Does America Yearn For A Monarch?

Life Magazine fabricated a mythical monarchy in the early sixties by applying polish and airbrushing to John and Jacky Kennedy, elevating them into a Camelot. America couldn’t get enough of the magazine, and rewarded its uncommon “access,” to the JFK White House with financial success. The corporate strategy very successfully built an unprecedented, but mutually beneficial, relationship.

This was not the first popularization of an American President, but it was the most successful anointing of an almost-monarch. We all admire true heroes, however, there are many who seem to require more than honored heroes. To satisfy that craving, we create stars and surround them with irrational adoration bordering on veneration. The mainstream media (MSM) plays a role in the process, and has much to gain from it just as Life Magazine solidified itself, and its profits with the creation of the American version Camelot.

Life Magazine presented a glossy veneer of a young President and his family, because it could, and because it would not have been as profitable to have done otherwise. The public reaction was extremely receptive, and the oversized periodical continued to publish its principal stars’ immaculate images.

America has long succumbed to Hollywood’s very adept star manufacturing machine. Studios and production companies very effectively and profitably practiced the art of star production, as well as veneer creation, for a century. Whether the individuals in question believe their own press, matters little to the studios and the machinery that creates them. They are ephemeral creations that have no truth other than that of existence in the percepts of adoring devotees. They scatter nonsense, and often lies, and all utterances are gratefully accepted. Stars step into the light, feigning timidity, as they engage in absorbing gushing adulation. The star making process has been perfected and whether young, old, intelligent, rich, poor, educated or not, it seems that everyone is susceptible to its affects.

In 2009, the MSM has been provided a new President, whose natural tendency is already a well-prepared gleaming image, requiring little visible airbrushing. Obama’s promotional machine has had the added and unabashed advantage of having its subject well versed and practiced in the art of sermon delivery. Obama placed himself on a pedestal, and the MSM has delivered applause and sometimes infatuation. The zeal of this infatuation has translated into an abandonment of any application of journalistic ethics or common sense. The obsession has been transferred onto the population eager to satisfy a yearning for a monarch. Not that America wants a king, because it doesn’t, but there is evidently a vast portion of society that yearns for a personality that it believes will transcend it to a place that Camelots are made of. America doesn’t want to literally revisit the anachronism of royalty, yet the British monarchy is as popular in the U.S. as it is in Great Britain.

In Obama, America found a willing aspirant on whom it consigned the cloak and stature of monarch, the ultimate iteration of star. Modern versions of monarchs however, have no effective power, but they enjoy fulfillment of ceremonial roles. Obama accommodates that role rather effectively and continues his cultivation of the “I,” unabated. As President, he has avoided the thorny details of assiduous analysis on the most critical problems facing America, and has used sweeping, but banal statements of obvious principals, while his appointees actually implement policies and programs inconsistent with the claims of the message.

Obama has filled the ceremonial role of monarch with enchanting voyages across the country and around the world, although the country might wish for more representation of America’s interests, rather than promotion of its leader as internationalist. While the public and the MSM might treat a monarch with reverence, a President should be treated as a politician, and challenged as such.

As President, Obama has yet to demonstrate any proclivity for practical leadership of the free nation envisioned by the unpretentious framers of the Constitution. As he insinuates government into all social and economic fibers of the country, the American taxpayer’s expectations of Obama’s heralded change will rapidly evaporate, the “self-evident truths” will become redefined, and the reality of the costs will become the new, overwhelming burden.

Now that the Congressional Budget Office has notified them that federal spending in 2019 will represent at least 25% of the GDP, all taxpayers should decide that a monarch just will not be injected into their futures in any form, and that their President should be challenged. There are enough stars floating out of Hollywood to satisfy desires of royalty.

James Raider writes  The Pacific Gate Post