People and Places on Pedastals: The Zimmerman Effect

Updated blog post from 2011

A couple weekends ago I learned there’s a graveyard not far from here where the parents of Bob Dylan, Abe and Beatty Zimmerman, were laid to rest. I decided to shoot a photo to accompany my blog entry about The Zimmermann Telegram, the book by Barbara Tuchman that I'd previously written about based on her research regarding how the U.S. got into World War One. Unfortunately, as I was writing about the book I realized the spelling was not the same, as you can see. So I slept on it.

The other night as I lay awake on my pillow, I found myself pondering how it is that places where celebrities have been, like our Duluth Armory where a young Bob Dylan saw Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper do their nearly last concert, can become charged with such meaning. Places like the graveyard in Paris where Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison are purportedly disposed, or Woodstock because of the festival it hosted, perhaps against its will, have become shrines.

I also thought about the concept of six degrees of separation and how a tomb, in a sense, puts us in close proximity with a segment of history that has meaning to us in one way or another. Likewise art museums and history museums which let us stand at arm’s length from the bi-products of another's elevated life. By this I mean a life elevated in importance to a certain segment of society.

Examples abound. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The Louvre. The museum at the Indianapolis Speedway where you can stand next to every winning car of the Indy 500. The countless art museums in major cities throughout the world housing paintings by Picasso, images by Warhol and other iconic ghosts of art history.

For those who find the objects of our interests fascinating, our proximity to these people and places in some ways impacts us much like a magnet transforms a pin, when stroked and floated on a film of water, into a compass. Maybe this already has another name but if not, today I call this magnetizing The Zimmerman Effect.

Though I've often been critical of the celebrity worship in our culture, maybe it's something innate in us, in our essence, in the way we're wired, that desires to place people, places and objects on pedestals. There is a sense in which maybe we are even wronging them to do so because they are really just people, places and objects, not gods. It's interesting how our hearts are restless in the pursuit of something higher than ourselves.

Reading this fifteen years later, another thought occurs to me. I can't help but think of a Bible passage that I believe speaks to this phenomenon, Isaiah 6:1-7, which begins, "In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord."

To appreciate this passage it helps to know that the history of Israel was pockmarked with good kings and bad kings, rulers who sought to do right and those who were committed to their idols and sought to kill God's prophets who attempted to bring light to their understanding.

Uzziah was not just a good king, he was a good king who ruled for 50 years. That's a half century. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the pedestal his people placed him on, he crossed an ethical boundary and undermined his legacy. Struck with leprosy, he became an object of shame, anathema.

Some have suggested that the death of Uzziah removed a human focal point, allowing Isaiah to see beyond the throne on earth to the throne in heaven. Whether that is exactly what the text intends, it is a provocative thought and I've spent most of my life looking at it that way.

Perhaps all of our modern shrines—the graves, museums, concert halls, and historic sites—are expressions of something deeper. We are creatures who long to connect with greatness. We visit places where remarkable people once stood because, in some mysterious way, we hope that a little of their significance might rub off on us.

But Isaiah reminds us that even the greatest human figures are only temporary. King Uzziah ruled for more than half a century. For Israel, he was a dominant figure of his age. Yet it was only after Uzziah died that Isaiah wrote, "I saw the Lord." The king on the pedestal had been blocking the Son.

That made me wonder whether this "Zimmerman Effect" points beyond itself. Maybe our fascination with famous people isn't merely celebrity worship. Maybe it reveals a longing for transcendence—a desire to encounter something lasting, something worthy of our admiration. The danger comes when we mistake the signpost for the destination. Graves, museums, and concert halls can remind us of greatness, but they cannot satisfy the deeper hunger that put us on the journey in the first place.

Perhaps the question every pedestal asks is this: Does it lift our eyes higher... or does it stop them there?