Maybe it was just because I'd heard the hype before; maybe I was over sensitive.  But it has annoyed me again to hear that somebody or something that is immediately in our attention necessarily earns the title...
...of the Century
  This time, it was on the cover of TV Guide.  Frank Sinatra was on the cover, described as "The Singer of the Century", and my gut reaction was that this was more media overkill.  After all, I was born near the middle of the century, and by the time I was listening to music on the radio, Sinatra was to me a thing of the past; even Elvis was passé in the 60's, a time and a generation dominated by The Beatles, Stones, Doors, and other early rock groups.  Whenever Sinatra had a hit in the top 40, I wondered why, wondered who was buying his records and listening to his out-dated music, wondered what was in the minds of the programmers who thought that music which still carried the flavor of the 40's belonged on the radio stations favored by pre-teens.  O.K., I was young--Sinatra had far more talent than I credited in those days.  Yet his popularity was not with those of us born in the latter half of the century, but with our parents.

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  I don't want to minimize anything that Sinatra has done.  He was a great musician and a great entertainer who managed to keep himself popular through many years while the musical styles changed around him.  But this is the century of many great singers who have achieved things never seen by Sinatra.  Elvis sang during this century--and I am no fan of his, but he had more consecutive years of hit records than Sinatra, or than anyone else until Elton John, who also sang in this century.  Bing Crosby sang in this century, and was the first ever to earn a "platinum record" for selling ten million copies of a single recording--a remarkable feat at the time it was accomplished.  And as talented as Sinatra was, would anyone imagine that he ever sang so well as Pavarotti or Caruso or Domingo--just a few of the great operatic voices of this century.  And we haven't touched the extremely talented women who have sung in this age.  Barbara Streisand stretched her phenomenal voice into areas Sinatra never touched--her foray into disco demonstrated that her talent knows few limits.  If you have any doubts of Linda Ronstat's talent, get a copy of Pirates of Penzance.  Sandi Patti may not be so well known, popular principally in Christian music, but her voice is surprising in its range and expression.  Sinatra is good, but the competition is tough, and he's not the best.

  And then some television show expanded the range:  entertainer of the century.  All right, I agree that there are few musicians who can put forward the acting credentials to rival him.  Elvis did a lot of movies, but with Sinatra you had the impression that he really could act, that he wasn't just a popular singer thrown into a movie to sell tickets.  The Beatles made several movies, some of them excellent--but if we're talking "entertainer", we must consider all of those who are entertainers but not singers.  My mind leapt to P. T. Barnum--but he would have been the entertainer of the 19th century.  Still, there have been many entertainers this century.  I am no great fan of Michael Jackson or Elton John, but they put on phenomenal shows.  There have been actors with talent which goes beyond stage and screen.  And certainly if we are listing great entertainers, we have to include Jim Henson, George Lucas, and Stephen Speilberg--any one of them a more significant entertainer than Sinatra, a more fitting candidate for "entertainer of the century".

  And, perhaps more to the point, I'm still annoyed at the last "of the century" which was foisted on us:  the so-called "Trial of the Century", the murder trial of O. J. Simpson.  And here my annoyance becomes quite clear.  After all, consider the trials that might be considered.  This is the century of Nuremberg, in which those responsible for the atrocities of World War II were punished.  In this century, we had Brown v. Board of Education, when separate but equal facilities were made illegal in the United States.  The Scopes Monkey Trial forever changed education in America in this century.  In this century, the Watergate Hearings marked the first time a sitting American president resigned in the face of a bill of impeachment, and Roe v. Wade extended privacy to allow women to kill their unborn children on little more than a desire to avoid stretch marks.  Sacco and Vanzetti, the Lindberg kidnapping, Miranda, the Chicago 7--and these are just the major trials of this century which would be familiar to most Americans.  I can hardly credit that anyone would have accepted the notion that the trial of a celebrity sports star who parlayed his recognition as a great athlete into a mediocre acting career charged with killing his wife would even appear on the list of major trials of the century.  The trial of the 19th Century is probably Dred Scott--the decision that decided that Black Americans were not human.  On that basis, I expect that the next century will best remember Roe v. Wade--the analogous case which decided that Unborn Americans are not human.  But I might be mistaken.  Any of those I named could become the trial of the 20th century, and there are many more important cases and decisions which are unknown to the public at large which could claim the title.

  So what was the Simpson Trial?  It was the media event of the moment, no more and no less.  That perhaps is what the death of Frank Sinatra is:  the media event of the moment.  The decade of the nineties seems to have become the decade of hype.  As the end of the millennium approaches, the hype will continue.  In fact, the hype has already reached such a level that intelligent leaders and media pundits have completely confused themselves and the public regarding the end of the millennium.  The world will celebrate the end of a millennium on December 31st, 1999--a full year early.  December 31st, 2000, is the end of the 2000th year, and thus the end of the 200th decade, the 20th century, and the second millennium.  The date which has been hyped as the end of the millennium is little more the end of a millennium than is today.  But even though we can say that a day has ended at noon--it has, since the day which began at noon ends 24 hours later at noon--you would all consider me a lunatic if I decided that the millennium ends tomorrow at noon.  But tomorrow at noon is as much the end of a thousand years as midnight on December 31st, 1999.  The new millennium which matters on the calendar begins on the first day of the year 2001, and not a moment before.  The date you've been told to anticipate is merely more media hype.

  (My opinion on the Simpson trial?  I think the justice system is in good hands as long as it is in the hands of juries.  I also would note that Dennis Miller's joke about the lawyers in the civil trial submitting the transcript of the criminal trial as proof that Simpson killed his wife is not as silly as it sounds.  The standard of proof in the criminal trial is "beyond a reasonable doubt"--that is, no one can imagine that he didn't do it; that in the civil trial is only "the preponderance of evidence"--that is, it is more likely that he did it than not.  So if jurors conclude that Simpson might not have killed his wife, but he probably did, then he shouldn't go to jail, but he should have to pay something.  But I've wandered off the point.)

  Of course, the problem with hype is that we become inured to it.  Given so many claims of the greatest, the best, the ultimate, we come to ignore them.  I often joke about the fictitious video game I have named The Very Last Ultimate Final and we really mean it this time Fight 3--in a world in which everything is hype, hype becomes nothing, and an honest attempt to describe something for which superlatives are appropriate is ignored.

  Sinatra was a great singer and a great entertainer; even many of us raised on Rock and Roll came to appreciate a musician who brought real excitement to the dull musical stylings of our parents.  The Simpson trial was important as a media event and a cultural event and a legal event--a trial to which television was given unprecedented access, which polarized society almost entirely along racial lines, as many black Americans declared their belief that the predominantly white police force had framed him for the crime and the white-biased judicial system would certain railroad him to prison for it, and just as many white Americans complained (with a more limited vocabulary) that a guilty rich man was going to get away with murder by obfuscating the truth with irrelevant claptrap about prejudice and revenge motive based on racial envy of a successful black man, or by using money and power to buy a legal defense which would find some technicality on which to free him.  But any claim that these are more than the events of the moment, any categorization of them as major moments in history, is nothing more than advertising to sell tickets--whether measured by television ratings or magazine sales or some other commercial enterprise.

  And as the entertainer of another century said, "There's a sucker born every minute."

Just curious...what caught your eye?

M. J. Young Net