Cellular Narcissists Among Us

Cell phones are an inevitable. We can't go back. We probably shouldn't want to, for every society must advance if it is to survive, and thrive. What they also are, however, is another opportunity for people with sad self images to seek the attention they crave, even if that attention is cultivated by irritating others.

We all have experienced it. At the beginning of a play, or any public event, the audience is reminded to shut off their devices. And at a critical denouement, off goes a phone. You figure the person will rush to silence it for surely he is embarrassed. But no. It goes on. It goes on. It goes on.

I have seen it even in a Church. As a Catholic, there is the moment when the priest raises the unconsecrated host and with Grace and intermediary prayer, there is the Transubstantiation, the God made Man is there, Present. And a cell rings. Tatata tatata tatata da! Over and over.
The ultimate human desecration of the Transcendent. Is there any shame? Or does the person bring his phone again, the next week. Neither man, nor God, will inhibit the incoming call.

Why do I think of our cellular narcissists today? I was in Barnes and Noble rummaging in the newly relocated biography section, by the Starbuck's Cafe. A man was talking as loudly as he possibly could. I assumed there was a live body next to him receiving the monologue, but no, he was on the phone. He was regaling the other side of the line with his business dealings, and surely making sure that others knew of his self-perceived success. Lately, I find the noise of our society is bothering me more and more, and with that bother comes an anger at how readily all of us surrounding a man like this, walking up and down and shouting his self for all to apprehend, are dismisssed so that he may absorb all life around him to satisfy a hole within. All sorts of remonstrations bounced in my head I wished to offer him, but I knew he would never receive them as fair critiques.

But of course, this is just a nit of a bigger problem of the generation in which there is an I but no thou, in which morality is a laugh and breaching the social contract is a given since the rights of the me always take precedence over the rights of the other.

On the way to work the other day, I saw a man, neatly dressed, on the corner of Vermont and Beverly Boulevard here in Los Angeles, preaching repentance, in Spanish. People were avoiding him. A crazy man, no doubt. As crazy as John the Baptist, eh? How did I get from the cell phone to the end times? I don't know. Just feels like one of those signs of a culture in decay. Not the phone itself of course, but how we are in relation to it and each other.