{"id":3355,"date":"2010-09-17T09:37:44","date_gmt":"2010-09-17T13:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/?p=3355"},"modified":"2010-09-17T09:39:06","modified_gmt":"2010-09-17T13:39:06","slug":"william-winston-and-wayne-meditations-on-fame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/2010\/09\/william-winston-and-wayne-meditations-on-fame\/","title":{"rendered":"William, Winston, and Wayne: Meditations on Fame"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> Dave Chappelle has an old routine where he talks about President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky: \u201cI always wondered what it would be like to be <em>that<\/em> famous.  Monica has a book out now, which made me think that nobody has a pickup line that good: \u2018Sleep with me, there\u2019s a future in it!\u2019\u201d  Likewise, there are many writers whose work remains immortal.  But only one is <em>that<\/em> famous that his childhood home is simply referred to as \u201cThe Birthplace\u201d: William Shakespeare.  It was cool to visit the place where Shakespeare (or, as one of the worst lyrics in the history of music refer to him, the guy who \u201cwrote a whole bunch of sonnets\u201d) was born and is buried.  Nobody calls it Stratford, though.  It\u2019s always, in hushed tones, \u201cThe Birthplace.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>After a mere twenty days here, I can\u2019t pretend to have a great feel for the national psyche of the Brits.  But it seems that they have a special place in their hearts and minds for heroes.  Other than Shakespeare, I\u2019ve obliquely encountered two more people with massive social status in Britain: Winston Churchill and Wayne Rooney.  A large group of us visited the Churchill Museum, which contains the Cabinet War Rooms that housed the British war effort during the Blitz.  Despite the fact that Churchill was voted out of office nearly the second the war ended, he is treated as a demigod, repeatedly referred to (and we\u2019ve heard this in other places as well) as \u201cBritain\u2019s greatest war leader.\u201d  A bold statement for a country that has been in many, many wars in its two millennia of existence.  And then there\u2019s Mr. Rooney.  Just as we arrived, he found himself in the throes of a prostitution scandal.  It did not help his cause that he employed said prostitute the night before he was to marry his pregnant wife Coleen, nor that he reportedly texted Coleen once she found out that it was \u201cno big deal.\u201d  It seems easy to compare this case to that of Tiger Woods, but the difference here is that the mainstream papers (and not just tabloids) have relentlessly covered the case.  And that\u2019s the problem with heroes, in England, in America, or anywhere: they\u2019re human, and when you find out, it\u2019s a disaster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dave Chappelle has an old routine where he talks about President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky: \u201cI always wondered what it would be like to be that famous. Monica has a book out now, which made me think that nobody has a pickup line that good: \u2018Sleep with me, there\u2019s a future in it!\u2019\u201d Likewise, there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6697],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2010-dennis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3355\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/norwichhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}