Truman's Legacy
onsidering that I am just now publishing my website, I’ve been thinking a lot about Legacy. It’s really the important stuff, when you get right down to it; and, the sooner you can really hone yours to a glossy marble statue, the better.
“Just how will you be remembered?” It's the question that every brassy, good looking ingenue and every dapper, but guileless chap should be asking themselves.
The funny thing that we all miss, when we let ourselves be caught imagining such timescales as legacy, is that we can barely remember a single person form our own family who lived only three short generations before us. Some of us were lucky enough to know our grandparents well; few of us, our great grandparents; but, almost no one knows their great-great-grandmother, Esther, who used to flash the train conductor every morning, walking the short cut along the train tracks to the hospital, where she worked as a nurse.
Generational memory is very short, and has prompted many a mustachioed, pipe-smoking gentlemen to lock themselves away in their study for the last third of their lives - not to be disturbed! - in order to write their memoirs. And, I don’t mean 'memoir' in the modern sense, either. Modern memoir is at best a narrow poetics of current times, and at worst, a ghostwritten money grab in the spirit of Us Weekly. I’m talking five volumes, baby, with a family tree, illustrated in the front matter of each tome, leafing a generous shade of historical ancestors, the kind, which has no fewer than three major wars in it, all retold with a thrumming, patriotic flare. Most of us, however, barely have names to go on after three generations. Which is to say that our understanding of the nuanced personalities, the hardships and worries, and the utterly banal day to day lives of our not-too-distant relatives is a bit short of “Legacy” in stature. What would make us think that ours might survive the next three generations of modern memoirists?
It’s probably all too human, right? Who doesn’t love to tell a great story of the time that they’re best friend cut his balls shaving them the night before his SAT test and ended up in the ER, getting his testicles stitched back together, instead of answering if ‘Clumsy is to Botch, the way Preparation is to Success”? These are the stories you hope get talked about, told over bonfires, written down, remembered for generations.
Fame, it’s easy to imagine, was probably alluring to our most distant ancestors, just as it certainly is with us, today.
The advent of print technology turned up the heat on the idea of legacy in the past (see aforementioned mustachioed scribblers); whereas, modern, social technology has taken it nuclear in the last three decades. No one made a living off their legacy in the early years of humanity, but now a You Tube career is both viable and potentially essential to a person’s legacy. If you were born after about 1998, you were born into a world where technological memory lasts forever, and it is possible that most of the significant events of your life were recorded; Legacy, in today’s day and age now includes everything that cannot degrade from forgetting - which, as technology advances, is less and less. That time you streaked through the center of town, drunk on Michelob Ultra in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday? That lives with you for your entire life, when it happened in 1972; when it happened last week, it lives in the hearts and minds and screens of the You Tubing community for the rest of eternity. Or, at least until the lights all go out.
Now, this is the other end of spectrum. Legacy is still a thing made of when the world is watching you, the difference today, is that there’s no longer a time when it isn’t watching. If you were born after 2010, then it is possible that not only the significant events of your life have been recorded, but so were most of the insignificant ones.
I have often wondered aloud - to a disgruntled looking group of friends with children - just what damage is being done to kids low-jacked, photographed and filmed their entire lives - the way all kids are now? (by the way, these are parties I’ve not been asked back to, and friends I haven’t heard from in a while…) There was a time when you could hike up a mountain, drive to some remote spot or hang out in an abandoned parking lot, where you could plausibly feel assured that you had a kind of privacy. I’m not so sure that’s possible in the same way today. These days, one cannot help thinking of satellites, when sunbathing in the buff. The skinny dipping we did when I was a teenager would be a publicly risky endeavor today, what with that friend who doesn’t get that some things shouldn’t be filmed for their Tik Tok channel - I’m looking at you Jeffrey… Unless, of course, your living legacy - or what, I think we are now un-ironically calling a person’s “Brand” - would benefit from such a stunt.
Don’t get me wrong, ambition has been an incredible incentive for great things in this world: stunning music, dance, art, literature, theatre, films; spectacular innovations in science and technology; the quality of life for literally Billions of people have been made better by ambition. But, it also started wars and pulled holes in families. And, likewise, the ubiquity of surveillance technology, and the unforgetting eye of our increasingly documented world, has certainly added a level of oversight and protection from some of the threats of modern living - today, there are so many cameras capturing round the clock footage from nearly every vantage point, that when someone commits a crime, it’s probably arguable that that person is in such a desperate state that they are in need of more help than the person who was victim to the crime. But, then too, there is undoubtedly a dark side as well, and a cost we pay, or will. The Truman show was certainly a weirdly prescient film, foreshadowing reality TV and the creepy relationship we all have to TV in general, but I think it might also have been one of the greatest existential horror movies ever made. Jim Carrey might even say as much. The big problem might actually be that the brassy, good looking ingenue and the dapper, but guileless chap should be thinking about their legacy, but that their legacy is being captured, compiled and set in the permanent record before they are even capable of cogent thought.
I’m not thinking of legacy right now, as I post this, because I’m worried if these ideas and thoughts will be a permanent mark on how I am remembered. I’m 100% positive that they will be, and that’s why I’m worried. At some point in the near future, or possibly even three generations from now, some memoirist is going to read this and think I’m a real dick. If I’m really honest, I’m thinking about legacy right now, because I really want to participate in this crazy world, I want talk about difficult ideas, write stories and make things that are challenging for a reason - beautiful, quirky, ugly things - or even things that are just silly. I’m thinking about legacy, because I want to be a part of what’s happening now, living, and breathing. I’m thinking about it because I would love for what I do to matter beyond just myself. But, I’m also thinking about it, because I don’t want it to crush me for some very human mistake, or lapse of judgement with regard to an ill-advised statement made about a massively popular and profitable segment of the writing market.
One thing about Truman, in the movie, is that once he figures out what’s happening to him, he barely hesitates to leave it all behind. We don’t have that option. For us, practically anything we say or do or tweet could become our legacy. Thinking about how we will be remembered is tricky nowadays, because it means thinking about it when we're just joking, when it's something that's just meant to be private, and even when we're not paying attention at all, when we're not even thinking about it! Legacy is now something we all get whether we want one or not, and it will be something our great great grandchildren will probably be able to see for themselves with a simple, add-sponsored internet search.
Weird times.
Thanks so much for stopping by.
And hey, in case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening and goodnight.
