Sun 9 Nov 2003
Watching 60 Minutes with my wife tonight, we were “amused” at the story of how Jessica Lynch became famous by getting knocked cold in a car wreck and then getting rescued, while the soldier who saved the lives of the group that was captured that day by singlehandledly picking off 7 people, one by one, as they tried to fire a mortar at the vehicle the group was in (and this guy had failed his marksmanship test) remained unknown till about a month ago. She got a million dollar book deal because of errors in the reports of what happened that day.
My wife also mentioned how ridiculous it is when People or some such magazine picks a mother of the year or something and that person is some rich and famous person who can afford a lot of help rather than, for example, some person who’s doing a heroic mothering job on a limited income. I don’t mean to decry the accomplishments of famous people who are doing good–I just don’t think that being a beautiful person has ANYTHING to do with the criteria for deciding whether a person is worthy of some kinds of honors. The press and media choose their stories based on profit projections, so naturally, part of their assessment of a person’s greatness is their saleability.
So I got a mental arc–why don’t the bloggers of the world work together to choose a regular person who’s worthy of fame, and make them famous! I haven’t worked out details of how this might be done, but I’m sure we could come up with a way to have people nominate people for fame, and then through a series of votes to narrow down the candidates, come up with someone to hilight. Maybe we could pick a person every week or month of something. Get enough bloggers together on this, and the story will be saleable enough for the press and media to cover it.
One request–if you run with this idea, please credit me with starting it–or to be more precise: please credit my blog, which I’m running anonymously–I’m not quite ready for fame yet!