Wendy Williams: Sacrificial Lamb of our Simulational Age
My Wendy Williams Chronicles
Wendy Joan Williams was born in a middle-class family in Asbury Park, NJ in 1964. With its beach, stores, restaurants, theaters, and amusement park, Asbury attracted numerous visitors—at least up until the 60s. Thanks to the building of highways like the Garden State Parkway, major shopping centers like the Monmouth Mall, and mega-amusement parks like Six Flags Great Adventure, Asbury headed into a downward spiral, leaving numerous residents jobless and desperate—which eventually gave way to rioting in the 1970s. It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that a cadre of business- and culture-savvy homosexuals came in and brought the city back to life.
Williams’s career, much like her hometown, is caught in the midst of a collision course of a variety of forces: bureaucratic concentrations of power and the bent toward monoculturalism, the allure of artificial spectacles and the mass-uprooting from the real, cultural populism and the queer camp sensibility—a peculiar combination that perhaps one can only find in the Land of the free and the Home of the brave. America prides itself on the freedom it allows its citizens, the unique blend of ideals and endeavors it holds space for, and the opportunities it allows people to reach proportions of success and satisfaction that seem larger than life itself.
But just as the events of 9/11 dramatically demonstrated, its demise is inevitable. Lady Liberty must topple over and crumble, and public figures like Wendy Williams who will do anything for the sake of fame and notoriety must collapse—her infamous fainting spell on air while dressed like the Statue of Liberty on Halloween serving as an eerie harbinger of what was to come.
That matrix of spectacles, artifice, and lies that undergird this great nation’s cultural ethos—like the conjoint forces of spandex, wigs, makeup, and cosmetic surgeries that (attempt to) conceal Williams’s real appearance—can only suffocate the truth for so long, before it explodes through the veneer of “Liberty” and surges to the surface for air once again.