Attention and Augmentation

I might as well ’fess up immediately: I was never much of a baseball fan until I moved to the Cleveland area, so (unlike other boys in the late 1930s and early 1940s) I didn’t really know enough about Joe DiMaggio for him to be a hero to me as a kid. (My heros were writers: Howard Pease at first, then H. L. Mencken, and eventually the incomparable E. B. White.) By the time I reached adulthood, “Joltin’ Joe” was enough of a cultural icon that I recognized him as having everything you want in an athlete: skill, style and sensibility, and he maintained all those attributes right up to the day he died, a day or two before this is being written. Anybody who disinvites George Steinbrenner from his funeral has to have something going for him.

By one of those freaky accidents, the story of DiMaggio’s death was reported in the same newspaper as the story of Michael Copp, the hapless teenager who now faces life without the young woman whose breast-enlargement he arranged and who also faces prison time for using his mother’s credit card to pay for the surgery. And, while I know as little now of Copp as I did of DiMaggio when I was a boy, he does, somehow, seem like an Evil Twin of the great DiMaggio.

I don’t go in much for cultural tut-tutting. I don’t like searching sewers, for one thing, and, for another, I think it’s too easy to glorify a past that wasn’t usually as golden in reality as it becomes in retrospect—nostalgia, oddly enough, often ruins the human memory. But there’s something about the juxtaposition of Messrs. Copp and DiMaggio on the cultural radar screen that brings me up short.

“When I was a boy....” people expected to become celebrated for doing something that advanced, in some way, the human condition. E. B. White did it by writing essays that are models of grace and civility; even today, I always feel better about being a human being after reading one of them. Joe DiMaggio did it by starting or stopping the flight of a 3" white leather spheroid on a Summer’s day, by maintaining an attitude of respect towards his star-crossed star of an ex-wife, and in a lot of other ways of which we have been reminded these past few days. He, too, had grace and civility; he, too, always made you feel better about belonging to our species.

It was really pretty simple: you worked hard at doing something worthwhile; you got good; you became famous (at least among people who enjoyed that sort of thing). And if you were truly world-class, you used your fame to advance some other worthwhile thing.

There is nothing about Mr. Copp’s life which makes me delight in belonging to his tribe. Even the idea of watching him and/or his augmented associate on a talk show makes me physically ill. It’s not just that their actions were vapid and possibly illegal, and ought to be condemned rather than celebrated; I cannot, for the very life of me, figure out what such creatures could possibly say that would be of the slightest interest to anyone who valued his or her humanity. He worked hard at something utterly without value, loused it up, and now presents himself as another member of the parade of self-made victims, using his celebrity to promote additional triviality—DiMaggio’s Evil Twin; DiMaggio turned inside out.

I recognize that the manners of my childhood were sometimes as phony as Mr. Copp’s girlfriend’s glands. I realize that they were sometimes used to cover malice and malevolence, and to mask motives much more sinister than the simplemindedness which would enlist Mom’s Mastercard in the service of mammary maximization.

But, by gum!, they contributed to a general sense of human dignity, and something dreadful has happened when we, as a people, decide to treat Copp, his girlfriend, and many other denizens of the Daytime as if they deserved the attention we lavish on them. Attention is too precious a commodity to waste on fools.

This entry originally appeared in the Berea, Ohio News-Sun on March 18, 1999