Marie Antoinette got a bum rap and literally lost her head in the wake of the French Revolution. As usually happens with most famous - and, in her case, infamous - historical figures, an accretion of cultural and pseudo-historical myth eventually obscures the reality of who they really were.

For starters, Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen wasn’t French. She was Austrian and, at the age of 14, was married off to the Dauphin of France in an effort to solidify an alliance between the French and Austro-Hungarian empires. Though her conduct as Queen of France wasn’t especially prodigal for that time, she became the object of some pretty vicious slanders and libels and, by the time of her execution in 1793, she was vilified throughout France as a wanton, selfish, licentious spendthrift who sneered that if the common people had no bread, they should eat cake.

There is no record she ever uttered these words and historians today regard them as “journalistic cliche” attributable to Jean Jacques Rousseau. Nevertheless, the image of a haughty, sneering queen has become an iconic one in the collective memory of our Eurocentric culture and the best efforts of the most scrupulous scholars will never fully purge it from our consciousness.

That much is evident in the present day United States, where an “all for me, but none for thee” mentality appears to have gripped the ruling elites in the federal government rendering them incapable of reflecting on their jaw-dropping hypocrisy, much less feeling the slightest shame or remorse for it.