Jack Shafer

There are no slower slow-news days than the ones that fall between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Washington depopulates, Wall Street evacuates, and corporate America vanishes, creating a massive news drought that not even bad college football bowl games can fill. Journalists respond not by digging deeper for news but by imitating the hot-shot vacationers: Newsroom bosses and their hot-shot reporters escape if they can, leaving their newspapers, wire services, and broadcasters short-staffed and snow drifts of wire-service copy fill newspapers everywhere.

So, if Cheetah (the spelling varies, with some outlets using “Cheeta”), an elderly chimpanzee who died at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, Fla., on Dec. 24, wanted a Viking send-off from the press, he couldn’t have picked a better time to expire. The Tampa Bay Tribune appears to have been the first to break the story of his death yesterday in a short story. According to the Tribune, this wasn’t just any dead chimpanzee, this was Johnny Weissmuller’s co-star in a couple of Tarzan films from the early 1930s. Sanctuary spokesman Debbie Cobb told the Tribune that Cheetah, roughly 80 years-old, had been acquired from the Weissmuller estate in Ocala, Fla., sometime near 1960. Hundreds of news organizations repeated the Tribune‘s claims, either by republishing the Associated Press rewrite or by creating their own derivative accounts, including Reuters, CNN, MSNBC.com, the Washington Post, and the London Telegraph. Even the New York Times published a credulous Cheetah story on its Arts Beat blog today at 9:53 a.m., mostly based on the Tribune piece.

The death of Tarzan’s Cheetah at a Florida roadside zoo was “too good to check,” as journalists like to put it—especially during a holiday week. Had anyone bothered to make a few phone calls, plumbed a few news databases, or relied on common sense, they would have instantly discovered how improbable it was that the chimp had worked in the movies with Weissmuller.

For one thing, it’s unlikely that a male chimp would live to the age of 80. The oldest chimp residing in an Association of Zoos and Aquariums-accredited facility, says Steve Ross of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, is Lil’ Mama, and she’s in her early 70s. The Suncoast Primate Sanctuary is not the greatest animal facility in the world. It’s not AZA-accredited and it has a bit of a dodgy history. Previously doing business as Noell’s Ark Chimp Farm, the attraction had been closed for about a decade when the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) ran this 2008 article about its reopening. The paper reported:

In 1999, the USDA stripped the sanctuary of its license for public exhibitions, citing small, rusty cages used to house the apes and improper record-keeping.

Two years later, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission declined to renew the facility’s state license for keeping exotic animals, citing similar concerns.

Other incongruities argued against the claim that this chimp was Tarzan’s Cheetah. Sanctuary spokesman Cobb told the Tribune that Cheetah arrived at the attraction around 1960, yet the earliest mention preserved in Nexis of his residence there is a June 3, 2001, Tallahassee Democrat article, which also states that the Noell family established the place in the mid-1950s as a “retirement home” for old circus and movie primates. (If you housed the original Cheetah in a cheap roadside attraction, wouldn’t you make a bigger deal about it?)

A 2002 St. Petersburg Times piece gave a more dramatic spin to Cheetah’s arrival, stating that he “ended up in a research lab after Hollywood replaced it with another chimpanzee.” A St. Petersburg Times article from 2006 declared that Cheetah had been a resident for “about three decades,” which would place his arrival at the roadside attraction at about the time of the Jimmy Carter inauguration. That the sanctuary never gave the animal a consistent biography indicates that several somebodies were making things up as they went along.

By early afternoon, Cheetah’s Viking funeral was sinking. At 1:44 p.m., the New York Times updated its earlier, credulous piece, noting that “the announcement drew skepticism and recalled a previous incident of mistaken chimpanzee identity,” a reference to an AFP story that cited a brilliant 2008 Washington Post feature about a West Coast chimpanzee purported by its owner to be the real Cheeta. Miami New Times noted, along with other debunkers, that several chimps played the role as Tarzan’s sidekick, and that the most famous of them, Jiggs, had died in 1938. “Jiggs seems to be the only animal actor whose role in the films has been established thoroughly,” Miami New Times reported. Weissmuller was involved in a Titusville, Fla., attraction called Tropical Wonderland or Tarzan’s Jungleland, the newspaper reported, but it closed in 1973. “Is it possible this Cheetah came from Weissmuller’s tourist trap and not his actual movies?”

Possible? I’d say almost inevitable. The lessons to draw from Cheetah stories, in their order of importance. 1) Always verify what unknown spokesmen tell you. 2) Don’t trust fantastic stories about animals. 3) Discrepancies in obituary details often signal something awry. 4) And beware of holiday news.

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PHOTO: Cheetah, a chimpanzee who died on December 24, was purported to have starred in Tarzan movies. Courtesy Suncoast Primary Sanctuary.

If BMW had an auteur—the kind of auteur Apple had until last night—would his fans gather at local BMW dealerships when he died to light candles and toss flowers in front of showroom windows the way Steve Jobs fans are now at Apple Stores around the world? Would they storm Twitter to post recollections of the first and second BMWs they owned and thank Mr. BMW for having made their ordinary trips to the store for milk and eggs more like cosmic adventures in motoring?

Obviously not. No other gadgets have wormed themselves into the global psyche the way Steve Jobs’s have. Like most of Jobs’s coups, the takeover was a matter of design. Although he had been synonymous with Apple since the late 1970s by virtue of the computer he developed and marketed with Steve Wozniak, and the cult of Apple was already in full bloom at the time of the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, Jobs didn’t fashion himself the maximum leader of the cult until he returned to the company in 1996.

Jobs’s restoration was read by his followers as a resurrection, and he encouraged this interpretation by using his regained powers as Apple’s guru to further mesh his identity with that of the company’s products. Jobs became his Macs and iPods and they became him. By and large, they were pretty good products, if not a little pricey. (Ask me, I’ve owned a few.)

What Jobs understood was that there was and is room in the computer market for a prettier or marginally better product—packed tightly in a very fashionable box—that could be sold at a premium price if he marketed them as “Veblen goods,” luxury products that convey status upon their purchasers. Jobs hasn’t been alone in this discovery. Take the modern American kitchen. It has become our most densely populated Veblen-goods petting zoo, with its Viking six-burner range with griddle and double oven, its Sub-Zero refrigerator-freezer, its Bosch silent dishwasher, and its MoMA tea kettle. The modern kitchen appliance signals the high status of its owner to friends and neighbors, and so do Apple’s products. When Appleheads visit your home or office and see your iMac or MacBook Air, you can see the Oh, you’re one of us! thought bubble forming over their heads. Conversely, these folks emit a palpable sense of disappointment if catch you with a Dell or a Toshiba. But you seemed so creative! You can observe this sort of messaging on the subway, too, as Apple owners steal glances at one another, bonding wordlessly as they pinch and flick their way through their iPhones and iPads.

Becoming a loved brand wasn’t easy for Apple. Given the automatic hatred the creative class (or those who think of themselves part of the creative class) has for corporations, Apple and Jobs should have been targets of scorn. What he and Apple had going for them at the beginning was their underdog position against IBM and then Microsoft. Apple wisely projected itself as the alt-computer company, a distinction Jobs cemented with the 1984 Super Bowl commercial. Just using Apple products was supposed to be an act of rebellion against the system.

After the Jobs resurrection, he made sure that salvation came with every purchase. For what are Apple Stores but places of worship, with priests who possess secret knowledge manning a Genius Bar at the far end of the temple? Is the Apple logo on the wall not a late-20th century cross? Is every Apple employee toting a handheld credit-card scanner not a human tithing-station? You laugh, but I can’t tell you how many Sundays I’ve gone to my neighborhood Apple Store to renew my faith, and to indoctrinate my children in its fundamentals.

Jobs’s flirtations with Eastern philosophy give credence to my interpretation, as does the energy he spent playing the role of the infallible leader. Jobs told his customers, point blank, that if they wanted his products and services, they’d have to use them the way he delivered them. Just as the pope doesn’t let anybody take a bath in holy water, Jobs wasn’t about to allow anybody to jailbreak an iPhone without at least risking excommunication.

Evidence of Jobs’s psychological hammerlock on the culture can be found in today’s news stories about his life and times, which quote heavily and without caustic comment from his speeches and interviews. These quotations would be ridiculed as Khalil Gibranian nonsense if spoken by anybody else. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become,” Jobs has said. And, “I want to put a ding in the universe.” And, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” And, “You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.” And, “There is no reason not to follow your heart.” And, “Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent.”

I predict a quickie book, The Eternal Wisdom of Steve Jobs, in stores and e-book shops soon.

The doublethink of the Apple slogan “Think Different,” revealed Apple as an oddly totalitarian organization (no, you can’t change your own battery in your iPhone). What the company has always wanted its followers—I mean, its customers—to do was think like Jobs. Follow your bliss! But do it inside Steve’s cocoon. That so many customers regarded Jobs and Apple as rebel leaders instead of techno-conformity ringleaders does not flatter human perception.

None of what I’ve written is intended to subtract from the products and services he helped create, his extraordinary business comeback, or his tenacity, all of which I admire. My problem isn’t with Steve Jobs but the sloppy veneration of Steve Jobs. He made computers, pretty good computers. Isn’t that enough?

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Charles Arthur shares some pop psychology ideas on why some people love Apple and some people hate it. (I’m in neither group.) Use your Mac to send hate mail to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and your iPhone to monitor my Twitter feed. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

Photo: Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs gives a wave at the conclusion of the launch of the iPad 2 on stage during an Apple event in San Francisco, California March 2, 2011. Jobs took the stage to a standing ovation on Wednesday, returning to the spotlight after a brief medical absence to unveil the second version of the iPad. REUTERS/Beck Diefenbach