BEFORE WE BEGIN, A QUICK ANNOUNCEMENT: My once-canceled talk radio appearance has been rescheduled on short notice. It’ll be at noon this Sunday on “The Buzz,” 100.7 FM.
WHILE RESEARCHING a future piece for this space about those screeching new business magazines, one phrase kept recurring in their headlines. It was a phrase I’d remembered from dreadful Reagan-era articles in the likes of Vanity Fair and Esquire about seemingly unstoppable tycoons and financiers.
Such profiles would almost inevitably carry the title “The Rise and Rise Of….”
The oft-unspoken assumption behind the phrase is that there were certain ultra-Alpha-Male money-gods for whom the rise-and-fall, birth-and-death rules of normal human existence do not apply.
You want to know the roots of today’s supposed decline in “civil society?” The I-got-mine-screw-you zeitgeist exploited by conquest-of-nature SUV ads and ultraviolent video games? The who-needs-you “Attitude” of wrestlers, sexist/racist comedians, “aggro” rock bands, and Microsoft attorneys? It’s all in those five short words, expressing the manufacture of a particularly annoying social archetype–the quasi-neo-Nietzschean ubermensch who believes himself to be above the petty rules of puny humans.
With this premise in mind, I did a quick Net-search for the phrase. Following are some of the hundreds of results of the search; people, places, and things that, according to various print and Net-only journalists, are or were on “The Rise and Rise”:
And, of course:
There are also films entitled The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer and The Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket, and an earlier stage play called The Rise and Rise of Arturo Ui.
Mind you, I happen to like some of the stuff on this list (particularly Bowie, bagels, miniskirts, and the Net). It’s just that nothing keeps rising forever and ever, except in theoretical algebra.
MONDAY: More media merger madness.
ELSEWHERE:
