The Art of the Deal as Entertainment
Procedural voyeurism grants us an illusion of control over realities that we secretly fear we have no power over — sometimes correctly, as with the BP oil spill, whose coverage has been rich in process and until recently short on meaningful developments. The Romanian religious philosopher Mircea Eliade wrote about mesmerizing narratives that he called origin myths. He said they helped people feel a sense of authority over an otherwise chaotic world. Today our origin myths are more mundane, but we still see the deal as a primordial act. We might do well to call these decadent versions “LeBron Announcements” or “Conan-Leno Matches”: rituals of symbolic participation in games-within-games that are way above our heads and occur within heavily guarded inner circles that we can peek into but never truly penetrate.
solid explanation. all this lebron/conan/leno stuff pissed me off too. NO BODY HAS/HAD ACTUALLY DONE ANYTHING YET.
not just disguising, we’re bait-and-switching one of the few things in this world that is mildly controllable: our very own accomplishments.
