Celebrity Fixation Blocks View of Who We Are

Whatever happened to the poor? Syndicated columnist E.J. Dionne asked that question last week knowing full well that our nation’s poor hadn’t magically disappeared. Dionne was commenting on a recent study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal media watch group that studied 38 months of nightly news broadcasts on ABC, NBC and CBS.
“With rare exceptions,” the study said, “… poverty and the poor seldom even appear on the evening news—and when they do, they are relegated mostly to … platitudes about their hardships.”
Dionne sees the poor and struggling middle class as “barricaded behind our fixation on celebrity, our titillation over personal sin and public shame …” Using figures from the FAIR report, Dionne says that in the period studied between September 2003 and October 2006 the three networks combined for 58 stories about poverty. In that same period they broadcast 69 stories on the legal woes of Michael Jackson. Enough said.
News programs aren’t the only place on television missing the real lives of people other than the comfortable. And even when TV people seem to be like you and me, they don’t share our problems: they go anywhere they want, do whatever and buy whatever they want. I guess that makes sense. Especially on a sitcom, you don’t want unfunny, unhappy people. And in our consumption culture, you can’t be happy unless you’re getting things and doing things. So they do, and the bill never comes around.
I’m not asking to trip back to shows of the 60s and 70s where people struggled weekly—like Good Times or All in the Family. But hiding working class life also risks hiding much of our culture’s spiritual reserves. As a social worker with the elderly in Florida I saw time and again how people who had faced financial challenges all their lives met aging with greater courage that those who had achieved material security but were now rendered poor by circumstances beyond their control.
We’re missing that courage and so much more: the strength of family ties, church as a center of life, a more physical way of being--closer to the basics we're born with. This is not to say the poor haven’t been victimized by our mania for things, or our national trend to obesity. Of course they have. Everyone who has raised children in this culture knows it’s nothing short of war to teach children to value themselves on virtues beyond material accumulation. In part, we fail because as Christians we have for too long acted unsure about the pursuit of pleasure. In our bodies, in our minds, in our gift for sensing a spiritual reality that transcends all limitations, God has wonderfully made us to feel joy and pleasure. But we, as Paul writes, have preferred the works of the creature over those of the creator, adoring our things while treating pleasure as “personal sin and public shame.”