We were driving back from Mt. Shasta, the final and somewhat arbitrary destination of our Thanksgiving weekend getaway. No heater, no defrost, and the beginning of the fall flu which felt like someone was pushing their thumbs into each side of my throat. For about five hours we were looking at this:

With each fifty miles my “babe, I’m not really feeling so well” moved closer and closer to the unambiguity of sinus pressure, fever, and mental soupiness that is either the flu or a cold … I still don’t know the difference.

Finally the I-505 merged onto the I-80; a river of concrete with familiar names, familiar roadside restaurants; promises of proximity to a heated apartment, a purring cat, a cup of tea and bowl of soup. And, like a bank statement with an unexpected negative balance, the I-80 was a parking lot of red lights glowing through the Bay Area gloom. So close and yet so far away.

What should have only been 30 minutes turned into an hour and a half of pushing down on the clutch, brake, and gas like a concert pianist. My toes were frozen. Each inhalation was a sniffle. And in front of us was a white pickup truck, a Ford, with a bumpersticker whose small print invited tail-gaiting:

I wish I lived in New York so I could vote AGAINST Hillary Clinton

The all caps ‘AGAINST’ was in red ink. An interesting sentiment for a California resident heading into the most liberal city in the entire nation. Bored enough to be intrigued, I changed lanes and sped up to get a look at who presumably put it there. He was an archetypical character: bad haircut, mustache, pot belly, and thick forearms that led to a white t-shirt with an indiscernible logo … probably that of a car parts manufacturer. He stared ahead into the sea of traffic with intent concentration more than resigned frustration.

The statement is obviously symbolic. It’s not Hillary the person; it’s what she represents. Instituted liberalism? Feminism? The disempowerment of male leadership? Multiculturalism? Gay men holding hands on sidewalks?

Or in other words, the opposites of the encompassing world view that so many angry bumperstickers hurl at George Bush.

This is what we do. We find people and we make them icons for particular beliefs, particular characters, both good and bad. Then we scrutinize their behavior, taking pleasure when their actions reaffirm our preconceptions and scratching our chins when they do not. Can we really separate the individual from their caricature?

For a long time now I’ve been indifferent – or at least happily tolerant – of the amount of print, bandwidth, radio spectrum, and conversation that is dedicated to the phenomenon of celebrities and tabloid news.

Tangent: “Tabloid: ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from tablet + -oid . Originally the proprietary name of a medicine sold in tablets, the term came to denote any small medicinal tablet; the current sense reflects the notion of ‘concentrated, easily assimilable.’”

Many of my friends live in Los Angeles and so I’m used to the daily name-dropping of celebrity sightings (even though I rarely have any idea of who they are talking about). I also long ago discovered that nearly all of my friends, acquaintances, co-workers, professors, and coffeehouse co-habitants spend a certain part of their lifetime keeping track of who is marrying who, who is sleeping with who who just married who, and who is divorcing who who just married who but was caught sleeping with who.

For example, as Josh points out, as the Democrats were about to take both the house and senate, the competing story was:

As you can probably tell, there is a certain complacency to my tone, a certain amount of pride that I really couldn’t care less about what Hollywood is up to. Meanwhile, those who do tune in for their regular updates of E Entertainment Television (what the hell does the E stand for if not entertainment?), speak of their habit as a “secret treat” after a maddening week of intellectual brainwork. Somehow or another, everyone is interested in show biz gossip and yet everyone is convinced that they should be embarrassed and ashamed of their interest.

Not long ago I left a poorly articulated comment on EMC’s weblog reborn (please, let’s not call it EMC 2.0) arguing that “literature has always centered around the notion of the character.” I stand by my claim. The atom and pearl of the novel, for me, has always been the character.

On our way back from Shasta Mari made the expert move of buying three books for the price of two at Borders (yes, Borders … we were in Vacaville for god’s sake). One of those three is Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, which has been my constant companion – along with chamomile tea – over the past three bone-aching days. (Melissa, sick herself, reminds me that in Panama the flu is called rompe hueso).

Zadie Smith carves her characters with the attentiveness of a Renaissance-era sculptor. These are fictional entities we’re talking about here and yet, as a reader, you’re convinced that you understand each character more than he or she understands him/herself. Furthermore – and most enticing – subtle flaws and qualities of each character are reflected back at us in a mirror of self-awareness that evades daily life. By trying to understand – or at least come to terms with – fictional characters, we are compelled to more honestly understand ourselves.

After an amazing Italian dinner we partook in the only activity offered by the city of Shasta after 8 p.m.: a movie. Pickings were slim and we settled on The Queen; a movie which turned out to focus more on the death of Princess Diana than the namesake of the movie. Regarding royalty, I’ve always concurred with Moreno: why does it still exist? The concept says that God chose a particular bloodline to govern all others. And this is a notion that, in an era of pervasive Dick Tracy-like cell phones, we not only tolerate, but encourage.

You could say that my veneer of indifference to Hollywood sensationalism is spread thin when it comes to the reverence of royalty. The death of Di was as meaningful or meaningless as any other in my world.

And I could never understand why that “who cares” attitude offended so many people. But now I think I do. Just like Hillary Clinton is the archetype of hypocritical liberalism and George Bush is the archetype of chauvinistic conservativism, Princess Di was a bonafide archetype of goodness just like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and Mother Theresa. And it doesn’t matter if she didn’t lead the same struggles as the other three; for archetypes are a matter of collective perception, not a list of rights and wrongs.

Archetypes are an undeniable way of how we understand the world – or, in this case, the people – around us. There is the loner; scribbling in a notebook on the corner table of an urban cafe. There is the slut; male or female, seducing and sleeping with as many people as possible. There is the contrarian misfit; picking a battle with anyone willing to engage. The ambitious over-achiever. The ditz. The passive-aggressive geek. The attention-grabber. The drama-queen.

Or, there are fancier-sounding 20th century versions expounded on by Freud and Jung like the Übermensch and Puer Aeternus. We all know that there are nearly 5 billion individuals on this planet. But to make it a little easier, there are 20 or 30 types of people.

Which is why we need characters in novels and celebrities on E! and characters on The Real World. They help us define the mental boundaries of what each type of person is like. To double the fun we get to mesh these archetypes with our pre-conceived notions of gender, profession, ethnicity, class, even astrological sign.

This is something we all do and yet we call it ‘intellectual’ when we analyze the behavior of fictional characters but ‘trashy’ when its real people caught in the lens of the tabloid press. So this is my shout out to anyone who can both appreciate the existential dilemmas of Hollywood’s overpaid and the characters of supposed high-brow literature. I know that I need to try a little harder.