Pop Messiah and the Breakfast Cereal Killers

Jensen Karp (right), with his wife, actress Danielle Fishel

I’d never heard of Jensen Karp before this week, when he allegedly found shrimp tails, dental floss, and rat poop in a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch breakfast cereal. Karp’s Twitter posts about the debacle became an instant sensation, garnering thousands of retweets in mere hours. Despite his decades-long career as a child actor, comedian, and TV writer, it took breakfast cereal to turn Karp into an overnight sensation.

Then his ex-girlfriends began making their voices heard.

I understand the appeal behind Karp’s story. In a classic David and Goliath story, an individual hero stands fast against the industrial monster, General Mills. We humans seek heroes to confront our problems, because we recognize how pervasive our challenges are. But the rush to embrace Jensen Karp gave me instant willies, especially when he refused to participate in any effort to rectify the problem. That was my first problem.

Karp’s story appeared “ordinary” despite his large audience, drawn from his media presence. Decades deep in entertainment, he knows how to sell a story to the public, evidenced by his generous use of visuals. Karp offers a simple morality play of corporate negligence, or worse, while pitching himself as a hero against the mighty monster of General Mills. We buy it because we know corporations fundamentally aren't on our side.

David-and-Goliath mythology looms large in Western morality. We believe that the small, the ordinary, and the workaday, somehow deserve saving, a belief which transcends any religion. Yet we seek extraordinary individuals to perform that saving. Rather than collaborating with other individuals, a notoriously high-risk enterprise, we instead yearn for a superhuman hero who will do the defending for us.

Both political parties claim to speak for commoners and ordinary people, while shrugging at actual abuse. From Republicans turning water cannons on protestors, to Democrats abandoning campaign promises like disgraced lovers, conventional solutions just don’t work. We watch the powerful work in tandem with the rich to impede necessary changes, while the world literally burns and floods around us. And mere notional reforms only bandage a dying system.

Humanity has an innate desire to stand up against the powerful. But actually doing so carries great personal risk: the first person to threaten the powerful, usually gets struck down. Instead, we await an exceptional individual to do the threatening for us. After that person dies to save us, like Jesus or Fred Hampton, we’ll rally around that person’s martyrdom to provide moral unity and direction.

This messianic desire made sense in prior times. The idea of Christological salvation matters, because only with a rallying cry, could the weak and the defenseless band together against the powerful. The early church provided a place where the oppressed could air their grievances and be taken seriously. Sadly, of course, as the church became powerful in its own right, it switched sides and defended the rich and mighty.

If we’re honest, we don’t want to improve the world in the abstract, we want to live in the improved world. But challenging the powers which shackle us carries a price few people are willing to pay. We need someone willing to die for us. Our messianic hope tempts us to accept that Jensen Karp might threaten the corporations. But he can’t. He isn’t willing to die. His product is entirely himself.

Jensen Karp isn’t a messiah. His behavior, before and since, demonstrates that he’s in it for himself. He wants the rewards of notoriety. As reports of narcissistic behavior and sexual harassment emerge, it appears that Karp has always been his own product. He has always maintained a camera-friendly version of himself, perhaps because of his media upbringing. He has spent his life in the media eye, and knows how to keep it focused on himself.

Karp’s history of seeking attention comes at others’ expense. This isn’t the proletariat punching up. Karp used his media connections to manipulate a digital marketplace which loves a simple moralistic story. His attempts to hijack our moral umbrage redound entirely onto himself and his career. Karp has a product to sell, which is himself, and he’s sold it aggressively, because he knows the short horizon for media attention anymore.

I cannot fault anyone for embracing this story. It plays well: a massive multinational corporation did something negligent, and answered the everyman’s challenge with haughty disdain. It fits Western, Christian-adjacent morality neatly. Too neatly, as it turns out. Hopefully, Jensen Karp offers us a chance to learn how to spot, and avoid, future secular messiahs.