Some Animals are More Equal
With the chemically-enhanced Barry Bonds closing in on baseball’s famous home run record, it seems sports fans (short for fanatics) are being worn down into acceptance. Never mind he had to break the rules to do it, he was never actually convicted.
And besides, he’s a star.
So Scooter Libby gets a pass, O.J. Simpson gets a pass, Michael Jackson gets a pass, Martha Stewart and Paris Hilton get summer camp. . .a subtle pattern is begining to emerge. Celebrities, the new opiate of the masses, live by different rules. These aren’t human beings, they are super human beings. Where others have to work harder and harder to get food and keep themselves alive, it rains money on our celebrities, and that’s OK.
I recently got back from a trip to England and visited the home of a family who had the good fortune in the 1500’s to be married into the family of Henry VIII about the time he confiscated the property of the Catholic church. They got about a county and a half of rich farmland and buildings. Over the centuries these folks, with hereditary nobility, helped raid subject countries of their art treasures, and now wallow in them at home, put them out in their gardens, and get tax breaks for donating them to the government. And the House of Lords is still accepted as part of the government. . .the Ruling Class.
We, on the other hand, don’t have hereditary kings, don’t have concentrations of wealth in the hands of an undeserving, unproductive clique who may break the law, flaunt the morals and raid the treasury of the state to make themselves even richer, and become even more beloved by the masses. . .or do we?
I used to be amused by the old TV show “Queen for a Day” being such a hit in a free, egalitarian country. If we were so proud of being a democracy or a republic, what was it about the show that so appealed to Americans? Now it occurs to me that the whole idea of royalty really has nothing to do with “the devine right of kings,” or any of the rationalizations used over the millenia. People are elevated over on another because they fulfill our fantasies. We get to vicariously enjoy the power and fame they exercise over us. If they can do whatever perverted thing they feel like doing, diddling little boys, killing their wives, stealing from the poor, invading other countries, breaking the rules, we support them because they are living the pretend lives we wish we could lead.
My grandmother, born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled by the (they felt) kindly old Kaiser Franz Josef, said late in life she felt the best form of government was a monarchy. She had fond memories of her family, the little town where they had lived for 200 years and a strong sense of belonging. After she saw the horrors that came after the Kaiser, who could blame her for being nostalgic?
What I’ve seen in my lifetime has convinced me that royalty and ruling cliques are not creations of law or war, but the fantasies of the masses. Reality TV and professional sports are the opium we must have, since the founding fathers denied us an official ruling class. Reality is cold, hard, and scary, and freedom means responsibility.
How else could an anthropologist explain MTV?
Comments
Hey Mr. Frazer. What do you have to say about Mike Thompson's letter to the Times-Standard personally attacking you? I thought it was especially ridiculous the way Thompson claimed he was one of the first and most vocal opponents of the Iraq War. The only thing Mike Thompson did for the first few years of this fiasco was hide in his political foxhole waiting for the whole thing to blow over. Thompson is a liar and useless to this community. Your letter to the editor, which obviously pissed off Thompson, was on the mark. Mike Thompson is a joke!
Posted by: Anonymous | July 8, 2007 05:18 AM