Perhaps These Weird Personality Cults Are Okay When It Comes To Popstars.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-15329625/Taylor-Swift-Travis-Kelce-surprise.html

Although most Popstars can't run their own lives, let alone a country. So when it comes to Heads of Government/State it should be a quality that has everyone going; "Nope!"

Perhaps because of where he went to Community College David Bowie was utterly obsessed with; "Metropolis" (1927). Financing and composing for Giorgio Moroder's 1984 version.

After performing in then West Berlin David Bowie not only declared his admiration for Adolf Hitler he compared himself to Adolf Hitler before insisting that Britain needed a Dictator like Adolf Hitler.

In short, he went full Kanye.

Obviously David Bowie was famous for his personas, Ziggy Stardust etc, and was, frankly, saner than Kanye West. So it's likely he was exploring the performative, iconography of Personality Cults. How he as a Popstar could get his adoring fans to do almost anything for him. Even utterly horrific things they would never decide to do themselves.

It goes to that issue that Democracy is the abnormality. Most people don't want to tell their elected leaders what to do. They want a Dictator to tell them what to do.

Francis Fukuyama was partially wrong in his Friedrich Nietzsche inspired essay; "The End of History and the Last Man." The end of the Cold War didn't see the human race coalesce around Democracy but Totalitarian Capitalism.

Rodrigo Duterte in The Philippines being an example you can link to from "I'm Still Here" (2024) and the Totalitarian Capitalism of US President Taft's "Banana Wars."

Obviously The Philippines has the history of being a Spanish then US Colony. It then had the US-backed anti-Communist Dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos during the Neo-Colonial Era. So there is there is the sort of learned behaviour of submission.

However in 2016, amid the Globalised Era, no-one imposed Rodrigo Duterte on The Philippines. He basically ran a Democratic campaign on the slogan; "I'm going to set up Death Squads to murder a lot of my citizens!" And a lot of his citizens then voted for him.

He's only being prosecuted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) now because the people of The Philippines democratically elected the latest instalment of the Marcos dynasty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F-G9hBhIpE (Dirty Old Town, The Pogues, Celtiques, Official Audio).