Goo-goo for Gaga - in lieu of reasoned discourse

Trueman writes here: Goo Goo for Gaga- I Blame Bono (and Bush) (Carl Trueman). The whole post is worth a read. Here’s some excerpts:

“If the fact that the Senate did not repeal `Don't ask, don't tell' was a pleasant surprise, the tiresome role of celebrities (or, `slebs' as British journalist, Rod Liddle, calls them) in weighing in to campaign for such a repeal was not.    This time it was `Lady Gaga,' who comes across as a cut-price knock-off of Madonna (as Camille Paglia has noted), speaking at a rally in Maine.  Members of the crowd variously described her speech as "brave," "moving," and "touching;" I found it cliched, lacking in argument, and utterly lightweight.  How a pampered celebrity, with a veritable army of bodyguards, playing to the gallery and going with the cultural flow is `brave' is somewhat unclear to me.  Crossing a moderately busy road to buy a packet of cigarettes would seem in today's world to be a more physically, culturally, and professionally dangerous undertaking.

Listening to her on Monday, I was reminded of a comment made to me in the 80s about the student activism of that time: student politics is all about sincere people getting superficially involved in very deep issues.  If that applied to relatively articulate and intelligent students at Cambridge in 1985, it would seem to apply in spades to the barely articulate synthetic celebrities who now consider themselves to have the right to lecture the rest of us (via ghost written speeches made up of emotive blather) on how society should be organised.

… Such celebrity authority brings to the fore a number of unfortunate aspects of the contemporary world.  First, there is the assumption that what young people have to say is actually something to which it is worthwhile paying attention.   Wrong, wrong, wrong.  These are the same young people who think that the Twilight movies are actually watchable and that no English sentence is complete unless it contains the word `like' at least three times.

… The unspoken wisdom of the day seems to be that those with less experience of the world, and thus presumably less `baggage,' are better equipped to solve its problems.  That's theologically Pelagian and technically nonsense. ”

Trueman also observes the apparent hypocrisy which is so often reinforced by the tragic vacuity of thinking endemic in our day.

“This aesthetic power is, interestingly enough, of a piece with the type of argument she, and other celebrity sources of wisdom, use, where the language of right and wrong is, by and large, subsumed by the language of taste and tastefulness.  To be specific on the issue Lady G was addressing, those who disagree with her position were labeled `bigots,' and  the idea that someone may have reasons for disagreeing with her that were rooted in anything other than mindless prejudice is not even an option.    While I regard her arguments as stated on Monday as vacuous and emotive, I would at least like to give her credit for possibly holding her position for reasons other than mindless bigotry against social conservatives.”

That would, of course, require the rarity wherein the so-called ‘tolerant’ actually tolerate someone who absolutely and morally disagrees with them.