Poor Justin Bieber. He’s taking it hard for the comment he wrote in the guestbook at Anne Frank House: Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber. It’s tempting to call him a twit. To say he doesn’t get it. That he’s disrespectful. Yeah. But on the other hand …
Mr. Bieber, who is 19, serves as a kind of pop culture Everyman. I find it hard to attribute his words solely to him. They are the sort of words one would expect from most kids his age who haven’t had the benefit of a post-secondary education and have spent most of their waking hours in continuous exposure to Western commercial culture. The words reflect a sentiment which, almost a generation ago, Milan Kundera described when he wrote about the aesthetic of kitsch which dominated the culture of communist Russia. His thoughts are readily transferable to capitalist North America: let’s call it an aesethic of banality. It’s the way of life our culture calls us to adopt. It’s almost irresistible how it insinuates itself into our consciousness. Bieber reflects to us the world we have created for ourselves and in which we all participate. We see our hand in it when we learn that Anne Frank House chose to respond via its Facebook page. Yeah, really:
We think it is very positive that he took the time and effort to visit our museum. He was very interested in the story of Anne Frank and stayed for over an hour. We hope that his visit will inspire his fans to learn more about her life and hopefully read the diary.
Facebook, in case you forgot, is a social network that a billion of us have joined. It had its beginning, in case you forgot, as a local network program that undergraduate boys not much older than Bieber could use to rate and rank girls based on such important factors as smiles and tits. Sure, if Anne Frank had been alive today and if she had avoided Nazis and concentration camps, she may well have been a Belieber. She may also have been one of the girls rated and ranked on that social media network so many of us endorse by our use.
It seems a trite observation nowadays that the anger of a ranting homophobic unwittingly reveals a self-hatred that arises from unaddressed issues around sexuality. But it’s a useful model and provides an analogy for understanding the ridicule and cruel taunts that people have directed at Bieber. Maybe the taunts are symptomatic of self-hatred. As Everyman, Bieber speaks with our voice. It’s a banal voice. We all admit that. What we refuse to admit is that it’s our voice. We suppress that fact, but it re-emerges as anger. We hate ourselves for mucking around in a popular culture that’s so shallow we could be declared brain-dead and still manage its demands quite nicely. We hate ourselves, but vent our hatred at Bieber. It’s a classic case of displacement.
I know another classic case of displacement: the Christian myth. Maybe that’s how we should understand the Bebe. Bieber as Jesus. He’s the second coming, taking the sins of the world on himself.
The curious thing about an aesthetic of banality is its absolute dependency upon the Oprahfication of suffering. It’s not simple suffering (anybody can suffer). It’s suffering redeemed by acts of extraordinary courage. Go to your local bookstore and check the backs of all the fiction bestsellers. Count the number of times some variant of the phrase “suffering and redemption” appears there. Don’t feel like walking to the bookstore? Log in to your Facebook feed and check out all the memes that celebrate the redeeming power of extraordinary courage, the YouTube videos of cognitively challenged kids who get a chance to shoot the winning basket at the championship game, the homely singer who silences the smart-mouthed reality-TV judge (homeliness is a kind of suffering, isn’t it?), the poor kid ready to kill himself until the B-list celebrity he’s always wanted to meet knocks at his door because of a heart-rending email.
Maybe Bieber’s sin is that he has trivialized the extraordinary suffering of Anne Frank. She was this girl, you see, this teen-aged girl, normal in every way except for her one challenge (she was Jewish), but she overcame that challenge (by writing a diary), and achieved the kind of celebrity that teenagers dream of, complete with an appearance on the Ellen DeGeneres show, a book deal with HarperCollins, and a twenty-city tour, a … Oh wait. She’s the one who died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, right? But if she lived today, she would come back as a superhero and join forces with anime characters and whup those Nazi basterds worse than a baseball bat-wielding Jew in a Quentin Tarantino film.
Bieber wrote: “Hopefully, she would have been a belieber.” Hopefully? It suggests a naïve faith in magical possibilities. But this is a longing we share with Bieber. We want to reify Anne Frank as an ordinary teenager who, had she survived, would have shown extraordinary courage in the face of overwhelming odds and gone on to do typical teenager things, like make out in the back seat of a solid German-built automobile. Alongside Bieber, we rail against tragedy. We deny the possibility of a pointless suffering that offers no opening for redemption. Pop culture is our answer to meaningless suffering. As Tarantino illustrates, its history is revisionist. As Facebook illustrates, its story is global. And as churches everywhere illustrate at Easter, its theology is emphatically Christian, because the dead always rise from the grave to beat the crap out of death.
Bieber’s statement is sufficiently inane that it reads as parody. The problem is that it parodies a sentiment we share with Bieber. We’d prefer to relegate Anne Frank to a cartoon fantasy where the suffering of children yields meaning. We hate Bieber because he reveals to us the immaturity of our impossible longing for moral order. Or, to put it in more grown-up terms: we share with Bieber an infantile theodicy and that discovery pisses us off, so, in an act of displaced anger, we take it out on him.
Photo credit: Adam Sundana, CC Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 Generic License