I once owned one of those old Mad paperback books that had a section lampooning pretentiousness
in society. The French, of course, are pretentious. I visited Paris once when I
was in the service; oh sure, there are a few interesting landmarks in this
remarkably gray and dirty city, but the “highlight” of this visit was some pompous
food vendor trying to tell me that his Whopper rip-off was pronounced “Whop-pair.” Mark Twain didn’t conceal his
contempt for French pretentiousness: "France is miserable because it is
filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France”
and “The French are the connecting link between man & the monkey.”
But the Mad book
hit a little closer to home, featuring a pompous-looking character with a
pencil moustache, holding a paper bag with odor lines surrounding it; the
caption indicated that anyone with a British accent can sell any gullible
American a bag of dog doo. And it is quite true; most Americans think it is an
honor for someone with a British accent to even deign to speak to them, let
alone gaze in their general direction. Frankly,
I think the Brits are overrated; I mean, who couldn’t possess an empire where
only a handful of soldiers armed with the latest technology can control natives
armed with brickbats?
But worse is that the British are so conscious of class. No “honor”
is greater for a “commoner” is to be granted the right to be called “sir” or “dame”
and prance around like a puffed-up pigeon in heat. The pretension, of course,
starts with the Royal Family. Have you ever noticed that everyone in the
“family” has blue eyes? Well, not everyone;
Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie have hazel eyes. But both of their parents—Prince
Andrew and Sarah Ferguson—have blue eyes. One of the reasons for the break-up
of their marriage was that they hardly saw each other, since Prince Andrew
spent a lot of time away from home in the Navy. Of course, I’m not insinuating anything, but one suspects that somehow
a mongrel got over the wall and contaminated the gene pool. But the point is
why the insistence on marriage only with those with “fair” eyes. It is
certainly deliberate, and suggests an expectation within the family for “racial
purity.” Kind of like the Nazis.
British class pretension also runs rampant in the
mindbogglingly successful Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling—those initials
another example of personal pomposity. The
Potter books are infused with the British fascination with class. Harry and
friends are “different” from everyone else, because they have “special
powers”—meaning that they are “special” people, and have to be separated from
the common rung of humanity. Rowling’s
ponderous, detail-burdened prose is also a hallmark of writers with delusions
of grandeur; people assume that this is “good” writing, but in reality it is
reveals a paucity of vision. Some writers can get away with seemingly
meandering, pointless prose; Henry Fielding did so with cleverness and wit. But
with Rowling, you can boil down the “essentials” down to a page or two.
That is not to say, of course, that ponderous, pretentious
prose doesn’t help turning a book into a movie; screenwriters adapting
Rowling’s Harry Potter books for film didn’t have to do much work to visualize
the world she created. But that is what all those movies are—visual junk food
with no discernible moral point to make. I remember lying in a hospital bed
after surgery to remove an abscess from my jaw, and on a television monitor was
the first Potter movie, and it was just headache-inducing torture, especially
since I had no ability to change the channel.
Rowling, of course, had pretensions to write for the “adult”
market. Her first attempt, The Casual Vacancy, was so bad that even her
rapid fans were unable to push the novel’s rating above three stars on Amazon,
which generally indicates a product that is a waste of time and money. Her latest work, The Cuckoo’s Calling, was written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith,
which again is an example of pretension. Rowling was recently ”outed” as the author by
a law firm which had some association with her. The book had been selling
poorly before then, probably because like the Potter books it is over-burdened
with superfluous prose—not helped by the liberal use of “f-bombs” and other
gutter language, which I suspect is what writers of children’s books believe is
the most “convincing” way to take the next step (kind of like an actress with a
virginal image doing a nude scene in an “adult” role). But never underestimate the power of marketing
and name recognition; all you have to do is get published the first time, and
whatever rubbish follows will have an audience: Once her rabid fans “discovered”
her new book, it has become an “instant” bestseller.
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