IDIOCRACY
I find the UK’s frenzied, orgasmic media circle-jerk leading up to the royal wedding seductive and annihilating in equal measure. Despite the outward banality of the couple, and the bourgeois nature of the monarchy, I like the royal family. Despite the obvious moral repugnance of a “monarchy” in the 21st century, its odious paradigm, and its concomitant notion that some people are inherently better than others simply due to the circumstances of their birth, I wish we had one in America. Not because I don’t find the modern monarchy boring as hell – with their middle class tastes, behaviors and interests – but because its existence is living, unarguable proof that we do not live in a meritocracy, and never have.
For all the odious, classist, fucked up legacy of unearned privilege the Brits have to grapple with, at least they acknowledge that it exists. In the US, the myth of a meritocratic society is a one big shit brick everyone – save the Bush Family and Paris Hilton – has to eat. And smile as it is served to us in the form reality tv shows that increase their wealth and our hopelessness. But, it would be harder to accept Donald Trump (for instance), as the embodiment of attainable “American ingenuity” – selling abusive media entertainment and over-priced gauche real estate – if he had a big fat crown on his head.
America likes to think of itself as the very embodiment of meritocracy, where “all men are created equal”, blahblah, where people are judged on their individual abilities rather than their family connections, the absurd ideology that you get out of the system what you put into it. After all, the original colonies were settled by refugees from a Europe in which the restrictions on social mobility were woven into the very fabric of the state. From the very beginning, Americans believed that equality of opportunity gave them an edge over the Old World, freeing them from shackling snobberies while enabling everyone to benefit from the abilities of the entire population. Americans still believe it, despite the fact that income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age while social mobility has stagnated. The disturbing consequences of inherited wealth in this country are upstart Horatio Algers finding it harder and harder to “pull themselves up by the bootstraps”, while the children of the privileged have a much greater chance of staying atop the social heap. A “King”, or a”Queen” would surely help put into focus the privileged by birth and the But-For-My-Own-Laziness middle and lower classes.
There is something grotesquely wrong with a people and a press that aren’t outraged by this type of assault on equality of opportunity. The movement to abolish the Monarchy in the UK is always raging. I don’t think that middle-class people would be outraged by their inability for them to “get rich” like Donald Trump, or for their children to advance in some spectacular fashion like Paris Hilton, but rather, are dismayed by how much more difficult it has become for them to simply remain moderately middle class — to stay even — and to pass along middle class values and ways of life as their inheritance to their children.
As Americans we are easily duped into believing a filthy rich, Connecticut prep school brat was an “aw shucks” good ol’ boy, trading his marauding and coke snorting for folksy charm and brush clearing, a pantywaist cum manly Marlborough Man with chainsaw kitsch. Or that Donald Trump is a providential creation, sent earthward to provide us with the notion that we too could become a successful “entrepreneur” were we only more industrious, more clever and a little less lazy. We accept Donald Trump as a crafty, hard working self-made American, not the son of a crafty, hard working self made American – who bequeathed to his dumb as shit son $400 million (which he promptly lost) – he really is. BUT, if Donald Trump had to sit on a fucking throne, holding a bejeweled scepter handed down to him by his father, and his father’s father, perhaps we wouldn’t look at him as the embodiment of the American Dream, but for what he really is: a vulgarian. A grotesque, liver lipped, squinty eyed, sub-intelligent, dyed-ginger double comb-overed weirdo who was born in the right place at the right time to the right person.