We are living in somewhat chaotic times at the moment. There’s a financial crisis gripping two of the most powerful continents in the world, conflict in north African and the Middle East, a terrorist attack in Norway, riots in London… the list goes on. This is enough to send Jehovah’s Witness in their droves to your door saying “we told you so”, conspiracy theorists to do the same via YouTube videos and people in society to wonder if the world really will end next year. So what would you do to get by? Some turn to drink or drugs, which cost the life of a certain singer this year, some decide to make a stand and some decide to kill people they think are to blame (not mentioning any Western names). But an increasing “release” from the horrors of the real world is what I like to call vita vana (unreal life in Latin). I’ll explain with a few examples.
My idea of vita vana is where someone decides to effectively “live” their own life through the goings on of someone else’s, usually a celebrity or someone they look up to or deem worthy of a higher status than themselves. By doing so, they can get the satisfaction of happiness and success through said person (or sometimes collectively through a whole team, in the case of a football club, which I will look at later). Because the media usually portrays these people as almost invincible, the happiness and success is seemingly everlasting and so the pretence can go on for a long period of time, until the person living the vita vana either matures or gets bored. An example of this is the recent announcement that R&B star Beyoncé Knowles is pregnant with Jay-Z’s baby. Now, normally if someone announces a pregnancy, you get the usual congratulatory messages and people are generically happy for a brief period. However, Twitter went insane with messages. People had somehow become engrossed with the news, making speculative comments about its name and its future talents, genuinely feeling excitement for the baby’s arrival and expressing their jubilation and shock at the news. From a neutral point of view, this seems like an exaggerated response to a fairly common announcement, if not slightly perverse. Women get pregnant everyday. If I had reacted like this for a random woman in my town on Twitter or Facebook, I would be seen as strange (even more so than usual). I’ll look at possible reasons for this reaction later.
Another example is with Steve Jobs announcement that he would be stepping down from his role as CEO of Apple due to ill health. Unfortunate, but a fairly common decision to make for a frail businessman with cancer. The responses to this were just as extravagant, but on the opposite side of the spectrum. There were eulogies for his career, questions concerning the stability of Apple and even the state of computer technology, early criticism at his replacement, even heartfelt messages regarding his influence on computing (which was almost a love poem on “innovation”). A man had decided to quit his job because he was sick and people reacted in ways disproportionate to his decision (in my opinion at least).
Then we look at a football club like Arsenal (this example is a little different but has similar parallels to a vita vana). Having played a poor match against Udinese mid-week but still managing to pull through 2-1, many fans I had noticed were quick to ignore the performance when goaded by rival Spurs fans and decided to discuss how badly they perceived Spurs themselves to be doing. This continued as Spurs lost 5-1 at home to Manchester City on Sunday (not before the embarrassment to come back at them significantly worse, losing 8-2 against champions Manchester United). This wasn’t the first time Arsenal fans had deflected issues at the club they supported onto rival fans. It happened a few times last season when they dropped out of two competitions (three, if you count the league race) in the space of two weeks. By technically “living” their fan lives in the revelling of other teams’ defeats, they had forgotten their own problems. Just by taking on these problems as fans (not even shareholders with financial ties in the club, just people who chose to pay to go to matches), they are living through the club, which is possibly even worse than living through another human. A club is just a company after all. But perhaps I’m being a little too lateral with that last example, thinking that a club is just a company. And it’s not just Arsenal fans that do it; all football fans like to ignore their own problems at the expense of their rivals’ issues.
Three examples of vita vana there. So, why the reactions? For the first one, it can be fairly simple. With their influence on music and current popular culture and black culture (which is, arguably, at the forefront of both music and popular culture at the moment, for both good and bad reasons – something that I’d welcome a debate on and maybe another blog post), Beyoncé and Jay-Z are seen almost as royalty, as I saw someone mention on Twitter today. Their popularity has warranted these reactions and the reactions perpetuate the popularity. Jay-Z can “leak” or advance release any album or song now and people will jump on it and give their opinions good or bad within minutes, and most of the responses will be extravagant in some way, whether it’ll be through parody or seriousness. Same for Beyoncé. And this sort of hysteria can stretch further into the lives of other “superhuman” celebrities, even if they’ve previously beaten up their girlfriends. Fans of Chris Brown (or Team Breezy as they’re known) immediately forgave his actions and have now moved on from the issue, despite Brown having shown further signs of his aggression and temper, Hulk style. His fans have become Brown’s little army, attempting to defend him from attack.
With Steve Jobs, this could be seen as an example of how we have put technology high in the pecking order of our life priorities. People rushed to see him do his keynote speech every year for Apple, announcing another iteration of his flagship Macbooks, iPods or iPhones. They wait intently to hear about the next releases, even if they show no significant improvements but cost a few hundred more to purchase. You get people angrily denouncing Apple or Apple users; PC is better, Mac is better, I’m a PC, I’m a Mac. And that is the exact problem at hand. Suddenly, we are the computers. We have taken on the role of these machines, these factions of plastic and silicon. At least, that’s what we are told. I’m certainly neither a Mac or a PC, I’m a human being that uses a computer (probably too much, but I’m still human). The sooner we live our lives properly and not through these machines or these people, the better. As David Boyle said in his book Authenticity, reality is human.
For the football fans, this has been an ongoing situation for many years and had initially started out as a bit of fun and community spirit. As the 70s and 80s creeped in with its hooliganism, there was a dark undertone in British football which reached an apex with the Heysel and Hillsborough disasters. the hooliganism died down in the 90s and was replaced by a hunger of power and money via the influx of wealth the Premier League had brought. As the Bosman ruling came into force in 1995, power shifted to the players and a whole new era of football came into being. By the 2000s, money, controversy and foreign takeovers had begun to rule over what used to be a working class sport. Fans had now got themselves caught up in the mess and found themselves trying to defend the actions of people they would not normally back in other circumstances. Would you give a vote of confidence to a group of men who had used money from a company to buy that company and subsequently put it in potentially bankrupting debt? Most haven’t, but some have. As long as their club is successful, they’d probably say. Their club. Not for long, some others might say.
I can’t really sit here typing this and say I’ve never done these sorts of things myself. I’m a huge Jamiroquai and Michael Jackson fan and I’ve found myself dressing up in their respective regalia (if that isn’t living through someone else’s life via their wardrobe, I don’t know what is). I cried when Michael Jackson died, said I missed him and had someone tell me my feelings were over the top as I hadn’t known him. I’ve also got emotional to the point of tears when my team won the 1999 Champions League final. I was 8 at the time. Perhaps we all, at some point, get bored with our own lives and decide to tag along with the joy and happiness of others, to say we were part of it. Or maybe it’s to deflect away from our priorities because we’re too scared to face them ourselves. Either way, these vita vana shouldn’t be our primary lives or our only lives. We should be able to be happy for ourselves and face up to our own problems and not look after the happiness of those we don’t know because for most celebrities nowadays at least, they don’t know us individually or collectively and ultimately, they don’t really care as long as you give them money or “support”.
Discussion
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