STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Pippa Middleton Is a Superhero
By Staff News & Analysis - June 22, 2011

Now Pippa Middleton (left) is turned into a cartoon character who rubs shoulders with the Beckhams … She stole the show at the Royal Wedding with 'that' dress and became one of the most talked about women on the planet. Now the Wonder Woman that is Her Royal Hotness has joined the ranks of Superman, Spiderman and Jessica Rabbit – as the star of her very own comic strip. – UK Daily Mail Online

Dominant Social Theme: The best of us are superhuman.

Free-Market Analysis: We were surprised to see that the sister of Kate Middleton (who is married to the future King of England and is now Duchess of Cambridge) is getting her own royal treatment. Pippa Middleton, who attracted a great deal of attention at the recent Royal Wedding for her slim and curvaceous figure, is to be featured as a cartoon character promoting the PlayStation game inFAMOUS2.

Comic book content is extraordinarily popular these days. Tales of Superman, Batman and even the Green Hornet have virtually saved Hollywood from irrelevance, providing producers with the opportunity to overlay extraordinary special effects on top of action scenes featuring modern-day morality fables that buttress certain dominant social themes. More on this connection between modern comics and elite judiciary memes below.

Such a successful recipe evolves, as elites are always on the lookout for items of popular culture that can be manipulated for propaganda purposes. In the past, children's TV programs have occasionally featured animated series created around, say, popular singing groups but now comic books and strips are beginning to feature VIPs.

Arnold Schwarzenegger comes to mind. Before he put his "comeback" on hold, the Governator was scheduled to appear regularly in a comic book built around his larger-than-life persona. Pippa Middleton may not have the Governator's accomplishments but her rear end has provided its own entrée. Here's some more from the Daily Mail:

Pippa Middleton faces an ethical dilemma in the comic as she is asked to spill the beans on her sister and new brother-in-law's honeymoon. Dilemma: In the comic Pippa Middleton has to decide whether she should betray her sister and dish the dirt on the Royal honeymoon.

Created by Oxford artist Kate Brown, the comic is part of a series promoting the new PlayStation game inFAMOUS 2. It sees the Duke and Duchess arriving at a part in the fictional city of New Marais. As they chat with David and Victoria Beckham, Pippa is approached by a millionaire businessman who promises to invest money in her party-planning magazine in return for gossip about her honeymoon.

It ends with her debating whether or not to betray the Duke and Duchess's trust. Readers are left wondering if she will betray her sister, as devious Lex Luthor would surely do, or keep tight-lipped like Superman's kind-hearted alter-ego Clark Kent.

According to the Daily Mail, other celebrities starring in their own comic strips include singers Cheryl Cole, Beyonce and Lady Gaga. Cole's comic alter ego apparently faces the moral dilemma of whether or not to give a can of doctored hairspray – actually filled with oil – to Nicole Scherzinger, who replaced her on the X-Factor program.

The Mail identifies the genesis of the these comic strips as a collaboration between former drug dealer Howard Marks and Pat Mills, creator of sci-fi comic 2000AD. Marks is quoted as saying, "I'm a comic book fan – and I'm no stranger to moral ambiguity – so my involvement in this project is a no-brainer."

Marks may not be aware of it, but he is on the cutting – bleeding – edge of a power elite sub-promotion. This is an inevitable outcome of what is called "Fanboy" culture. It is an surprising, if inevitable, evolution, and one that has seen the West or at least the Anglosphere convulsed by superhero mania.

When comic books first came out, they received the same reception as rock and roll, especially in American society where they burned alongside "the King's" records in great bonfires. How times have changed. Hollywood is ravaging the back issues of Marvel and DC Comics to come up with even marginal characters that can be turned into movies. The attraction of these characters is that they reinforce the dominant social theme of modern Western justice, including the paraphernalia of its court system, adversarial construct and prison system.

We have examined many times in the past the essential corruption of the West's criminal system and how the power elite has perverted justice generally to reinforce the status quo of regulatory democracy (see other article, this issue). The move away from private justice (between the two affected parties) and toward public justice (in which the state seeks penance for so-called debts-to-society) is one of the elite's most effective memes. We have seen for ourselves when writing about this issue that people cannot even conceive of private justice anymore.

People are entirely intimidated by the West's current judicial system. Like the financial system itself, the Anglosphere elites have attempted to make justice so complex and professionalized that people lack the confidence to determine for themselves what is just. The current system of justice in fact is a con – no more effective or "fair" than the current central-banking economy.

In private justice, which developed over thousands of years, the affected parties dealt with each other directly or with an agreed upon third party. The threat that impelled justice was violence – either individual violence (a duel) or family-enforced justice (a vendetta).

Only in the past 100 years or so has the idea of state justice evolved worldwide – the idea that the state investigates, prosecutes and passes judgment on its citizens. It is no coincidence in our view that at the same time duels and vendettas have been regularly mocked and demonized as a kind of "mob justice." The TV Westerns that were so popular on American TV in the mid-20th century were part of this process of demonization.

And yet, unfortunately, state justice is inherently malicious as it degenerates inevitably into open authoritarianism. In fact no monopoly on earth escapes this fate. The Western state creates the laws, pays for them to be investigated and enforced, and provides the penal institutions and punishments as well.

The state therefore has created a monopoly justice system and those behind the state – the Anglosphere power elite – have built up a system that effectively puts them beyond the law. One of the reasons to challenge Islam worldwide is that many Islamic regions still abide by elements of private justice, a state of affairs that is apparently anathema to Western power elites.

In a private justice system, the elites would be subject to prosecution. While elite facilitators and apologists are on occasion subject to some form of prosecution, the more powerful elite families inevitably are not, or not significantly anyway. (How much jail time did Edgar Bronfman Jr. get for his "Insider Trading" conviction?) This gives the elites a powerful tool for maintaining the status quo. It is the courts, after all, that rule on whether or not one has "standing" to prosecute.

The current justice system is probably the most ingrained of all modern power-elite memes. People literally cannot conceive of how justice can be gained except by some omnipotent state. It does not occur to them – in the grip of this mind control meme – that justice is inevitably uncertain and biased. What is one person's justice is another's unfairness.

Turning people into superheroes to reinforce the status quo is perhaps an emergent elite tool in a larger arsenal. But the bigger issue is mind control generally. From movies to books to television, people are bombarded with dominant and sub dominant social themes. Most people still have a hard time thinking that the world could be organized in another way. Free-market thinking is not by any means the norm, nor will it ever be.

The elite, like incubi, never sleep. Ms. Middleton's rise from pleasant young woman to superwoman is part of the larger celebration of celebrities brought to us by the powers-that-be that own and manipulate the mainstream media. This in turn is part of the never-ending quest to inculcate societal division at all levels. Some must be better than others. Thus the justification for rulers and ruled may be established. it is another version of the judicial meme, that only the state has the wisdom to rule.

In the 20th century especially, the elites through their control over mainstream media were able to impose an effective narrative on the West and, really, the world. The narrative included central banks as economic adjudicators, the state itself as the provider of regulatory democracy and criminal justice and various forms of officialdom as necessary to the survival of civil society.

In the 21st century, as we have often pointed out, this mind control has broken down. Western intelligentsia – those involved communicators not directly co-opted by the powers-that-be – are much less apt to regurgitate elite memes. It is the difference, in fact, between a Dark Ages and something more hopeful.

We often speculate that the confrontation between the truth-telling of the Internet and the memes of the elite will eventually result in the elites taking a step back, away from their determination to initiate formal world government. It is a process we refer to as the great Internet Reformation. Certainly we have seen in the past few years the elite transition from persuasion to violence (as they have transitioned before) and we believe the advent of the Internet is possibly an impetus.

What does seem certain is that the Dreamtime that the elites' imposed so successfully in the 20th century is unraveling now, or at least fraying. War is Peace. Paper money is Gold. The State is Freedom. All these memes and more are challenged every day on the Internet. What also seem obvious to us is that the Internet is a process not an episode. The trends toward freedom and free-market thinking that have marked the first part of the 21st century may well continue to accelerate.

After Thoughts

Ms. Middleton, a nice young woman, may not necessarily enjoy her celebrity. But having become part of a royal family, she has (unfortunately for her) become part of the process of social division and judicial reinforcement. Nonetheless, this trend like others – exposed by the Internet – may eventually overwhelm at least part of the mind-control the elites have sought to inculcate so assiduously.

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