Twenty-five or thirty years ago a friend of mine coined this term, as far as I know, to indicate the tendency, in our celebrity culture, to present oneself as a protagonist.  In the years since, everyone vaguely inclined to it has become a star.  Some of these stars shine over a city of two or three, some over an entirely empty yard, but while they write or perform they indulge in the dream that someone, somewhere, gives a rat’s ass about what they think or feel.

“Protagonism!” my old friend snorted, to indicate that the long-ago soundtrack I’d improvised and recorded on magnetic tape was mere showing off, did nothing to enhance the audience’s appreciation of the movie, instead merely pointed a constant finger at its author.  

“Nobody cares, nobody cares,” the world-weary dispatcher at Prometheus Courier Service used to say many times a day, especially when people tried to share their concerns with him.  He drank himself to death alone in a rented walk-up in Chelsea, and indeed, nobody cared.  Not to say he wasn’t a very nice guy and a lot of fun to shoot the shit with.  

People photograph their lunch and post it online.  OK.  Same with opinions, which, like cloacae [1], every one of us former reptiles and our bird cousins possess.  Unlike these primitives, we can post them as fast as we think them up.

I wonder about this desire to make oneself known to others, in the form of writings, photos, videos and music posted on the weird electronic spider web most of the world is connected to.    Zora Neale Hurston, a woman who knew a good deal about it, called this desire to make oneself known to others the oldest human longing.  

But thinking about it now, I wonder:  who can possibly care that a stranger’s father, when he was a baby, was whipped in the face, setting in motion a long chain of regrettable events that weighed on his children and his children’s children?  Or about his speculation on the terrible life of the insane mother that caused her to whip her infant in the face, before she left forever the town that would be wiped off the map twenty years later, the blood of everyone she knew in childhood plowed into the mud.  

I suppose one might as well wonder why people read poems, or enjoy psycho-biographies, or watch violent movies where terrible events are portrayed vividly, or smile at idiotically idealized comedies, or love head-banging music.  The things created by human souls as they hurtle between infancy and death.  Could be I’m just thinking too much, having nothing better to do.  You wanna see what I had for lunch?   I’m almost done digesting it.

[1]   In birds, the cloaca is the terminal chamber of the gastrointestinal and urogenital systems, opening at the vent. Excretory systems with analogous purpose in certain invertebrates are also sometimes referred to as “cloacae”.

Birds also reproduce with this organ; this is known as a cloacal kiss.