Their brush with one another was the paradigmatic encounter between the Celebrity and the Nobody, the “have” and the “have-not” of the postmodern age, an era which hypocritically blasts endless PSAs about “equality,” “democracy,” and “self-esteem” while deriding non-celebrities as losers, wastes of space, and living beings unworthy of life.

The meeting outside of Manhattan’s Dakota building between John Winston Ono Lennon and Mark David Chapman would result in the former’s murder and the latter’s lifelong incarceration. It would provoke numerous public expressions of grief from hundreds of thousands of people who felt their own lives were somehow affected by the death of a man they’d never met.

Mark Chapman, a tormented young man fueled by delusional narcissism, had become obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger’s classic chronicle of adolescent alienation. The novel’s narrator is Holden Caulfield, a bitterly misanthropic teenage boy on the brink of nervous collapse. Holden heatedly fulminates against the world’s “phonies,” people who pretend to be what they aren’t, who pose as righteous when they’re actually venal and selfish.

Chapman soon grew equally fixated on ex-Beatle John Lennon, his former hero, whom he now regarded as the ultimate phony. “He told us to imagine no possessions,” Chapman later put it, “and there he was, with millions of dollars and yachts and farms and country estates, laughing at people like me who had believed the lies and bought the records and built a big part of their lives around his music.”

Chapman came to view it as his mission to uphold Holden Caulfield’s spirit by slaying this vain and gluttonous rock-star monster. He bought a .38-caliber revolver and a plane ticket to New York. He purchased the recently released Double Fantasy album, planted himself in front of Lennon’s luxury apartment building with record in hand and gun in pocket, and waited for the star to ride up in his limo.

For all of his mounting madness, Chapman understood one thing well: You were nobody in the modern world if you weren’t famous. He later told Barbara Walters that by committing the murder, he felt he’d “acquire his (Lennon’s) fame.”

And he was right. Murdering a famous man gave Chapman the very fame he sought. He was no longer a nobody; he was a star.

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Chapman’s aim was, in a sense, truer than that of other antihero assassins such as Oswald and Hinckley. They had merely set their targets on presidents, while Chapman focused on a rock star, an infinitely more acclaimed figure in our culture of celebrity worship.

Lennon was neither the ludicrously hateful villain of Chapman’s imagination nor the glorious love guru his followers imagine him to be. Like most of us, Lennon appears to have been an imperfect person with some admirable traits and many notable faults. He was an immensely talented songwriter and musician with a spotty personal life plagued by sexual infidelity, drug addiction, and other vices; a man prone to wretched self-indulgence, but also articulate, intelligent, and often winningly self-effacing and sincere; at times a charlatan, but undoubtedly a genius.

To Chapman, Lennon only represented the world’s execrable “phoniness,” which Chapman took as a personal affront. This simplistically negative conception didn’t do justice to Lennon’s complicated personality. But after Chapman filled him with bullets and surrendered to police on that December evening in New York, the ex-Beatle’s posthumous ascension to holy martyrdom has truly grown annoying, even obnoxious.

On this thirtieth anniversary of Lennon’s murder, we hear little but holy rubbish about this rich, besotted, pampered celebrity who met a tragic end at a young age. He was, we are now commonly informed, a “speaker of truth to power,” a “noble soul too pure for this world,” and so forth. That Lennon himself likely would have disdained this Lennonite cult of personality has little influence on his worshipers’ adulation. Unfortunately, phony delusions regarding Lennon did not die on December 8, 1980. They have exponentially multiplied, fed by the notion that this pop singer was in some sense crucified for our sins on that terrible day.

But who mourns for Mark David Chapman?

The man who acquired infamy by planting four shots into a rock star’s back and shoulder has now led the majority of his life behind bars and is unlikely ever to be paroled. That Chapman was (and is) a creepy, psychotic freak we can all agree, but wouldn’t Lennon himself, had he survived, wanted to understand his attacker rather than simply revile him? Wasn’t one of Lennon’s most likable traits his willingness to hear from people who didn’t like him without growing defensive?

It is December 8, 2010. Lennon remains dead, Chapman rots in prison, and the Earth turns as ever before. Both John and Mark have failed in their quixotic quests to change the world. There is nothing new under the sun, but some still imagine making a better world. And that, too, is nothing new. Rest in peace, John; rot in peace, Mark. God bless you both.

If any recent event ever could be said to exemplify the sad desperation of contemporary feminism, it’s the manufactured controversy involving the supposed travails of gorgeous blond reporterette Ines Sainz, and the few minutes of allegedly horrible “embarrassment” she endured while dwelling amongst the sweaty, smelly, horny, testosterone-addled New York Jets last week.

I want to be fair to women who call themselves feminists. Feminism is just a word, and words mean many things to many people. It’s an oft-heard trope that, as many a bumper sticker on many a Volvo seen in many a college town has proclaimed, “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.” And it’s certainly many times protested that “libbers” don’t go in for male-bashing at all; they respect men perfectly fine; they just want equal rights for equal pay, equality of opportunity, and so forth.

Many who embrace the “feminist” label are no doubt totally reasonable, sane individuals. (Of course, my personal experience with self-titled feminists leads me to question the assertion, stubbornly insisted upon through the years by many an earnest-sounding spokeswoman, that “libbers” aren’t indeed quite frequently angry man-haters indulging in spiteful and cruel invective against the penis-possessing half of the human race… Still, I’m willing to accept, for argument’s sake, that the sampling of feminists I have encountered may not be representative of the group as a whole.)

Be that as it may, the recent promotion of the victimhood of Miss Sainz by many women’s groups is just pathetic beyond belief. It would be laughable, in fact, were it not so thoroughly grating.

Sainz, who works for Mexican network TV Azteca, is—at the risk of sounding sexist (that is, truthful)—a pretty young thing. Like many attractive women, she likes to dress sexy. I think it’s fair to assume that she enjoys the attention she gets for her looks. One may also observe that showing off her body has helped her career. Nothing particularly new or revealing there—other than her skimpy wardrobe, of course.

Last week, while covering a New York Jets practice at the team’s facility in Florham Park, Sainz was standing on the sidelines delivering a report to a cameraman. In her skintight white shirt and jeans, it seems she won the notice of many members of the team, as well as some of the coaching staff, including head coach Rex Ryan. Some Jets, it seems, deliberately threw a football in her direction and engaged in small-talk, in a playfully flirtatious manner. It may have been immature and stupid, but Sainz later said it didn’t bother her at all. “I wasn’t offended,” she declared, calling the back-and-forth she engaged in with the players and staff an “amicable” exchange.

Later, in the locker room, en route to interviewing team quarterback Mark Sanchez, some members of the team apparently whistled and assailed the comely Mexican newsbabe with hearty catcalls. Sainz tweeted that she felt like she was “dying of embarrassment,” but that she chose to ignore the crude behavior.

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But then, it seems (and here we have the crucial moment), a fellow female reporter told her she SHOULDN’T STAND to be TREATED in such a manner. The name and affiliation of this interlocutor hasn’t been given, but it seems quite clear to me that she, not Sainz, is the originator of this controversy. She, not Sainz, the object of all of the attention, is the one who truly took offense to the players who had the audacity to whistle at a shapely, provocatively-dressed woman.

I think we can safely assume that the unnamed female reporter who encouraged Sainz to take steps to rectify this terrible wrong is a less attractive woman than Sainz. Though it sounds rude for me to say this, I don’t mention it in order to put her down, but simply to point out the irony of the situation. Sainz, the alleged victim of (ooh! aahh!) sexual harassment, has become the current cause celebre of women’s groups quite in spite of herself. She’s been dragged along for the ride, and she’s consented, though she seems hardly to understand the significance of it all.

Witness this CNN report, in which thick-eyebrowed anchor Rick Sanchez, in absurdly straight-faced and pompous fact-checking mode, questions Miss Sainz with solemn intonation, as if this silly bit of (not even literal) grab-ass were the most important story since the destruction of the Hindenberg—ah, the humanity! Miss Sainz, speaking in broken English, isn’t reading from any script; she’s trying to describe what happened, but doesn’t really know what to say. She seems to know that a lot of women are offended on her behalf, but she doesn’t seem particularly bothered personally. (And why SHOULD she be? Her looks and figure, and the attention she gets from men are in large part what’s gotten her where she is in her career: why bite the lecherous hand that feeds you?)

THEN watch as fellow reporterette Brooke Baldwin, upbraids Sainz for being overly-casual in her response to the players’ verbal come-ons, which sends the message that such boorishness is “acceptable.” What makes this dialogue particularly interesting is the paternalistic condescension of Baldwin towards Sainz—the sophisticated, white, Western professional woman laying into this Third World Hooters-waitress-like bimbo for her lack of proper feminist consciousness. Sainz, sensing her cue, then makes clear that OF COURSE she’s bothered by how she was treated, but the discerning viewer doubts her sincerity; she’s saying what her puppet masters want her to say. Once they get out of her face, we can safely predict, she’ll happily go back to her former slutty-dressing ways. Again, though she’s involved, this clearly isn’t her fight—she’s a prop, a stooge, nothing more.

The gambit has worked, to some extent: Jets owner Woody Johnson has personally apologized to Sainz for the extraordinarily sinister whistling, hooting, hollering, and flirting indulged in by many members of his team: Johnson agrees that such behavior is, in the prissy, schoolmarmish parlance of political correctness, “unacceptable.” (Sainz says she accepts the apology.)

Still, one wonders how many more Pyrric victories like this contemporary feminism can handle. Most people still have access to common sense, and common sense tells us that if a woman wants to avoid getting leered at, she should avoid dressing like a streetwalker and visiting a locker room full of half-naked men.

Of course such considerations will never deter those for whom ideology trumps reality, who can’t resist viewing women as perpetual victims and men as dangerous predators, and who view every unwanted or unwelcome comment directed at a woman as a horribly egregious case of sexual
harassment, tantamount to rape. Feminists who don’t subscribe to these extreme, simplistic, and rather bigoted views should make sure to distance themselves from the phony spectacle surrounding Ines and the Jets, before the title they embrace loses even more credibility in the public eye.