was on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

When did it all go wrong?  Maybe it was when he appeared on Silver Spoons.  Or maybe when he was the star of 'Can't Stop The Music'.  But was there ever a point where we could say he was headed towards this bizarre Kardashian/transgender/hit-and-run place he is at now?  And what does the seven-year-old within me think of all this?

Heroes are strange things.  There's something within us that looks up to certain people, and when those people no longer are what we thought they were (or we realize that they never were what we thought they were to begin with) it affects us.  None of these heroes should be blamed for not fulfilling our expectations...but the spotlight can be a very hard thing, not only for the ones under it but the ones watching it.

I suppose I still have heroes, though they are more about genuine character than our imaginations.  Heroes in recent years are people I know...a minister friend of mine who died recently after many years of faithful service to the church, or a grandmother who takes her children in when her kids aren't able to raise them well, or a teacher who year after year puts up with the crap of the modern education system because she loves kids.  People like this will still fail sometimes, but at least they won't have married a Kardashian.  

Fear in all the wrong places

Several years ago I stopped watching TV news because I hate the fear.  Don't go out at night or you will be raped and murdered!  ISIS!  Ebola!

Fear is everywhere in our culture today, which is remarkable because probably there has never been a more secure time to live.  We're not really in danger of war coming upon us; we have security everywhere we live; and even all the health scares out there usually only come up because people are not as hygenic as they should be.

For all the fears that we could have, are we afraid of the wrong things?  Likely.  So my parents just got back from a trip back east to see my brother and on the way they stopped and saw some old friends.  They woke up the next morning not feeling well, but eventually left.  They arrive back home this week and find out that the people they stayed with died because of carbon monoxide poisoning this week.  Actually one of them is still alive but not expected to live...but you get the point:  this is something serious!  Had my parents stayed with these people for a few more days, this is something that could have actually killed them, something that likely happens in many places.  It's a reminder to me to a)get the furnace checked and b)make sure the carbon monoxide detector is working.

So many people today are going crazy over the fears 'out there'.  Congressmen seek to gain political points by talking them up, newscasters look for ratings by scaring the crap out of people.  'We've got to stop these horrors!', but in the end they forget about the things that are really dangerous.  What of Congress devoted as much as time to making sure every furnace in America was safe rather than criticizing policy about Ebola?  Wouldn't that actually be a more productive use of their powers?

A friend of mine was driving to work yesterday when somebody ran a stop sign and almost killed him.  It could have been much worse: only one fractured vertebrae and a lot of aches and pains.  But a serious wreck nonetheless.  But stuff like this happens all the time...people minding their own business driving to work, when somebody not paying attention causes a major, dangerous wreck.  Where's the outrage?  Why aren't our streets safer?

Carbon monoxide poisonings and car wrecks kill far more people than the Ebola virus in our country.  But one we freak out about, the others we ignore.  Maybe we'd just rather be scared by fake stuff (hello, haunted houses!) than things that are real.  But that's just stupid.

Fake Life

My old seminary buddy Bruce Bates linked to a terrific article about a film that takes on the subject of how internet porn has affected an entire generation.  I especially liked the comment from the film's writer, director, and star: "Are you watching these images and concluding how this is how real life should be?"

Porn is certainly a serious problem for many many...but I'm wondering how much 'fake' life affects the rest of reality.  It's not enough that a woman that doesn't have a size 0 body is now considered chunky in our modern society or that sex isn't always like it is in movies (both porn or mainstream).  How much other kinds of fantasy do we live with from the stuff we allow into our homes.  It comes in so many flavors:
-Romance novels that make a woman think that prince charming shouold be coming on his white horse to save her from the losers in her life
-TV dramas that make us think that criminal cases can be wrapped up easily within an hour
-Talk radio that makes people believe that their own extreme positions can and must prevail or nobody will win

Though I've not really had an appetite for porn and avoided it as much as possible (I've always found it somewhat disturbing, though in honesty I do know what my lust triggers are) and I've sought to stay as grounded in real life as much as possible, I've noticed that fake life has impacted me as well.  I am a child of the first wave of the video game culture.  From Space Invaders onward, we've been taught to believe that nothing in life is permanent.  First we would put another quarter in, but later on we learned the beauty of switching the home consoles on and off.  Don't like how the game is going?  The reset button is right there.  No problem, right?

I'm wondering if this kind of denial of the results of our games causes more problems than we think.  Let's start with a simple game of Pac-Man that isn't going well.  You get distracted by the kids, you lose focus for a moment, and soon enough you're dead.  Just hit reset, problem solved.  But life isn't that easy.  Many people daily make horrible choices and think that there are no consequences.  As a parent I am daily trying to make my children understand that what we do matters: if my daughter throws a tantrum, holding her to punishment doesn't seem fair to her.  If my son spends all of his money on something frivolous (and yes, the frivolity of the marketplace is ever-stunning in the crap that it produces) and therefore has no money later to buy something of substance, not then loaning him five dollars may seem cruel.  But consequences exist...have video games tried to convince us otherwise.

A few years ago I became interested in a game called Football Manager and still probably play it too much (finishing 30 seasons...yeah, that's too much).  Basically, you take control of the management of a team and see where it takes you.  I'm really quite good at working the game, getting the right players, and putting them in the right spots.  But this game is so good in part because it leaves a lot of things to chance.  Players get hurt, or we lose a match we should have won, or my team owner is demanding unrealistic results and fires me for not achieving them.  But early on I learned how easy it was to not live with the results...quit early from the game in which your player gets hurt or you lose to Wigan.  Who cares, right?  But think about how video games makes us view sports: our team loses winnable games, and we think the coach is a bum.  A player gets hurt, and we scream and rant because it's not just fair.  Part of the problem of fan behavior in our modern society may come from the fact that we haven't accepted the reality of the results.  Because we have no outlet to give us an upset button if, say, Sporting Kansas City loses tonight, we get upset and bitter.  Our fake life has made it where we don't want to deal with the reality of life.

I don't know that we can ever go back to the way things once were.  Many people even now spend all their time in Second Life or the Sims or playing some other game or watching porn or absorbing a romance novel.  The escapism from reality may seem comforting for a moment, but inevitably it makes returning to the real world all that much more difficult.