The Faustian bargain

Look at the list of words from the article given below (look up the words you do not know) and say what the article may be about.

ADDITIONAL READING

III. Expressions and collocations connected with involvement in activities

Joe is heavily into downhill skiing these days. [ informal: takes a great interest in / is very involved in]

I went off football and I started playing golf instead. [ informal: stopped liking / lost interest in]

She locks herself away for hours in front of the computer and surfs the Internet every night. [isolates herself from the world]

He's totally hooked on motor racing these days. [ informal: is addicted to] What do you get up to at weekends, Michael? [ informal: do]

Do you have a hectic social life? Yes, I have a pretty full diary. [a lot of commitments/ activities]

Ex.3.5. Give more informal alternatives for the underlined words.

1 My daughter's extremely interested in folk music. She buys a lot of folk CDs.

2 He isolates himself in his darkroom and does photography for hours on end.

3 She's totally addicted to ice hockey these days. She watches every competition on TV.

4 I have a long list of social appointments for the rest of the month.

5 What do you enga g e in when you aren't working, Nigel?

fame celebrity hero paparazzi the media miserable

a global market production costs potential rewards

a gap in the market supply and demand a direct financial reward

a soap opera freelance journalism to run out of victories

commercial products endorsements a kiss-and-tell story

While reading, note down:

(i) unknown words and expressions which seem useful to you;

(ii) names of famous people mentioned in the article: you should be able to say what these people are famous for.

In her death, even more than in her life, Princess Diana has become a global celebrity. But what forces create such fame?

When, in 1927, Charles Lindbergh landed in France at the end of his epic flight across the Atlantic, he was mobbed by 100,000 people. In an instant, his life was transformed in a way that no individual had previously experienced. His privacy was destroyed. He could not cash a cheque or send his shirts to the laundry: neither would be returned.

Lindbergh courted his future wife, Anne Morrow, in the sky - the only place where they could be alone. They married secretly, leaving the ceremony hunched in the back of a friend's car; a decoy led the press astray as the couple fled to their honeymoon on board of a small yacht. Spotted a week later, they were buzzed by a seaplane, a photographer leaning out of the window.

But the nadir of the relationship between the world's first global celebrity and the media came in 1932, when the Lindberghs' young son was kidnapped and murdered. When the body was found, two months later, vendors converged on the spot, selling hot dogs and postcards of the Lindbergh home. Worse, photographers entered the morgue, broke open the coffin and photographed the mangled corpse. Although no newspaper used the photographs, prints were sold, for $5 each, on the streets of New Jersey.

The Lindberghs eventually fled fame, after newspaper photographers had forced off the road the car carrying their second son to nursery school. But it took Charles Lindbergh's ham-fisted campaign against American involvement in the Second World War to damage his reputation enough for the public to lose interest in him. Public indifference was his ultimate release.

The tale of the Lindberghs demonstrates that misbehaviour by paparazzi is nothing new - and indeed the word itself was coined way back in 1959 by Federico Fellini, who gave the name of Paparazzo to a rapacious photographer in his film, "La Doice Vita". But it also is a reminder of the extent to which the cult of celebrity is a creation of this century, and dependent on the technologies of communication that act as its distribution channel: the camera, the wire service, the screen and now the Inter­net. Princess Diana had the luck and the misfortune to become famous in an age when fame has become the foundation of some of the world's most successful industries. ­Her tragedy was that she incurred more of the costs of fame than most celebrities, but enjoyed fewer of the benefits.

Once the famous were, like Lindbergh, mainly people (indeed, mainly men) who had achieved some practical task: conquered something, discovered something, written something, performed something. The Princess of Wales represented a different sort of celebrity. To the question, "What was she for?", there was never an easy answer: apart from giving birth to a potential future British monarch, she had no obvious function. In that sense, her fame was like that of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, rather than that of Eva Peron or even Marilyn Monroe.

Yet, even though her fame lacked an obvious explanation, its extraordinary scale become apparent the day she died. The hours of television and forests of newsprint; the immense queues in cities across the world to sign books of condolence or lay flowers outside British embassies and consulates; the rush to buy books about her - all are evidence of a sort of veneration. All over the United States, she was the only topic of conversation at Labour Day picnics; at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, central bankers lost interest in the future of interest rates when her death was announced; in Pakistan a man she had once met poisoned himself. Only the assassination of John Kennedy has caused a comparable worldwide sense of shock - and he, after all, was the world's most powerful politician.

But to look for a function for Princess Diana - for a justification for her celebrity - is to miss the point. And not only in emotional terms. The development of global media and entertainment industries has turned fame into a commodity in its own right. Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, is writing a book on the economics of fame. He argues that famous people drive an implicit bargain with their admirers, which may bring them benefits but may also impose costs. Both are magnified by modern communications.

The starting point for such a bargain is society's demand for celebrities. That demand has expanded astonishingly in this century. Two forces seem to drive demand: one, society's enduring craving for heroes, even if no longer heroes of the David Livingstone or Florence Nightingale sort; and the other, the growth of the media, which have created first national and now global distribution channels for fame.

The heroes that once satisfied popular demand will no longer do. As people have become more cynical, better informed and more egalitarian, so politicians, soldiers and saints have lost their attraction. Today's grubby wars leave no great figures behind. Only a few figures - Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, perhaps Desmond Tutu and Colin Powell - are heroes in the old-fashioned sense, and they are elderly enough for their aura of impeccable virtue to be convincing. Instead, a new model of hero commands the market: photogenic, accessible and above all flawed. Previous ages may have wanted flawless heroes (or been fed them by their betters); today, human frailty is what sells.

Princess Diana had plenty of that. In her days as a model wife and mother, she was admired, rather than loved. But it was her bulimia, her unhappy marriage, her vir­ulent divorce and her battle with the Palace that ensured her popularity, presenting her as a victim who yet sought to triumph. Her final coup-dating a Muslim playboy who was heir to Britain's swankiest department store and whose father has repeatedly been refused British citizenship - showed an astonishing genius for blending revenge with romance.

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