Hollywood vs. Holyrood
Among the gleaming jewels of popular culture that I’ll never be able to understand is the deification of movie stars. It’s one thing to worship a product of plastic surgery and ad hype as an object of fantasy. For most of us, we can deal with Walter Mitty-ish dreams, and still function in the real world. It’s another thing altogether when reality and fantasy become mixed up so we no longer can tell where the fantasy leaves off and the reality begins.
When Orange County decided to name its airport after John Wayne, it wasn’t the real man in the real world, who never served in the military and certainly was never a western lawman, they were commemorating: it was the character he played in movie after movie. The manly, mythic image. He never ran for public office, but I’m sure he would have been elected in a heartbeat. Ronald Reagan had a less, er, distinguished acting career, but he parlayed a mediocre talent (with Nancy’s drive to succeed) into a marketable image. Presidency of the Screen Actors Guild and being a radio announcer had never before been enough to get you elected governor of the most populous state in the union until Ron took on the role. Again, it was the man in the cowboy hat astride the palomino, the man who was more George Gipp than George Gipp could ever be, who was elected again and again.
And now we have Ahnold. In the real world, he is a former “actor� and bodybuilder (!!) who gropes women, ignores motorcycle safety and license laws, puts himself and his children at risk, smokes cigars and drives hummers. The first couple of years of his administration were as disastrous as one would expect from man with his background. After that, he went back to acting, and collecting fantastic sums of money from corporations merely expressing their support for his political beliefs. Whatever they are.
And he was re-elected by a “landslide.�
This last month I saw the movie “The Queen,� which, aside from being cast with people who really CAN act, was about the British Royal Family’s misreading of the public’s reaction to the death of Princess Diana. The queen and her family simply didn’t get that Diana’s death was the squalid end of a powerful fantasy the British and American public had clung to. How could they? The Windsors represent a traditional opiate that has now been displaced by a media-engendered opium. The fantasy of kings and queens and princesses has been eclipsed by the world of David Beckham (in England) and Bobby Bonds (in America), the world where money flows like water, and where laws and morality are irrelevant. The world of OJ and Bart Simpson has replaced that of Wallis Simpson. The royals didn’t watch enough television, didn’t listen to enough talk shows, didn’t read enough tabloids to realize THIS is what opium is really about in the twenty-first century.
And do the masses really need these drugs, in addition to alcohol, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and Viagra?
Sure looks like it.