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The Most Influential Person of the Last Fifty Years
We hear a lot about “influence” these days. Every time you turn around someone seems to be selling it, buying it, seeking it or attaining it. Abramoff appears to have had no shortage of lawmakers who freely sought to peddle their influence to his well-heeled lobby efforts. The word is tossed about with abandon when listening to music, seeing a movie, or looking at a painting. Check out the Picasso influence in that one. Who would you say your early influences were, Mr. Scorsese? You can hear the Black Sabbath influences in that new System of a Down. But what, really, does “influence” mean on a personal level? Who can claim true influence over MOST people in the world? When you consider this definition of the world, it’s clear that most politicians, lobbyists, moviemakers and whatnot really can’t claim to have any real influence.
A lot of people will say that Ronald Reagan influenced our lives in a permanent way. I even wrote an article a while back asserting that Reagan attempted to mount a fear-based conservative cultural revolution that largely succeeded. But he still left very little that affects us every single day in a prosaic, real-life manner – as the article’s many detractors gleefully pointed out to me. Bill Clinton gave the appearance of having a great deal of influence when he was president, but, the protestations of his detractors to the contrary, once he left office that influence evaporated pretty quickly. We haven’t had that kind of an influential president, it can be argued, since FDR implemented the Interstate Highway system. If you’re gonna really split hairs, it can be argued further that we haven’t had a truly influential American President - a president who implemented changes that permanently affected American life on true day-to-day basis - since Theodore Roosevelt. What president has come up with anything that we still feel and live with today since TR implemented wildlife conservation, antitrust laws, individual income taxes, and American imperialism?
So when we ponder the last hundred years, it becomes difficult to think of a public figure of any sort who fits that bill. And when we narrow it down to the past fifty years, the list of potential life-altering candidates becomes considerably smaller. Yet, there is one individual who has truly changed the way we live life – in a dozen small but very permanent ways.
Madonna.
Now, bear with me here, this isn’t as ridiculous as it seems at first glance. From the start, Madonna was what polite society once termed a “difficult woman”, in many ways. She made her first mark as a pop singer – one who couldn’t really sing. She married a volatile movie star and drove him to fits with her outrageous behavior and apparent need for constant public attention. She kept elbowing her way into movies, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she couldn’t act worth crap. But she didn’t let any of her shortcomings stop her from doing what she wanted to do. This alone was a quietly revolutionary idea – for generations, women had grown up being warned off of extreme behavior and risk-taking, under duress of making a fool of oneself and, worse, turning men off. The idea of publicly trying and failing was one that terrified EVERYONE, but especially girls. But Madonna’s greatest gift seems to be the ability to take risks, fail, and still somehow win, coming out on top and being talked about. And that always seemed to be her goal – in a society that teaches people that being the object of gossip, being talked about by others, is an odious fate to be avoided at all costs - Madonna sought this fate out, embraced it, and humped its leg while singing badly for millions of adoring fans.
Madonna also stooped to conquer and turned back the clock on idealistic feminist precepts that quite frankly weren’t working out so well for women. She made it okay to admit that yeah, women do want to go out with men with money, even if we make our own. And she certainly did make her own – every last penny of it – largely by trading on her sex appeal. She also made a very public game of buffing up that sex appeal, making extreme, high-profile changes in her hair color that emboldened the rest of us to follow suit (bleached blonde hair and thick black eyebrows abounded in the eighties) and transforming her sturdy, thick-legged body into a hyper-defined, fat-free testament to insane overachievement with three-hour daily workouts. The fitness trend we’d been hearing so much about since the seventies finally caught up with real women when Madonna literally carved herself a new body. If she could do it, why shouldn’t we try it? Okay, so most of us AREN’T fat-free, but still.
She did more for gay culture than Liberace, incorporating fag fads into her songs and stage act. Big flamboyant gestures didn’t seem as ridiculous when she served them up as an ironic pop culture tribute.
But all of this is just gravy compared to the real every day influence of Madonna, which today I find manifested in my bra straps. Madonna, who has quite substantial tits, cannot and couldn’t ever go without a bra in public, but she still wanted to dress like a slut to keep everyone looking at her. So she quite logically decided to make her bra part of her outfit. It didn’t really seem to bother Madonna that her bra straps were showing; they seemed to be meant to. So now, today, on a July day of ninety-degree, humidity-saturated heat, I’m sitting in front of my laptop with my bra straps sticking out of my shirt – which itself has straps that were purposely made to look like…bra straps. And it’s ok.
It might seem kind of frivolous to hang an entire article about influence on bra straps. But hey - I don’t think I’ll be wearing a shirt that looks like anything George W. Bush wears anytime soon, do you?
