Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 2, 1994 TAG: 9407040099
SECTION: RELIGION PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL HIRSLEY CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Medium
He had a possible future in another high-salaried profession, television, having completed a pilot for a TV series.
But he retired from professional football 15 years ago, and had only moderate success since in an acting-sportscasting career. As a result, O.J. Simpson was not a present-tense celebrity, being talked about by everyone in town ... until a few weeks ago.
Now that a shocking series of revelations has followed his arrest for the grisly slayings of his former wife and a friend of hers, O.J. Simpson is arguably the single most frequent subject of public conversations.
And there is more to this relentless gapers' block in the traffic of our daily lives than lurid attraction, says professor Peter Homans, who teaches religion and psychology at the University of Chicago.
He believes Simpson has also become the latest in a series of ``public disillusionments and mournings.''
As part of his research and expertise merging the fields of religion and psychology, Homans believes that these kinds of emotional, almost ritualistic, experiences have become more and more a part of mass culture.
Further, he feels that such secular, media-drenched rites are replacing religious ceremonies as healing experiences for public loss.
``The point is that ritual behavior is a healing of loss,'' he says. ``Western religions historically have functioned both to idealize heroes and to provide healing rituals when heroes are lost.''
And, he contends, to the extent that science and popular culture have ``destabilized and marginalized religion,'' there has been a shift in heroes, hero worship and handling disillusionment when heroes fall.
He disagrees with those who try to dismiss Simpson as not truly an American hero, saying that heroes are created by perception, not necessarily by deeds:
``Human beings idealize other people. It is partly conscious, partly unconscious.
``For example, you cannot have a group without a leader. Whether you elect the best one or the worst one, you put that person on a pedestal. Then, through idealization, everyone becomes part of the leader, identifies with the leader.''
A study of popular culture done in the 1950s found a shift had already begun in ``famous people'' chosen as subjects of media biographies, Homans recalls: ``Where it once had been statesmen, scientists and artists or writers, it was becoming athletes and movie stars.''
That shift has continued, he says, and Simpson is legitimately in the ``famous'' category because ``he has managed to maintain his visibility, to stay in the public eye.''
Regardless of whether one agrees that Simpson should be viewed as a hero, and regardless of whether one feels he is guilty or innocent of murder, the public disillusionment-and-mourning process has begun.
``When an idealized object is found to be defective in a way one did not know, there is a sense of having been tricked or lied to,'' Homans contends. ``When an ideal is shattered, it is like dropping a china plate on the floor. You can never put the pieces back together in the same way, or without the cracks showing forever after.
``And what is lost is not just the idealized person or object. It is as if a boy's dad dies, and the dad is idealized. Part of the boy is lost as well.''
While the Simpson case is the overwhelming current example of public mourning for loss or disillusionment, Homans said similar emotions have been wrought in different degrees by celebrities and events as disparate as the deaths of John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and rock star Kurt Cobain, as well as the Civil War, Vietnam War and the Holocaust.
Ripples of public disappointment over the latter trio of historical events still surface in dramas and documentaries.
On the other hand, he says, postwar Germans' reaction to Nazi atrocities showed that ``the public cannot take an infinite amount of disillusionment.'' Rather than prolonged mourning and depression, there was an economic boom as Germans who inherited their country from the defeated Nazis plunged themselves into work.
However, there has been a backlash of guilt and contrition among some Germans as the Holocaust story has been retold over the years, most recently in the movie ``Schindler's List.''
To the extent that mass culture involving newspapers, magazines, TV and movies functions instead of religious ceremonies to assist people through public disillusionment and mourning, Homans feels that the media are an uneven substitute for religious experience:
``At its best, it helps people review earlier memories and images of the de-idealized person, and helps them work through the loss.
``But at its worst, the media can forestall that process by continuing to perpetuate the ideal.''
by CNB