I've been watching people this week. Not up-close and personal, mostly: we're still keeping our distance from other people and their germs (and keeping our own to ourselves). But on social media, TV, the internet. I've noticed something. Many people, past and present, look to others for clues in building identities. They want help with their personal narratives. Often, people in the news are what they focus on.

Many Twitter users are commiserating with Queen Elizabeth on the death of her husband. Some said the sad occasion brought back their own memories of personal loss. Others were impatient with all the public mourning for exactly the same reason. There have been too many deaths in families in the past year. On the day Prince Philip's passing was announced, I also noticed a tweet by a man who'd lost his wife to cancer. His loss was just as keenly felt, though less newsworthy in the global scheme. He wasn't thinking about royals.

Years ago, I learned from reading magazines in my German doctor's office that some Europeans really like to read about 'crowned heads', especially their marriages and kids. From what I could see in the magazines, the important message was, 'They may be rich and famous, but we share with them the love of children, family life, and pets.' I concluded that the readers were using these people as models.

This is not a new thing. Colleen McCullough, in her book on Julius Caesar, claimed that Caesar's wife always asked herself, 'What would Cornelia, the Mother of the Gracchi, do?' She's probably right. Ancient Romans had role models, too. Crowned heads and Republican heroines alike could serve as life examples, I suppose.

Last night, I started watching The Serpent on Netflix. It's an interesting miniseries. They've done a good job of reproducing the mid-1970s. I know, I was there, though not in Bangkok. From my background reading, I conclude that this villain – the sort of dime-a-dozen con artist one meets, swimming like a shark among expats and wandering students – preferred to prey on seekers along the Hippie Trail. I can tell why: these young people were looking for something, a kind of meaning to life. The predator acted like he had it, only to steal their money and sometimes their lives.

The travellers were unwise, of course. How could they mistake this slick stranger for the real thing? Probably because they didn't know exactly what they were looking for. They fell for a plausible counterfeit. They thought they wanted to be enlightened, but really, they only wanted to be cool. They headed out to places with magical names, like Bangkok or Kathmandu. They read the Tibetan Book of the Dead with no context, and pretended to find deep secrets in it. They were looking for gold and what they found was cheap trash and disaster. This, too, is a timeless story, if you leave out the '60s music.

Not long ago, I was reading up on an ancestor of mine and Elvis's. His name was Presslar. He was one of the 'poor Palatines', economic refugees from the Rhineland in the early 1700s. A few hundred thousand of these impoverished people ended up in refugee camps outside London, lured by a fake promise in a lying book. The book, which was written by somebody who hadn't even been there, claimed that there was free land in the Carolinas, that it was a paradise for farmers, and that Queen Anne, bless her, would send them there for free. (Nobody told her.)

The British government were horrified by all these foreigners. Rumours spread that they were mostly 'gypsies'. Then a British official decided he might as well make money off them. Isn't that what public office is good for? He took a bunch of them off, not to the Carolinas, where he owned no real estate, but to New York's Hudson Valley, where he tried to make them produce tar for the navy. They refused. Eventually, our ancestor (mine and Elvis's) moved away, and his descendants ended up in Carolina, which they liked. Oh, another of his descendants is Jimmy Carter.

I don't know what all this teaches us, other than to be careful who we look to for a role model. Me, I'm sticking with Jesus, but you knew that. He made more sense when he talked, and didn't try to cash anybody else's travellers' cheques.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

19.04.21 Front Page

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