When there's no internet I'll sometimes put my music connection on shuffle and see what comes up. Lots of (different versions of) musical theater selections, which occasionally inspires me to muse about which of the approximately 64 different versions of "Chess" would be my favorite, but sometimes other stuff.
Today I was struck by the parallels between "Popular" and "Wonderful" from Wicked. Galinda is well-intentioned while the Wizard is explicitly manipulative, but both of them have the same goal: to make Elphaba into something she's not by focusing on image above substance, and Elphaba's authenticity makes her recoil.
Popular:
"It's not about aptitude
It's the way you're viewed."
Wonderful:
"They call me wonderful
So I am wonderful."
In the familiar film version of the Wizard of Oz, the wizard is a good guy who recognizes that the Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man don't actually lack the qualities they worry about; they just don't believe in themselves. So he gives them the recognition that lets them feel more confident in their own abilities.
In the original book, he's a little more dodgy; he does grandiose and expensive "operations" to install courage, a brain, a heart, without revealing to Dorothy's comrades that he's not really doing anything. But they accept that he must be doing something, because he's a wizard, so obviously they've gotten new skills. Appearance is everything.
Popular:
"...think of celebrated heads of state
Or specially great communicators"
Wonderful:
"Where I come from, we believe all sorts of things that aren't true...we call it history.
A man's called a traitor
Or a liberator
A rich man's a thief
Or philanthropist.
Is one a crusader
Or ruthless invader?
It's all in which label
Is able
To persist.
There are precious few at ease
With moral ambiguities
So we act as though they don't exist."
Here, to me, is where the songs diverge. From this universe, Galinda is taking a swipe at our world, but particularly (US Republican president) Ronald Reagan, formerly a movie actor, known as "the Great Communicator." As someone who's fairly left of center, it's easy to sit there and say "hahaha, those dumb conservatives, all style and no substance, am I right?" I feel smart because I picked up on Galinda's allusion and I know we're probably on the same side.
The Wizard, in describing our world, hits home. For one, he's being a little anachronistic; if he arrived from the early 1900s as in Oz lore, then he mostly precedes the revisionist history era. And even then, there's a time lag between when "myths" are revised and when they're known to be revised. Much of my history education as a young student made me feel like "people like you are bad and have always been ruining the world, you suck." This was curriculum set by adults a generation older than me, who wanted to do a more thorough and comprehensive job than the historiography they got. But then those same people say "we all grew up idolizing these heroes BUT ACTUALLY, did you know they are TERRIBLE, only TRUE DEEP SCHOLARS can appreciate this complexity," when like...no, I specifically did not, precisely because of your generation.
Beloit (now Marist) College publishes a "things about the incoming freshman class" that updates every year. (Which in part functions to make people beyond college age feel old, and in part to genuinely remind them about the newer cohort's worldview.) The incoming-cohort-of-
2009 list (kids who were mostly born in 1990-91, now about 28) mentions, "Christopher Columbus has always been getting a bad rap." Because the grown-ups need to be reminded that he wasn't a hero to them.
So that's why the wizard's head-pats catch me in a patronizing place.
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