“The Cremation of Sam McGee” commences,
“There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.”
Robert Service, “the Canadian Kipling” who penned the 1907 poem, died in 1958. Exponentially stranger things have occurred in the almost 70 subsequent years “that would make your blood run cold”:
The planet breaks temperature records annually. Nonetheless “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.”
Supreme Court Justices pursue a political agenda as if attorneys advocating their client’s interests rather than serving as neutral referees to ensure that the United States is a nation of laws, not men, pursuing a rule of law. Instead, the news media obsessed over World Cup football.
Were those absurdities not enough, “the queerest they ever did see” was a nation spending the semiquincentennial celebration weekend fixated upon Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding, rather than examining erosion of democratic institutions — the failure to fathom inheritance bestowed by the Founding Fathers, seemingly in perpetuity.
I do not know Taylor Swift or Travis Kelce. I cannot say whether I would like either one of the two.
I can say with certainty that I have not a scintilla of interest in nuptial celebrations to which I was not invited. I can say more definitively that discussion of gatherings to which another is not invited is among the more insensitive acts of social ineptitude.
How tragic that people’s lives are so empty that they behave as if drug addicts, pursuing trivial details of the wedding of people that they do not know, to which they were not invited.
Taking a walk or creating a gourmet dinner would be a better use of people’s time than consuming swill fit for a pigsty. It is a sad commentary — the title of Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel readily comes to mind: “An American Tragedy” — that individuals are seduced by tawdry celebrity.
Fatty Arbuckle, O.J. Simpson, and Bill Cosby are among those who enjoyed “15 minutes of fame” before proving that “all that glitters is not gold” — that, notwithstanding the unrelenting efforts of public relations experts, the English putdown NQOTD — “Not quite our type, dear” — succinctly describes most overpaid entertainers and athletes.
Time was when such people were regarded with little more regard than prostitutes and criminals: base and unsympathetic.
What happened to American education that, rather than worshipping George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, individuals with fine minds, possessed of cogent beliefs, who sought ideals and sacrificed in pursuit of eternal verities, the average American pays more attention to the wedding of celebrities who they do not know, who did not include them in the guest list, on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence when the citizenry ought instead to reflect upon democratic values?
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People…, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Mainstream news media made itself into a mockery devoting “more ink” to the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s marriage than to the meaning of the American Revolution: what we gained, the sterling example for people around the world, and what must be pursued to remain worthy stewards of our inheritance, instead of squandering it.
I conclude giving another Canadian — an entertainer — the last word: Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970) says everything that one needs to know:
“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don't know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot”
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
