I'm not that innocent.
Maybe not, but I'm the first to admit to having had a certain cathected fascination with Britney Spears.
My music is mostly nerdy college rock made by disaffected ironic dilettantes with old guitars and axes to grind. Glitzy top-ten hits-certainly throwaway pop ones-are anathema to me.
But I liked Britney. I'm sure part of it was her warm smile and American good looks. And after surviving a decade of self-deprecation and cynicism, I dug her undeniable hooks and feel-good ethos, wide-eyed and PG-rated and inexpressibly bouncy. Somehow, between her gyrating hips and her hummable lyrics, Britney became synonymous with something much greater than herself-she became a symbol of our good times, of a surging economy, job growth and hard-won complacency.
Until I went to her concert this month.
Britney is just as beautiful in person, and she projects a modesty that still elicits a few "awws" from the crowd. Through the stench of onion rings and old hot dogs, she surges pure saccharine, floating godlike above her adoring masses on the tiniest shreds of twine.
But Britney can't dance and doesn't sing. Her show rides roughshod over traditional showmanship. Its schtick is "virtual Britney," and that's just what you get-large doses of gloriously overblown pyrotechnics, ill-timed choreography, moving platforms and lip synching, with not a dash of soul to be had.
An angry mother behind me yelled at me and told me to sit down because her twelve-year-old daughter couldn't see. And even when she could, the poor girl hardly clapped. Apparently, watching Britney "live" is just... watching virtual Britney. It's watching a talentless young vixen prance around slurping exploitation from a horde of pop culture minions.
The real truth is, Britney, like a host of dot-com pipe dreams, exemplifies our irrational exuberance. Neither pariah nor hero, she's the outcome of averages and corporate calculus. Britney, my symbol of everything American and apple pie, showed how rotten the apples really are. And I had bought right in.
As I watched the inane spectacle drone on, I realized how easily symbols can overtake what they stand for. In our lifetimes, we're asked to pledge allegiance or belief in thousands of them. We shouldn't burn the flag, we're told, because it represents our democratic ideals and those who die for them. The cross, and religious symbols like it, is supposed to embody ideals like charity, non-violence and humility. People can be symbols, too, and thus, we should turn a blind eye to the failings of athletes and presidents because we need to believe in the victory and leadership they exemplify.
A symbol is not an invitation to think, but to simplify. It packages every facet of an idea, valid and invalid, into one digestible package that you're asked to swallow, and to reject one aspect is to scorn the larger whole. But the flag and the cross are no better emblems of American democracy and Christianity than Britney Spears was of my own notion of good economic times. Those ideas are more complicated than that, and they deserve the treatment of reasoned analysis rather than blind allegiance. The American flag can't represent the terrible poverty and increasing disparity in wealth in this country. The cross can't explain the tremendous violence of religious warfare. And Ms. Spears, in all her vapid glory, can't begin to embody even Generation Y, much less the complex realities behind today's economy.
Britney happens because we acknowledge, we accept, we succumb. We're asked to enjoy the tune rather than analyze why, to take pithy elation over catharsis. Tyranny happens because people are too afraid to burn the flag, to question the corruption of the values for which it stands. And across the globe, the distortion of religious ethics continues to lay waste to generations.
It is the skepticism of symbols, and not reverence for them, that keeps us free. Ending the dangerous reverence for oversimplification and the etherizing influence of blind allegiance won't solve the world's problems, but it will make us all more honest in the way we approach them.
Jonas Blank is a Trinity senior and editor of Recess.
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