Princes and Peasants

The crash of a small aircraft half a world away made the pages of Saipan’s newspapers. I refer, of course, to the untimely demise of John F. Kennedy, Jr., who piloted his Piper Saratoga into the dark waters of the Atlantic several days ago.

The news media responded to the tragedy with total saturation coverage, and I don’t think CNN paused for breath during a multi-hour running report of the story after it first broke.

Meanwhile–the same day that CNN became Kennedy Central–an air ambulance helicopter crashed on a mission in Texas, killing all three people aboard. But you didn’t hear about that, did you?

Of course you didn’t. There can only be one reason for the disparity in coverage for the two accidents: A Kennedy is royalty. A couple of Texas pilots and a flight nurse, by contrast, are mere peasants. A prince is worth more than a commoner.

The Kennedy and Clinton clans are, indeed, American royalty. They make the laws, yet are above them. They are the ruling elite, often times debauched playboys, and are accountable to no one. We would, of course, expect all that in Europe, but does it really fit with the American republic?

Not even the ultimate political pundit, Niccolo Machiavelli, could mesh monarchy with republics. “All states and dominions which hold or have held sway over mankind are either republics or monarchies,” he wrote in his famous work, The Prince. Machiavelli didn’t make a provision for a fusion of monarchy and republics, which meant he either missed the boat on that call, or that the two cannot co-exist for very long.

The masses, of course, want kings. Most people have a innate sense of social hierarchy, and are more comfortable having an authority figure to worship, serve, and identify with. The realm of policy is too abstract for most people, so they want a face and a person to point to and say “HE is what I believe in.”

America–the democracy, the economy, the military machine, the scientific supergiant–is the most highly evolved and successful society on the face of the earth. Yet Americans–the television watchers, the semi-literate victims of public education, the soulless office eunuchs–are no more evolved than the European peasants of the Middle Ages. A great nation was built on a great evolutionary hiccup, when freedom was, however briefly, preferred to authority.

But just as water seeks its own level, the ocean of humanity will eventually revert to the lowest common denominator. America is ready for royalty. The masses want people to worship, and when you mix royalty with democracy, you wind up with demigods and demagogues.

If the past week was an average week, 815 Americans died in car crashes and another 12 perished in flying accidents. Such tragedies are mere obscurities to be swept into the shadows, as the spotlight of Princess Diana Syndrome shines on the new American royalty.