Malvolio

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.”

— Malvolio, scene v, “Twelfth Night”, William Shakespeare

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three.”
— “Catch-22”, Joseph Heller

Ignorance of the contents of the letter that Malvolio ‘stumbles upon’ may make  Heller’s quote appear ingenious– as one of those funny lines that almost make  sense. In light of Shakespeare’s genius though, the quote acquires a new colour. It is one of  those moments of faith when a man bows down before his God with  exclamations of unworthiness that barely leave his lips. Heller’s self-confessed mediocrity in comparison with Shakespeare is just that.  Heller might admit to this description as long as we don’t use ‘religion’ to describe it. But then, the Bard covered the topic of names too!

 

Paris2Barack

Back in 2007 the mainstream news media in the US was obsessed with entertainment news. So much so that gossip mags in supermarkets were feeling the heat. I mean, if the mainstream media poaches on their ‘safe-bet’ of celebrity gossip, what is left for them to report? Of course, this being the land of innovators, these guys started filling their front-pages with gossip about the Dubya-Laura-Condi triangle. Sick but hilarious. You go to the nearest grocery-store/supermarket, buy some stuff for the kitchen, stand in the queue at the counter and end up trying to make sense of the headlines speculating whether Condi can ever do a Monica… Definitely sick, occasionally hilarious.

In the middle of this hysteria discerning people (like me) started raising their eyebrows by more than the mandatory one-eighth of an inch. In short doses, such stuff is amusing. Large doses of such speculations suggest proximity of the end of the world. And I am not ready for that yet.

The entire phenomenon of page-1-ification of page-3 had created a positive feedback loop where the media was obsessing over those whose main job was to be in the headlines. It works for both, except that the ensuing loss of credibility would kill the news industry before these publicity-hounds grow old. The only way out in such cases, when all else fails, is Divine intervention. Intervene or not, Comedy there definitely was. The US was in the middle of two wars,  but these wars lost the ‘battle of the front-pages’ to the grand-daughter of a hotelier. The last time a heiress created a sensation, at least she was kicking some serious rear-end, this time it was all for nothing. We now know that things did eventually change for good, so much so that we can’t imagine that news was so silly back then. We now obsess over the Obamas.

Anyway, I was reminded of all this by this video clip of a news anchor trying to make a point about the sad state of affairs in those days:

(link-source: The Editrix)