Power Outrage Hits World Leaders
All throughout history politicians have had to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous portrait painters and cartoonists, biographers and pamphleteers – all those little folks who like to get back at the great and the good (and making very decent livings from it in the meantime.)
No doubt the first cave dwellers with functioning speaking parts did not keep a civil tongue in their head for all that long. As the hammer came before the wheel and the first swear word went hand in hand with that first hammer stroke, people have always organized themselves in hierarchical groups – whereby the base of the pyramid started to shout abuse towards the top, even while the damn thing was still under construction and the pointy bits more than a bit wobbly.
These days our overlords have even more troublesome peasants snapping at their ermine-clad heels. What’s more, thanks to all kinds of new-fangled contraptions – from radio to movie theater and television to the internet – the world has become a stage where our politicians try to act in between the technologically enhanced hissing and booing of an ever-growing part of the audience.
While our current pyramid masters quite like their ever more luxurious trappings of power and simply love all those shiny toys of mass destruction, they are less enamoured with the proliferating genies of mass communications.
Some days ago an American columnist not quite compared his isolated president with the obnoxious star of a certain movie (and its miasma of sequels.) Bush’s little bestest friend Tony (who so doesn’t like that other sobriquet) was recently compared to one of the main characters of Melville’s ‘Save the wails’ epic.
Not that the rival of The George & Tony Combo has any reason to smirk. Poor Putin, some time ago, was even compared to a fairytale character – and not a mighty one like the one inspired by his historical namesake but a feeble figure of pity and fun.
As a certain famous person once sang: Uneasy lie the laurels – or something moderately close to it. So, maybe we should start holding a yearly returning Don’t Kick a Politician week – that is, after they’ll have begun to prove that they can be more than Spitting Images on our sorely tested retinas.
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