By Myles Ludwig
Hey, hey, Paula, I wanna marry you.
Hey, hey, Paula, no one else could ever do.
I’ve waited so long for school to be through,
Paula, I can’t wait no more for you.
My love, my love.
When Texas college students Ray Hildebrand and Jill Jackson wrote those lyrics to their 2-million selling record in 1963 — and changed their names to Paul and Paula for the gospel-tinged pop call-and-response tune — they were not predicting the media death of Paula Deen, the denouement of the celebrity chef and the evolution of social media power.
The current Paula dirge, in fact the white mammy herself, is a pop culture side show on the media midway, staged for the suckers to dunk and meant to make a few bucks for everyone, except, of course, the Queen of Lard herself.
The Snowden leaks certainly have more import, though it does boggle the mind to believe that, if the super spy agency was so good, why, if the phone calls, texts and emails of every criminal, drug dealer, pornographer and terrorists in the world were collected, overhead and read … why weren’t they caught?
Was anybody listening on 9/10? Or were they out to lunch?
And it makes one question the verisimilitude of movies like Zero Dark Thirty.
Last I looked in Costco, Snowden is not on the cover of People and its assorted cousins of celebrity worshipping or Schadenfreude-inducing magazines (there’s still a chance his “pole-dancing” girlfriend might make it) that he may be paging through to diddle away the long hours between countries.
But, neither is the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage.
Both of these stories are more likely to be fodder for made-for-binge-viewing.
There are three things that make the Deen story food for thought.
One is its foundation in a linguistic phenomenon; another is the dizzyingly rapid rise to power of social media; and the third is potentially the most important because it’s about the seeds of a new theory of communications yet to make the textbooks.
We know the story sprang from a leaked legal deposition in which the buttery doyenne of the deep-fried admitted she’d used the “N-word” and the hubbub, like Topsy, “just growed.”
That’s the linguistic part.
I’ve been trying to trace the evolution of that euphemism, “the N-word.” When did it first rear its head in the lexicon? The Little Black Sambo of my childhood?
I had thought it popped up during coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial as a way of impugning the testimony of LAPD Detective Mark Furman in an approximate of a politically correct or socially acceptable term.
But I was wrong.
It surfaced earlier, attached to the great Joseph Conrad’s classic late 19th-century novella about seaman James Wait, The Nigger of the Narcissus, which, according to my favorite tertiary source, Wikipedia, was published in the U.S. as The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle at the insistence of its publisher, Dodd Mead, “not because the word was deemed offensive but that a book about a black man would not sell. In 2009, Wordbridge Publishing published a new edition titled The N-Word of the Narcissus.”
It hardly has the same ring.
“According to the publisher, the point was to get rid of the offensive word, which may have led readers to avoid the book, and make it more accessible. Though praised in some quarters, many others denounced the change as censorship.”
Poor Joe. Not only sporadically broke like many writers, but also an early victim of political correctness, not unlike Norman Mailer, whose celebrated war novel, The Naked and the Dead made the controversial “fug” acceptable and hopelessly passé simultaneously.
It set me thinking.
I wonder why Jesse Jackson’s characteristic of New York as “Hymietown” during his quixotic presidential race didn’t stick to him like Elmer’s glue? How did “gay” become an appropriate appellation for people who have particular sexual preferences? Is that anymore acceptable than “catamite”? In fact, is sexual preference something to be proud about?
Or the irony of televangelists Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker or mob boss Joe Colombo starting The Italian Anti-Defamation League to picket the New York office of the FBI, appearing on TV, then getting shot in the head at his own Central Park rally, ostensibly by an N-word guy who was said to have been played by the Gallo brothers and was then shot himself. What would Uncle Joe have made of the phenomenal success of The Godfather or The Sopranos?
And Lee Harvey Oswald? Or Jack Ruby and Frank Sturgis, who have become characters in Magic City, the show in which all the main characters are supposed to be Jewish, but don’t look it and certainly can’t get the Yiddish accent right?
What happened to “sticks and stones”?
Pitiful Paula, a creature of the media as the idea of the celebrity chef arose when food became not a commodity or even a matter of palate, but a source of what Veblen called “conspicuous consumption,” was caught again. The first time was when she lied about having diabetes while flogging an anti-diabetes drug.
She barely escaped that trap with her skin, but this one, in which she aired an amateur video that recalled a Nixonian non-denial denial — I am not a racist; I am not a crook — (the worst mea culpa ever, according to TV commentator Terrence Smith) which spiraled through the mediaverse like a whirlwind.
And here is how we come to a new paradigm: the Cannibal Theory of Communications.
A leak was twitterized, fed to mainstream media, devoured, then followed by two amateur video sort-of apologies that re-fed Twitter, which devoured the failure to appear for a highly promoted scheduled interview with Matt Lauer (who’s having his own image problems), to refeed Twitter, which re–fed the rescheduled softball Lauerview and crocodile tears, which re-fed Twitter, belching up fleeing sponsors, canceled TV shows and books, feeding more Twitter, feeding gleeful news on competitive TV morning shows, feeding celebrity gossip TV shows, feeding celebrity gossip magazines, refeeding Twitter, Sunday morning TV shows, feeding Twitter ad nauseam.
Indigestion.
Twitter has becomes a media channel that forms the message and links all mass media. It reminds me of the Lion King’s Circle of Life.
The Cannibal Theory of Communications — my name for wagging the dog — is a child of the ménage à trois marriage of Social Networking Theory (a descendant of Computer Science and Information Theory) and the traditional “Hypodermic Needle” theory (the pre-zombie War of the Worlds 1938 radio broadcast that had millions of American radio listeners believing Martians had invaded New Jersey) and McLuhan’s technological determinism.
And now, me.
And what does Joan Rivers have to say about all this?
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.