Our sycophantic, loyalist, celebrity-loving culture creates monsters! Never in our entire history has this been so obvious. There are a couple of rather mawkishly sentimental programmes on British TV that celebrate genuine heroes. Real people dedicating their lives to service or incredibly brave individuals who risk their own lives for the sake of others. There are also dozens and dozens of programmes catering for our inane adoration of anyone who becomes prominent regardless of the reason why they are drawn to our intention.
Fine jobbing actors, internationally known film stars rub shoulders in our mind’s eye with presenters of daytime quiz shows on barely watched TV channels, subjects of reality TV shows and even people disgraced for, or accused of corruption. The Hamiltons, Jordans and TOWIEs apparently deserve our attention more than war heroes or carers. Spend a lifetime looking after the sick or disabled and you will not even be acknowledged in your street, take cash for questions or over bloat your mammary glands and you will be lauded in every street in the land!
Of course, its all a bit of fun, isn’t it?
That my friends, is further from the truth than my desk lamp is from Alpha Centauri!
Ingrained into our cultural psyche is the propensity to genuflect at royalty. If we examine the reality behind royalty we will find that they are the descendants of land-grabbing thugs. Royalty became established in an age when having the biggest club or the mind-set to wield it without a second thought, made you a leader of men, and. Crucially, passed the power you had grabbed on to your progeny. Position was inherited along with the booty you had blagged and the land you had grabbed. Down the line a bit and you persuaded your kow-towing followers to take up arms against the neighbouring robber baron. Soon, enough robber barons were subdued and allowed to survive if they served you, for you to claim the right to rule in perpetuity. Hierarchies have a vested interest in allowing a trickle of upward mobility so that the masses at the foot of the pyramid can be persuaded that one day they too could be kings… but only if they play by the rules.
Some clever so and so managed to add god into the equation, arguing, no doubt, that as god was in charge of everything and had allowed the king to be king it was truly gods will and anyone in opposition was both traitor and blasphemer.
The British people have spent centuries so sucked into this charade that even today the majority believe that having a monarch is a good thing. By the same blueblood token they also believe that royalty and even aristocracy are, somehow, better then the rest of us just by the dubious heritage of having stolen land from ordinary people centuries ago, or perhaps having been the illegitimate progeny of a sovereign.
Historically kings, queens and nobles also mopped up any wealth left lying about by unwary peasants. Along with being able to de-flower a peasant bride just before her nuptials feudal lords were paid a proportion of any wealth their vassals produced every year. As there were lots of peasants and only one lord he became wealthy. So wealth and blue blood went together and we remain unhealthily impressed by rich people, regardless of how they acquire their money. This idiocy pervades most of the western world with many cultures just as in awe of wealthy criminals as they are by those who get their money through legal (although often immoral) means.
Since the first days of a universal press us hoi polloi have been sold the pup that fame and fortune go hand in hand, so we admire people for having one or both. Thus the half-century or so of TV programmes has given us a myriad of famed, infamous or TV exposed individuals that we have fallen at the feet of as if they are heroic figures.
As monarchy is so close to deity we cannot imagine that they can be human let alone ordinary. We adore them so much that we attribute almost supernatural powers… surely the queen never uses a toilet and probably has a servant who farts for her!
The fact that monarchy’s offspring and minor relations squander the national wealth taking helicopter flights to get their toenails cut or using a limo to pop to the corner shop for a packet of fags is, by most of us excused.
So wealthy, famous and powerful people become, by degrees, immune to the law.
Many, because they are so adored by so many believe in their invulnerability and act in a way that we would not forgive in our friends and neighbours. Haughtiness seems next to godliness and as they are such modern wonders we can believe no evil could touch them. Even when some clearly do do evil things they remain immune because of who they are.
So a succession of famous people are now demonstrated to have been the worse sort of criminals. There is, in our society (and rightly so in my opinion) nothing more reviled than the paedophile. Yet for decades rich, powerful and famous people have indulged the perverted desires, sometimes in plain sight and have not been castigated, caught and punished.
This truly shameful state of affairs is slowly being exposed, along with the fact that many less famous and even more powerful people have, for years, exploited children for their own evil ends.
This is societies sickness and will not be eradicated until and unless we see what our part in it is. No-one should be above the law or our collective morality and yet that state of affairs continues to have us in its grasp. Why else would half a million people sign a petition to stop the sacking of someone who has several times clearly demonstrated his arrogant disdain, racism and jingoistic tendencies. How can so many people believe that the presenter of a TV programme about cars should be allowed to mock the afflicted (Gordon’s one eye), taunt a nation (Argentina) or throw hissy fits if his rich man life style is asked to have a night off.
