Justinlightenment

"What up. Small step 4 a man, y'all."

On September 9, 1956, Elvis Presley played the Ed Sullivan Show.  Sixty million people watched the King and his hips that night.  Some were awestruck and some were scandalized, but none of them were ever the same again.  Popular culture was transformed.  Music was transformed. Elvis changed the world.

On February 9, 1964, the Beatles appeared on the Sullivan Show, before an even larger audience, and reshaped the world again in a monumental debut that heralded the start of the British Invasion.  Rock was, once again, fundamentally altered.  Tectonic plates ground uncomfortably against each other.  Parents didn't understand, but their daughters certainly did; it was a revolution, and the only appropriate thing to do was scream, and scream and scream.

On July 20, 1969, the world watched in hushed silence as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out of the lunar lander, and left their footprints upon the face of the moon.  The event signified mankind's conquest of nature; it was a kind of miracle and a kind of immortality, broadcast live.  Everyone watched.  Everything changed.

In the 1960's there were only three television channels, so a single major cultural event could claim the whole of the viewing audience.  Today, cable gives us hundreds of choices, and television competes with numerous other media.  A mass audience for a network television event today is barely a quarter of the size of the one that watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, even though there are now twice as many Americans as there were in 1964.  We are segmented.  Isolated.  Lonely.  The closest thing to a uniting cultural event my generation has is the tragic terror attack of September 11, 2001.

Until now.

Because now, we have "First Step 2 Forever," and, by God, it's magnificent.  Those naysayers who crowed about the death of publishing never could have imagined books still had the power to seize the cultural moment and define it, but they never could have imagined this particular book.  The significance of the thing is so massive that it's difficult to conceive, like the inevitability of death or the notion of the infinite.

He is risen.

Indeed, the mere marvelous fact of "First Step" strikes one dumb, yet reading it provides perfect knowledge and oneness with the universe.   That problems that have confounded the world's religions for millennia are resolved in the two hundred and forty heavily-illustrated pages of this slim little memoir. We have, at long last, been led from the Cave and shown the staggering and irreducible beauty of a pure Platonic form.  This book completes you spiritually, and, when everyone reads it, we shall enter a new age of global peace and prosperity.  For all the world's people are more alike than different, and all of us love Justin Bieber.

If you ever felt like everything that ever happened was leading up to a particular moment, let me tell you, you aren't alone.  Nobody ever has to be alone again, because Justin is with us.  We are entertained by Justin.  We are fulfilled by Justin.  We are nourished by Justin.  He's like Elvis, Britney and 9/11, all rolled up into one.  He is like Proust's madeleine, soaked in ecstasy.  His brilliance is so blinding, it hurts a little to look at him, but nobody dares to look away.

To many people around the world with limited resources, though, Bieber has long been something of a tabula rasa, beautiful and remote, a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, covered with a trucker hat.  But as a user of Twitter, an outlet whose sole purpose is spreading the gospel according to Bieber, I am not new to the kind of glorious exultation that I am now dubbing "Justinlightenment."  Thanks to Twitter, Justin has been sprinkling my days with 140-character nuggets of joy for some time, but I was, until now, a little worried that his wisdom would not be preserved on the ephemeral medium through which he broadcasts.

Thankfully, "First Step" collects the most momentous of his pronouncements, spreads them to a larger audience beyond his six million Twitter followers, and preserves them for posterity.  That's so important, because Justin belongs not only to us, but also to the ages.  It is our responsibility to preserve and cultivate Justin Bieber so he can be enjoyed by future generations.

But, lest my insufficient words fail to capture the splendor of this man and his beautiful truths or the magnitude of this singular cultural moment, here is Justin:

Hallelujah!