fame is not worthiness

Sarah Palin is to Barack Obama as The Monkees are to The Beatles.

Cormully caught that from the Department of Painfully Obvious Promotion and knows what we know: “I was an adolescent and cynicism was transparent to me.”

“Who is the better band?”

In 1965, Don Kirshner, music producer extraordinaire, signed onto a project capitalizing on the Beatles’ fabulous success not merely as musicians but as movie stars.

Seeking to exploit that year’s A Hard Day’s Night, aspiring filmmakers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider proposed to Kirshner an American television show approximating the movie.

From a pool of 400 applicants were selected four eminently qualified, talented, perfectly lovely young men.

They were to mature from commercial enterprise to self-propelled artists – whose quality of work is a judgment call – to be pitted against their inspiration.

Do you see?

The fact remains: Obama/The Beatles created themselves.