Culture Vultures: American Restoration
Steyn, Mark
CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn American Restoration 0 ne of the endearing features of the British press is their shameless lack of consistency. Having decided their angle on the story, they...
...When Michael Jackson decides he'll only appear in public wearing a surgical mask and accompanied by a 12-year-old Norwegian boy who won first prize in a Michael Jackson look-alike competition, we just say "Certainly, sir, and will young Master Lookalike be requiring his own surgical mask...
...In the British press, a star exists to be shot down (one fondly recalls the tabloid headline to a fevered Elton John rent-boy scandal, "Don't Let Your Son Go Down On Me...
...To his credit, Jacko understands his neo-monarchical status and has even named his child Prince...
...Anyone who comes to this country from, say, the British Commonwealth can't help noticing the weird monarchical deference of American life...
...So let's get on with it...
...Forget celebrity—our country is desperate for a king...
...and Mrs...
...just hasn't worked out...
...In the London Spectator I did a vicious assault on "the Kennedy Assassination of Women...
...To their credit, the American people decline to behave as subjects...
...That's perhaps the worst aspect of the network news coverage: They invented a popular mourning that did not exist, and in doing so they made the American people seem almost as craven and pathetic as their TV networks are...
...But over here celebrities enjoy the generous suspension of critical faculties once accorded to the doings of minor royals: Anything the most insignificant celebrity does, no matter how tedious or mundane, is news...
...In the United Kingdom, having stuck with George III and his heirs, the British feelentitled to abuse them with a rapacious, vulgarian relish...
...But these are at least formal positions in the life of the state: What's the justification for getting hung up on a lot of minor Kennedys further and further removed from any real achievement...
...And, incidentally, whenever Kennedy groupies quote Alan Jay Lerner's lyrics from Camelot, how come they never quote what would seem to be the apposite song in the score, "How to Handle a Woman...
...Bush vs...
...Let's just make Lieutenant Governor Kennedy Townsend the Margravine of Maryland, and Congressman Patrick Joseph Kennedy the Prince of Providence, and Senator Ted the Sultan of Swing...
...Wherever they are, I hope for their sake they can't get NBC...
...By contrast, when Hillary Rodham Clinton makes one of her stately "listening tours" around the Empire State (a fine place for the Empress Hillary), and some knuckle-dragging clod is boorish enough to mention the rape accusation against her husband, the American press, having had the benefit of the world's most refined etiquette class (journalism school), pretends not to notice—like a dowager Duchess at a nineteenth-century court who accidentally overhears the footman breaking wind...
...they preside over dozens of charities, many of them unfashionable ones without photogenic moppets or cadaverous young men...
...When his lovely bride, the Countess Sophie, accompanies him, it is optional to bellow the following supplementary: "Oy, Inv...
...To which his Royal Highness gives the formal response, "Look, I'm not gay, okay...
...And I rounded out the week with a column in Canada's National Post bemoaning those columnists with nothing better to do than spend the week cranking out one Kennedy column after another...
...they don't get special commemorative issues of Time or People, they have to make do, like Princess Alexandra, with the Canadian Forces Decoration or, like the Duchess of Gloucester, with the Solomon Islands Independence Medal...
...So we've got zero chance of attracting prime Kennedys to our state like Patrick Joseph Joseph Patrick Kennedy Smith Shriver Lawford, widely regarded as the most accomplished of the third generation...
...It's always a shame when people die before their time, but to the vast majority of Americans this was not America's tragedy and they declined to display America's grief because in the end he was not America's son and certainly not America's prince...
...And every American interviewer nods sympathetically as if they're listening to Princess Alexandra talking about the need for Third World child vaccination programs...
...The absence of monarchy is so keenly felt in American life that you guys have had to go to the trouble of inventing a faux substitute — celebrity...
...After the death of JFK Jr...
...As 'e given you a bleedin' good shaggin' yet...
...That's why they're only prepared to entertain as presidential candidates fellows whose dads and grandpas spent their lives warming up the name for the kid...
...The day after his plane went down, it was "Good Night Sweet Prince...
...The Kennedys are ideal for this purpose, having consciously modeled themselves structurally on standard European Royal Families, complete with collateral branches: All those Shrivers, Smiths, and Lawfords are the precise equivalent of the Queen's cousins, the Dukes of Kent and Gloucester and the Earl of Harewood...
...And so it was with JFK Jr...
...Even in supposedly cranky, gritty New Hampshire, all but one of our congressional delegation are the sons of former governors—the exception being Senator Bob Smith, and no wonder that loser's gotten nowhere with a generic all-purpose handle like that: It's fine for checking into a hot-sheet motel but in every other respect it's an affront to American notions of celebrity...
...The American people were admirably dry-eyed over the Kennedy crash: In my general store, the TV was tuned to the news channels for days on end after Diana's death...
...Kennedy columns came in one flavor only—reverential, mawkish, sentimental, lotsa Camelot quotes, America's Royal Family, Tragic Curse, Who Now Will Carry the Torch?, etc., etc...
...The only obstacle to the long overdue restoration of the American monarchy would seem to be the grunting masses, who, unfortunately for Dan and Peter and Tom, seem reluctant to be conscripted into their appointed role as fawning subjects...
...represented all that was best about America...
...The (Continued on page 63) Pennsylvania Aven ue, January 20, 2001 The American Spectator • September 1999 41 Culture Vultures/Steyn (Continued from page 4.r) so-called floral tributes outside JFK's apartment were only ever shown in close-up, because the truth is that not only did they not begin to match the fields of tributes in Kensington Gardens, there was barely any more of a memorial than the roadside crosses and bouquets you see on the edge of a state highway when some anonymous kid gets hit by a drunk...
...Stuarts in the Wars of the Roses...
...But the most striking characteristic of this American tragedy is that America didn't need to be involved...
...But nowhere is this monarchical hunger more transparent than in the American media...
...the day after that, they'd moved on to "Did Crazed Wacko John-John Have Sicko Death Wish...
...Having decided their angle on the story, they usually tire of it within 48 hours and start contradicting themselves just to keep themselves in shape...
...But back home the formal television mourning for Prince John ground on remorselessly—Dan Rather choking up on showtoon lyrics, Katie Couric earnestly asking one Camelot groupie whether John and his mom and dad were now all together in Heaven...
...As Mary Hart on "Entertainment Tonight" likes to tell us excitedly, "Coming up...
...No Kennedy is too obscure not to be worth writing up...
...Tom Cruise release a film in which they spend two hours simulating sex with each other and then promote it by giving interviews saying what a very private couple they are and how the most difficult thing is maintaining their privacy...
...Why waste Bob Smith's time and Steve Forbes's moneyby pretending we're the least bit interested in them...
...Here in New Hampshire, we're so lacking in political savvy we don't even have a lieutenant governor...
...40 September 1999 The American Spectator But celebrities rarely offer the dynastic continuity of a monarchy...
...So why be surprised when Dan Rather andhis chums give the impression that, in an ideal world, they'd like to be medieval court minstrels...
...I'm happy to say I stuck closely to this agreeable trajectory myself: In the Sunday Telegraph, I wrote a moving tribute to "this most un-Kennedy like of Kennedys...
...The comparison routinely invoked was the death of Princess Di...
...after a couple of hours of Kennedy coverage, the guy who runs the place flipped back to ESPN...
...There's something to be said for a republic, there's something to be said for a monarchy, but there's nothing to be said for a republic bent over on its knees in permanent ersatz monarchical boot-kissing sycophancy...
...The American media, in comparison, were simply faking it...
...Gore is just a big bucks version of Tudors vs...
...The instinctive monarchical deference of the American media is so deeply ingrained that no matter how absurd a celebrity is he can never jolt them out of it...
...The Kennedy specials were given titles like "America's Son," "America's Prince," "American's Grief," and "America's Tragedy...
...At the end of the week, King Hassan died in Rabat and was shrugged off by his Moroccan subjects with barely a second thought...
...Say what you like about real monarchies, but the people do have a genuine stake in the death of a dreary minor royal: They serve as colonels-in-chief of regiments in boring places far from the camera's eye, like Saskatchewan...
...By comparison, Iranian TV's weepin' and a-wailin' for the Ayatollah Khomeini was a model of restraint and good taste...
...A pity one can't say the same about Dan, Katie, and the other groveling courtiers of Camelot...
...Having thrown off George III and replaced him with a humble exemplar of the citizenry at large, America accords its elevated Joe Schmoe all the protective courtesies of an absolute monarch...
...on how John Kennedy, Jr...
...You a poof then...
...0 n one level, you can understand this...
...And dynastic continuity is what Americans are in desperate need of...
...The need for royal narratives—for princely heroes spurred to great deeds by a mystical destiny—is one of the deepest urges in human history...
...By the following day's Daily Telegraph, I decided that no one gave a hoot about this guy...
...The lieutenant governorship of Maryland has not hitherto been known as one of the crucial two or three positions in the country, but her magnificent track record at doing...well, whatever it is that a lieutenant governor of Maryland does, now has people talking about her as the Kennedys' best shot at the White House...
...Just leave me alone...
...If Dan Rather bursts into tears just 'cause some guy who edits a magazine no one's ever read dies, think what he could do with a full-scale royal funeral...
...and the day after that, they'd moved on to feigned ennui—"Haven't we all heard enough about this pampered socialite mediocrity...
...It's pretty clear from all this that two and a quarter centuries of republican government in the U.S...
...The British media were caught off guard by the thousands of mourners swarming into London and filling the streets around Kensington Palace with mounds of flowers and teddy bears...
...When His Royal Highness The Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, appears in public in London, for example, the massed ranks of Fleet Street correspondents rise up as one and greet him with the ceremonial cry, "Oy, Edward...
...The citizen legislator who leaves his farm and log cabin, rides his horse to Washington, serves two terms as president, and then returns to his rural obscurity with only treasured memories of ye olde White House intern pool to remind him of his former eminence is a fine idea in theory but somehow unsatisfying in practice...
...But, in fairness to those ululating Brit morons, the Di hysteria was at least a bottom-up phenomenon...
...American celebrities are the modern equivalent of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria or the later Ottoman Sultans who couldn't be left alone with their shaving razors because they were so in-bred they'd accidentally slice their penises off...
...In the United States, alas, there was no such variety...
...The American Spectator • September 1999 63...
...Even my fellow right-wing bastards at National Review and the Weekly Standard felt obliged to be subdued, running tasteful elegies MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...Someone from a daytime soap launches their new golfing video—and ET has the exclusive preview...
...we were assured that the torch had been passed to a new gender—the hot new Kennedys are supposedly the women like, er, Maria Shriver, hailed as one of the sharpest and most penetrating journalists of the day (that's to say, she introduces clips of the Emmy nominees on breakfast TV), and, urn, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who has established herself as a political heavyweight throughout the land from her power base as, ah, lieutenant governor of Maryland...
Vol. 32 • September 1999 • No. 9
