The Lionization of the Mundane

An encounter with insomnia resulted in my nervously fingering the TV remote control at 5:30 one recent Saturday morning. As both a chronic and an acute insomniac, this is not particularly unusual. (Three Restoril will, if I'm lucky, afford me four hours respite from consciousness.)

As the set slowly came to life (my TV is so old it thinks it has tubes and behaves accordingly), the image of a handsome woman in her mid-forties materialized before me.

"There was simply nothing better my husband could have given me!" she gushed.

(Great sex? A cure for AIDS?)

Her replacement was similarly aged and equally handsome.

"Believe me," she enthused, "this is the best I've ever tried - and I've tried lots!"

(One of those devices for removing stones from horses' hooves, with which we were enamored as children?)

Third up was a gentleman in, I would say, his mid-thirties, his girth attesting to a middle-class, middle-American lifestyle. He was more sober in his assessment.

"I can honestly say," he testified, "that it has changed our lives."

I was intrigued. Whatever it was, I needed it.

Obtaining one was easy. All I had to do was call an 800 number, credit card in hand. My account would be debited $69.95 (plus tax as I live in California).

The Juicemaster would be with me within eight weeks.

I flipped channels.

CNN was broadcasting the latest landing of the space shuttle.

"The main landing gear has been deployed," the commentator intoned reverentially.

"Pilot (sic) Scott Hackenabush is about to deploy the main landing drag 'chute."

(How do you know?)

"It's landed!"

Of course, the landing of the space shuttle is, indeed a triumph of engineering, skill, innovation and - in the light of recent reports on NASA - above all, faith. It is as removed from the innovation of the Juicemaster as a Model T is from the latest German supercar.

Still, the Shuttle's landing is almost an everyday occurrence, and, as such is not so far distant from our witnesses' commonplace preparation of a glass of carrot juice.

It struck me that both pieces of media-fodder were essentially undifferentiated in their mundaneness.

Driving to the beach later that morning, I fell to pondering the two phenomena. I realized that they were both symptomatic of a cultural milieu which dramatizes the ordinary. Being symptoms, they tended to obscure the underlying malaise of le corps culturel.