A Brief History of "Don't You Know Who I Am?"

» A Brief History of "Don't You Know Who I Am?"

I thought it would never happen, but this past summer I was recognized and stopped on the street by a complete stranger for the first time in my life. Granted, it was the street of a college campus, and I make my living off college basketball, but it was still weird.

"Hey, aren't you Kyle Whelliston?"

It was uncomfortable for sure, I wasn't quite prepared to answer questions about basketball in July. I was just trying to get to a Store 24 and get a candy bar because I had skipped lunch and was hungry as a motherfucker. As the 3 Musketeers melted in my mouth, I thought a lot about how I wouldn't mind if my life was never interrupted by strangers again. Especially if the question was, "Didn't you used to be Kyle Whelliston?"

But that kind of small, simple life is not for a lot of people. A lot of folks want to be famous, like paparazzi-type famous, they want to transcend their basic humanity. They want to be the types of men and women who make the plebian meat puppets they entertain stop, stare, give way, and pay money for their photographs. They want power, respect and the attention that goes with it. They want the world to stop, and tell other people where to get off.

I think about this now because of this incident several days ago involving Dreamworks studio co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg. At a hotel bar in New York, he blocked the flow of service traffic so he could hold a cellphone conversation without dining chatter in the backgound. When he was asked to move out of the way, a witness told The Post that he replied with, "'Who the fuck are you? Do you know who I am?'

"Don't you who I am." The complete reverse and inverse of "leave me alone," the last outpost on the far edge of narcissism, a level of self-importance and self-absorption that no blogger could ever hope to match... no matter how trapped in their own heads they become. The card is nothing new: sports stars, actors and politicians have used it to get out of speeding tickets and hotel charges and bar tabs, as well as into first class on commuter jets. This is not a comprehensive survey, but here are just a few of the examples of DYKWIA in our lifetime.

I don't know who Sienna Miller is, but she pulled one off in Pittsburgh last year. She didn't realize that you can't say "Do you know who I am," and follow it up by saying your name afterwards (only Charles Foster Kane can get away with that). Or call the city "Shittsburgh." That's something only Philadelphians can use.

John Mayer is so not cool. If he had to drop a DYKWIA in a Circuit City when asked for an ID to back up a credit card, he could have gone over to the music section, picked up a copy of Heavier Things and put it on the counter. "That's my picture ID, bitch," he could have said. That would have been smooth.

This story has been around for as long as the internet-as-we-know-it has existed, and it's easy to tell who the new folks are around here: they're the ones who are sending it out via mass e-mail. The premise is this: Jane Fonda and Ted Turner were in a Montana restaurant and Jane tried to blow a 45-minute queue with a devastating DYKWIA-bomb. I'm sure that the general framework is true, but the part at the end where the Vietnam vet kicks her out for having hung out with the wrong crowd once sounds like something someone might add to the story later to make it sound better. "And then... and then I threw an American flag in her face and said, 'Kiss it! Kiss it!'", etc.

John Kerry: We as a nation might have been in a whole lot less of a shitastrophe than it is now if Kerry had been elected, but it's come to light over the past three years that a big reason why is because the man can't get out of his own way. Or the way of his own ego. We'll never know how many people voted for Nader or stayed home because of circulated stories about Kerry using his influence to get other people's pizza, cut in line for snowboard rentals, or pass through barricades at a Rolling Stones show... but if the current global situation devolves into World War III, "Don't you who I am" will have played a crucial role in the extinction of the human race.

Filed under: celebrities dykwia embellishment heavier things john kerry