Yeah, they - players, musical stars, TV and movie stars, politicians, millionaires and billionaires - live in the clouds on Elysium.
The rest of us are the Red Shirts on Star Trek.
This is an extreme point in the history of what people used to call "Western Civilization". What do I mean?
The whole population of Athens crowded into the ampitheater for the three days of plays in the contest for best writer during the Dionysian festival. The casts were recruited from ordinary citizens. But those citizens attending voted on who had written the best play and kept voting for the quality of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes.
Shakespeare's plays were attended by ordinary people as well as the Queen, and it cost a penny to go to the theater. They weren't "culture".
Michaelangelo may have been the greatest sculptor ever, but he was also a stone cutter - he had to be to be a sculptor, and was a member of the stone cutter's guild, cutting slabs of Carrara marble along with other ordinary but skilled workers.
Spinoza was a lens maker.
William Blake and a century later William Morris were ordinary but highly gifted artisans, craftsmen, who were also great poets and artists.
Einstein worked in the customs house in Switzerland while he was developing his theory of Special Relativity.
And ordinary workers and shopkeepers played baseball and professional ballplayers worked in the offseason at ordinary jobs.
Today, the gap between those who work with figures, concepts, who plan, strategize, or who are celebrities occurs on one level, and the rest of life, work, society elsewhere. We complain about baseball because it was supposed to be sacred, outside the realms of time. But today people are catching up and this degree of inequality is becoming noticeable across the board.
This is true even of celebrity speakers, including those on the left, but also on the right: some of recent presidential candidates seem to have run only so they could then go on book tours and celebrity speaking circuits where they command tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands for a single talk. But I was shocked sometimes at the extravagant fees expected by some supposedly radical left speakers popular on campuses as well, often many thousands for a single talk or lecture. Yet look at the 19th century and everyone from abolitionists, to feminists like Susan B. Anthony to socialists like Eugene Debs, to vegetarian advocates, religious Chattaqua preachers and revivalists criss-crossed the United States on speaking circuits and none of them got rich, though they built a country and gave it an intellectual and political culture and life.
4/24/2015 1:21 PM (edited)