CSotD: Bubble Boy
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There are several cartoons about the birth of the fresh prince, most of them asking "Who cares?"
It's a good question. In fact, if the mark of a classic question is one that we have struggled to answer over the years, "Why do people care about stupid bullshit?" is a great question.
"Because they're stupid," is clearly not the right answer, though it's the easy one. But there are some otherwise perfectly sensible people who think this stupid bullshit matters, so the easy answer doesn't really tell us anything: It's too easy to dismiss as "stupid" the things that don't interest you personally.
F'rinstance, I've noted before that, while I like classical ballet, modern dance leaves me squirming in my seat not just with boredom but with a lively case of "get me out of here."
That doesn't mean modern dance is "stupid." It simply means I don't get from it what other people clearly do.
And I like Keats and Eliot and Tennyson and Frost, but you can test the speed of my reflexes by how quickly I hit the button on the radio when "The Writers Almanac" comes on. Any programming on any station is better than listening to Garrison Keillor read some over-long bumper-sticker-level musings about life and meaning and long-dead parents and the profound and evocative truth to be found in nature, in that portentous Captain-Kirk delivery of his.
But that doesn't mean that modern poetry is "stupid" anymore than the ratings of "America's Got Talent" means … okay, I think I'm digging a hole here. Never mind.
I like Mike Luckovich's take on the thing, because he points out an inescapable fact: This already-overwatched Royal Baby is a person, and one who didn't ask to be born into a fishbowl.
When his grandparents got married, the hoopla went off the charts to a point I satirized in a song my Irish pub band used to perform, the chorus of which began "Lady Di, Lady Di, Jug-eared Charlie's such a lucky guy …"
By the time they divorced, it was pretty clear the girl had gotten in over her pretty head, and, while she had, after all, married not just into the royal family but into the line of succession, she could not have foreseen that she was doing so a point in history when coverage of stupid bullshit was about to grow exponentially.
That is, my level of sympathy was tempered with a fair amount of "what did you expect?" but the fact remains that Charles, Anne, Edward and Andrew had not previously been subjected to that level of 24/7 scrutiny.
She certainly would have expected plenty of hoopla, but what she clearly didn't expect was to be hounded and pursued every day for the rest of her life.
Now her grandson is being served up for more of the same, and, whatever Lady Diana Spencer should have foreseen when she made her choice, this little sprat had no way of opting in or out of the frenzied, public life of a national mascot.
In his take on it all, David Horsey discusses the possibility of Britain dumping the Royals and becoming a republic, but notes the economic impact they have on tourism: "Getting rid of
the Windsors would be akin to Americans deporting all Oscar-winning
actors and burning down Disneyland."
In other words, it ain't a-gonna happen, folks.
So His Royal Infancy is left with this reality: Once Paris Hilton got tired of being Paris Hilton, she was able to kind of fade away into a trivia question, and, while Honey Boo Boo may be too young to know how she is being exploited and manipulated by her parents and the phony reality-show juggernaut, she, too, will disappear at some point and re-emerge 30 years later in a "where are they now?" feature for a fleeting second bite at the fame apple.
He, by contrast, was born into a life sentence and, no, I don't think wealth is a compensation, because he didn't get to choose it, and he'd have been just as potentially happy in a cabin in the woods, perhaps moreso. Or perhaps he'd have scratched and clawed and climbed his way out, in a desperate search for fame, in which case that would have been his need and his choice.
A couple of random associations:
When I was first hired as a reporter, I was struck by the fact that there was no television in the newsroom. Most newsrooms I'd been in as a freelancer had at least one, with the sound turned down, just in case something popped and nobody noticed it on the wires. (In the movie version of "All the President's Men," Ben Bradlee has three sets in his office, one for each network. It was a simpler time.)
Then, on the night in 1997 when Princess Diana was chased into a tunnel and killed, the night editor saw it on the wire and took a story off Page One to make room for it, at the bottom right corner.
This placement was an obvious blunder, and, within days, we had what I referred to ever-after as the "Princess Diana Memorial Television" mounted in the newsroom, because, had that hapless editor only seen how CNN was playing the story, she would have realized it needed to be bannered above the fold.
This is how it works, people: A story matters because it matters because somebody said it matters.
Over the week that followed, throughout her long, ceremonial funeral, we all wrung our hands in guilt over how the celebrity circus had destroyed that young woman's life.
Fortunately, it didn't take.
Which, in turn, reminds me of when the Onion bounced quickly back from the sobering events of 9/11 with this spot-on analysis:
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