Fairfax, VA, USA. We Americans, you and I, spring from some Platonic conception of ourselves, forever remodeling our past even as we reconceive our multiple futures. The possibility of success, tempered by the memories our well accomplished failures, bedevils us until our dying days.
We worship a dual headed bitch goddess, pursuing fame, thinking it is success. [N1] In this, the early decades of a new millennium, we confuse our good intentions with actual accomplishment as if the act of aiming at a target is sufficient. [N2] We no longer actually have to hit the target to become famous. Being famous is enough, a well laurelled goal, in and of itself.
Success? Everyone wants success but no one admits to wanting it. If we achieve success, we are half apologetic that we climbed our own personal Mount Everest. The ideal American archetype is a Tin Star who, having just rid the world of the bad guys, responds to praise from the townspeople by casting his eyes down and mumbling semi-audibly Aw shucks, I was just doing my job.
{sidebar id=332}Visible, flagrant success is the biggest American sin of all, reminding others of their apparent lack of success. There is no hero so successful they will not be attacked for what they have accomplished, whose purity of intention will not be questioned and used to degrade their success. Proper, culturally approved ideology is all.
If anyone could achieve the success a hero achieves, we all would be successful. By definition, and as charged, a hero is an elite member of our society. Success provides access to an elite, undemocratic club whose sole membership criteria is success itself. The rest of us need not apply. Not so with fame. You can become famous without being successful, or even very good at what you are doing.
Look around. Take a good long look, a picture if you like. Anyone can become famous. You can be a relative failure and still be famous.
- Fame, (fame) makes a man take things over
Fame, (fame) lets him loose, hard to swallow
Fame, (fame) puts you there where things are hollow
Fame (fame) [N3]
There are self-appointed leaders who appear to spend more time on retaining their personal fame and their supposed position of “leadership” than they spend actually achieving anything meaningful. [N4] A thirty second sound bite on national television becomes more noteworthy than two years of effort working the back halls of Congress. At its extreme, fame replaces success as a goal worthy of human endeavor.
The fame monster can devour you.
At first fame is novelty, then a given. It is not long after that you realize that fame can cause you to lose an awful lot of freedom. After the delight of being famous passes, you realize you have lost the ability to not be recognized.
You can no longer hide, nor should you expect to. You have to anticipate you are being watched. [N5]
- To be a woman is to never be totally free of the curious eye. [N6]
Transition [N7] can be like that if you transition at your work place. There are days in the beginning when it feels like the eyes of the world, let alone Texas, are upon you.
Everybody knows.
You begin to suspect that every whisper, every turn of a head in a hallway is a comment about you (as well it might be). [N8]
Get used to it. You are famous of a sort. It will pass. [N9]
The most effective way to put a stop to the side effects of fame — the knowing glances and nodding heads — is to be successful at work. Success on the job, whatever that might be, facilitates transition.
The quicker you are quietly successful, the quicker you will become just enough woman or just another man. [N10] Your previous history will eventually be lost as much as the name of that secretary three secretaries back.
You won’t be famous. You’ll just be another average worker with a back story that few people ever take the time to know.
But that doesn’t mean they won’t point you out as being successful and speculate on how you got wherever it is you have gotten.
- That’s life, you’re riding high in April, shot down in May. [N11]
But I’d rather have the burden of success than the unrelenting glare of fame.
"The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That-with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success-is our national disease."
[N2] It is not enough to aim, you must hit. - Italian Proverb.
[N3] Fame is a song recorded by David Bowie and released in 1975, with a remix version in 1990.
David Bowie met John Lennon late 1974, which led to socialization and jamming at Electric Lady Studios in January 1975. Lennon created the title and sang above a guitar riff written by Carlos Alomar. Bowie did the lyrics, with the tesult that the songwriting credit list order is David Bowie, Carlos Alomar, and John Lennon.
[N4] A quick list off the top of the author’s head: Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton, Britney Spears, Sarah Palin, most gender activists, everyone on most every reality show on television. Feel free to add to the list.
[N5] This, of course, is one of a woman’s basic assumptions, someone is watching her, if not “The Man,” then certainly a man or group of men.
[N6] Lisa Jain Thompson, 2009.
[N7] A man or woman born transsexual’s transition to her or his correct physical sex and social role. Normally done in public, like a figure skater at the Olympics, there is no shortage of judges willing to score the degree of difficulty and your success.
[N8] Never assume that it is your “fame” that produces a friendly comment. What you might suspect is a sarcastic critique may only be normal situational small talk. Women talk to women, men talk to men, both sexes like to flirt. If you stumble on a curb or slip on a step, people probably will see you but they are more likely wanting to help than to laugh.
[N9] At any given time, there seems to be a half-dozen autobiographies dealing with transition on the best seller lists. One writes of the scars healed, another of the cruelty of the still open wounds given them by their parents or their spouse.
The bloody marks of transsexual suffering are present everywhere. Life is hard whether you are a man or woman born transsexual or a normborn. We all had bad childhoods. High School, by design, is emotionally wrenching. Work has been rough for all of us at one time or another.
Most of us survive without a bloody autobiography and a talk show tour where we complain how painful our celebrity is.
Normborn: a man born man, a woman born woman. A useful term that I first learned from the writings of Susan Cooke and promptly stole.
[N10] People will still gossip, of course. Gossip is a normal human activity.
[N11] That’s Life, Gordon and Thompson, as sung by Frank Sinatra.
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Starpoetby Lisa Jain Thompson.
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