Dead or alive

...But it was strange to see people who wouldn't weep for their grandparents' death dissolving in grief over a man they had never met...

...Some lives are supposed to have more meaning, more significance than our own, or the lives of other ordinary people...

...His point was that some people - John XXIII, J.F.K., Picasso, Elvis - symbolize whole ways of looking at the world to a great many people, and when they die the symbols are shaken...

...We have invested the hostages with a significance we need to find in them...

...JOHN GARVEYout it...

...We recognize their faces, and sometimes know a few facts about them, who they are or were married to, where they are from, their hobbies...

...Elvis talked from that gray world spiritualists believe in to Hans Holzer, a man who writes about haunted places and famous dead people, and he used a medium named Dorothy Sherry as his mouthpiece...

...but I shouldn't say "we'' - this significance has been offered to us by other people...

...In the checkout line at the supermarket we know the face of Mary Tyler Moore or Mother Teresa on the cover of a magazine, but the person ahead of us, the person who is about to buy the magazine, is a stranger - we don't know that face, we may never see it again...

...The news media uncovered cliches which had been kept under wraps since Elvis Presley's death - "His songs spoke for a generation," ' 'Each one of us died a little when the music died," that sort of thing - and there were interviews, too many of them, with teary young people who testified to their undying commitment to all the stuff John stood for, whatever it was...

...One afternoon at a bookstore I picked up Elvis Presley Speaks by Hans Holzer (Manor Books, $2.25...

...I found it hard to see what made Lennon's death more important, more interesting from the news media's point of view, than anyone else's death...

...John F. Kennedy didn't wear a hat, and hat sales took a dive...

...The czar and his family occupied a place in pre-revolutionary Russia which was a lot like the place our culture reserves for famous entertainers and the few politicians who interest us...

...but wearing a button with a politician's name on it may be the same thing...

...A friend accused me of elitism when I mentioned this...

...The celebrity is often even less able than the ordinary insecure human being to exist easily without praise or approval...

...Yet even as the anger against the bad barbarians of Iran mounted, Washington was moving to support the good barbarians of Latin America...

...Hang a few reporters around his neck, let him croon some inside dope to them, give him a patron like Nelson Rockefeller, and this sweaty fellow becomes basically different from the rest of us...

...In both cases someone famous is unreasonably invested with unrealizable hope...

...It isn't that all deaths affect us the same way...

...But his point is interesting: our connection with the lives and deaths of famous people is so much in the air, so completely pervasive, that we fail to see how strange it is...

...If people react strongly to such deaths it is insensitive not to appreciate what they are going through, however unaffected you might be personally...

...These people have been transformed into symbols of America's absolute righteousness, which is as silly a myth on the right as America's guilt is on the left...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...Our way of loading human beings with special significance has obvious political and moral resonances...

...and we know celebrities...

...Our involvement begins when we buy it as true...

...We assent to their rule over our lives, despite the fact that their desire to exercise authority probably means that they are more driven by unexamined and dark forces than the rest of us...

...They are easier to have clear ideas about, less complicated, and unless they hold political office we can't be hurt by them...

...We know only two sets of people: the ones we really know, our families, friends, and other acquaintances...

...They are ordinary men and women who got caught in a moment which happened because of the stupidity of their leaders...

...In many societies mourning for public figures is an instant and noisy skill...

...These are the only faces we recognize...

...In an excellent New York Times op ed piece Michael Harrington took a clear view of the situation: "When four American women - three nuns and a lay missionary - were murdered in El Salvador last month, there was no sense of outrage comparable to that expressed over the hostages' captivity...

...but the public ceremonies, the vigils outside the Dakota, gatherings in parks all over the world - that was something else again...

...Here is the exchange I liked best: "H.H.: I would like to know, just before his passing, what led to his final moments...

...If he were working in the office next to yours, a man with Henry Kissinger's ambition would look like John Dean or Sammy Glick...

...I have this on very good authority...

...The Kennedy family's main attraction could come down to the fact that they don't live next door...

...Absolute objectivity about death would lead either to a cold heart or to constant, paralyzing grief...

...When I worked for a publishing company I got a letter from a woman who wrote books about the people she saw on television: would we be interested, she wondered, in publishing a novel about Starsky and Hutch...

...John Len-non's family and the people who really knew him suffered a loss they will live with until they die...

...That makes a difference: it allows Teddy and Joan's divorce to be an Event, where the Schwartz divorce is just a mess...

...This is something like voodoo...

...those goofy-looking Bo Derek corn rows were all the rage for awhile...

...They are rounded off and complete...

...In any case, it isn't far removed from the significance we heap into the campaigns of politicians we believe in, or the stars whose lives seem so much more interesting than our own...

...The belief that the Kennedy family is Very Special in a way the Schwartz family is not will puzzle those Martian anthropologists we keep expecting...

...and its national will...

...They are like dolls for grownups to play with, talk to, and dream a-bout...

...Nor is it unique to our culture...

...During voodoo ceremonies the gods who possess certain members of the congregation (who are "ridden by the god," like horses) have predictable personalities: they can be mischievous, benign, aloof, sinister...

...Everyone else is a stranger...

...Of several minds: John Garvey DEAD OR ALIVE WHAT THE FAMOUS MEAN TO US THE MURDER of John Lennon was terrible, for reasons which are obvious, but the reaction to his death was eerily unrelated to any particular life...

...when Clark Gable took off his shirt in It Happened One Night and revealed the startling fact that he was not wearing an undershirt, undershirt sales plummeted...

...There is a strange intimacy between us and these famous people who don't know us, though we know them, in a shallow way...

...The person who is possessed takes on the god's characteristics, even down to speech patterns and intonations...

...Thousands of beauticians compare themselves to the women on Dallas and Charlie's Angels and try hard to look like them...

...Why do we assume that people who desire power are not every bit as contaminated by pride, self-interest, insecurity, and resentment as we are...

...The system which makes people celebrities is not a simple thing...

...It is easy to find something weird in the sight of a woman wearing a small picture of Elvis on a chain, like a religious amulet...

...The spectacle that happens around deaths like Lennon's or Kennedy's is not like ordinary mourning at all...

...Celebrities are different from the people we live with...

...There are obvious psychological reasons for that difference, but in moral - and even patriotic - terms, the lives of those women, taken by right-wing terrorists, should be as important to us as the captivity of the hostages...

...But even dead gods get tired of the burdens we place on them...

...Was there a lack of reality"D.S.: He doesn't want to talk about it...

...Our joy over their release and the happiness we feel for them and for their families is made to coexist with the fakery poured all over them by the media...

...Some of them are learned from heroes, who function for us as minor gods of a sort...

...They have been made symbols of America's spirit, its humiliation and triumph over its enemies, its basic decency (look how we all turned out to welcome them - doesn't that say something nice about us...

...There is a* need for such people, apparently, or People and other magazines would not exist: we want, not just heroes, but even villains, people whose gigantic lives, unlike ours, mean something...

...We all have a repertory of learned responses...

...A journalist told me, and he was not kidding, that he lost his faith in God when John F. Kennedy was shot - as if no one in the world had ever died before, as if death itself were news to him...

...The hostages are our latest celebrities...

...I think I know what he means, and I remain guilty of whatever sin is involved in lacking this appreciation...