To understand our era, you could go to Cook County Foreclosure or Eviction Court and inspect the damage of the greed, deceit and self-delusion found in the subprime mortgage debacle and related economic ills.
Or you could just turn on NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice” Sunday and watch Rod R. Blagojevich and Donald J. Trump.
The indicted former governor may symbolize supposedly nefarious “pay to play” politics. And Mr. Trump, our own P. T. Barnum, may personify the chutzpah that was a part of our economic calamity. But their real value may be as a window on our time’s conflated notions of achievement and celebrity.
“Basically, you don’t have to be famous to be famous,” said Maureen Orth, special correspondent for Vanity Fair and author of “The Importance of Being Famous: Behind the Scenes of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex.” “However you get in front of a camera, that’s enough. There’s no link to talent.”
So it is with “Celebrity Apprentice,” a show in which grade-B artists mix with a former male pro wrestler, a current female pro wrestler, past Olympians, an Australian chef, a lingerie model, our former governor and a few truly ancillary characters in a competition in which Mr. Trump eliminates one contestant each week.
Last week Blago mostly served as a waiter as two teams — one male, one female — tried to generate the most restaurant revenue. He nearly got the boot after blabbing too long to customers and letting go cold a burger that was meant for Joan Rivers, 76, whose face, sadly, appears as taut as steel beams on the John Hancock Center.
And yet not all Chicagoans who watch and gain insight into our celebrity-industrial complex will do so just to ridicule Blago. Some current and former Chicago business associates of Mr. Trump can focus on him and feel dyspeptic over his striking Trump International Hotel & Tower.
According to people who were involved in the development, in filling the tower Mr. Trump reneged on traditional “family and friends” deals with individuals and firms, including prominent outside architects and lawyers. Typically, one puts down a deposit on a unit less than that required by normal buyers, and also gets a better purchase price. Such early sales help a developer procure financing for a project. In the Trump Tower case, insiders also had the chance to flip units before the complex opened.
With real estate booming in 2007, Mr. Trump decided he could make more in the open market and killed the deals. He was sued by both an Evanston architect and a former Chicago Sun-Times publisher — who later pleaded guilty to stealing money from the paper’s corporate parent. Settlements were fashioned. But most of the aggrieved didn’t want a public feud with a famous foe, so they cut modest deals and privately simmered.
After the economy plummeted, Mr. Trump exhibited similar gall in suing a consortium led by Deutsche Bank as he sought to force it to extend the maturity date of a key construction loan. He cited what is known as a force majeure clause, allowing an extension related to an extraordinary event — and claimed that the global financial crisis was such an event. It was poppycock, but a private truce was apparently reached.
Among many who dealt with Mr. Trump here, he is hated. That partly explains the fitting nature of a Blago-Trump association. Neither concedes error or defeat. It’s deny, deny, deny. You won’t get a Tiger Woods made-for-cable mea culpa out of them.
And each loves attention, even to his hair, which, like the TV host Glenn Beck, is now beyond parody.
“Celebrity was once a byproduct of achievement, like starring in a film, hitting a home run or walking on the moon,” said Alan Zweibel, an original “Saturday Night Live” writer who recently won a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America. “Now all you have to do is have sex with someone who’s starred in a film, hit a home run or walked on the Moon.”
And we judge the contestants. Perhaps we long to be one of them, but, most of all, we laugh at them.
“It’s like the fall of Rome,” Ms. Orth said. “An overindulged, sloppy, lazy society can turn it on and say, ‘Hey, I’m not as bad as that!’ ”
So let’s place tapes in a time capsule and explain to future generations how the popularity of “reality TV” created an assembly line to feed a low-cost programming beast. As for criteria to participate, it didn’t matter whether you represented positive fame or unadulterated infamy; just that you were once in the news.
