king to pawn

by Phineas Dash

Musings inspired by the confluence of Bushism and the Matrix Reloaded, among other distractions...

The idea of kings began perhaps as a mutation of the tribal figure we call the shaman: from one who hears the gods by deftly reading the signs of nature, to the one and only one, who the one and only God talks to.

Maybe the first were charismatic types with a flair for administration and certainly with a taste for power. They ruled by fear and love---by claiming to be the chosen of the King of Heaven who said whether or not the crops will grow to fruition, and by physical force: with an army to subdue the populace, and to fight enemies, invented or real. Conquest could lead to kingship. More lands meant more power. So it went, and so it goes.

When human societies were small and moved through the landscape among equals, there was no need of a king, an absolute ruler. Only when people became dependent on a single source of sustenance---even a single cultivated crop---in a single place, did they feel the need for a single authority. One King of Kings, one king of the realm, and a hierarchy of ownership and administration: the aristocracy to supply the army and control the peasants in exchange for land, power and courtside seats. Warfare of king against king, war within the aristocracy for the right to become king, transformed and absorbed the energies of human societies as they grew.

The religions that emerged from the Mesopotamian deserts were funneled into the king system. Who owns the holy truth? At first it's everybody until somebody claims it all, claims to know, claims the direct line to the King of Kings, so we fall right into following. But it's a damn good job so there are lots of contenders: prophets and heretics and who's on first-- so it becomes dogma eat dogma out there: popes vs. kings, kings vs popes, kings become popes, popes become kings, let's call the whole thing off. How about a savior then? Another name for the new king. Is this the best you can come up with?

We have yet to escape this system. It rules us in our so-called democracies and republics, in our churches, our sciences and arts. It governs our economics and determines how we spend the time of our lives. The authoritarian power may seem dispersed and unidentifiable now, but its basis is clear in how we deify one king or another, even if it is the king or queen of the moment; even if it's Stephen King.

The only meaningful revolt now is the revolt against kings, the idea of kings, the power of kings, the structures of kings, the king’s specialists, the emotions evoked by the system of kings, the beliefs based on the faith in kings and saviors.

Heroes are something else. Heroes and leaders, excellence, special gifts and sensitivities, and a captain to steer the ship, are all real, all to be nurtured and celebrated, and appropriately used. No hero triumphs without help, many myths are stories of groups of heroes, each contributing a talent or strength. The myths of heroes are myths of diversity and cooperation, with leadership and sensitivity to the realities of nature.

We need heroes, but we don't need another savior. Kings and saviors are the wellsprings of violence. The king suckers heroes and turns them into specialists, gets them fighting turf wars against each other, fighting for favor and funding, ignoring each other, learning nothing, dividing so the king can conquer.

We must oppose the king, disobey and resist. The king we must kill is inside us. We must understand what is inside us, what kings and what killers. The hero inside must be encouraged. We must understand, reconcile, invent, encourage, and work at it like the addicts to the king system we are. Saviors won't save us from ourselves.

WMD

Terrorists will try to use Weapons of Mass Destruction in America in the next two years, predicts the Bush administration. Say, doesn’t that include election year? I guess we’d better reelect these folks who are taking such good care of the country. What with Syria harboring terrorists and now Iran touted as a nuclear threat, we sure are glad we’ve conquered Iraq and are hard at work turning it into an American military base and oil well, surrounded by civil chaos.

So what if none of these WMDs are found in Iraq. The most important WMDs are in your minds and hearts anyway. The focus of your fears.

We’re too busy to read biographies of Karl Rove, or Joan Didion’s reporting going back to Bush the Elder that lay out the dangers in scandalously transparent detail. Despite their supposed piety, nothing is sacred to these people but power. They will manipulate every issue and emotion for one purpose: to keep and extend their power. Right now the Bush administration is as dangerous to America as Hitler and the Nazis were to Germany in the 1930s. (Of course, Americans would never commit such violence on a race or class as the Nazis did with the Jews. Never mind that our concentration camps are full of mostly one race, comprising a high proportion of said race, and we execute mostly one class, with some eugenic benefits when they also happen to be retarded.)

We’re so fixated on the latest flavor of fear, so attuned to novelty in our favorite WMDs, that a recently signed pact between the U.S. and Russia promising to reduce their arsenals of nuclear weapons by two-thirds came and went unnoticed. Apart from the mutual cynicism masking a tiny bit of actual progress (at least as measured against standing arsenals, if not previous agreements), this is a disquieting suggestion of how used to the idea of nuclear weapons we’ve become.

It’s been forty years since the nuclear test ban treaty, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis made the awful prospect of nuclear holocaust a clear and present danger. It’s been 58 years since Hiroshima; only fading codgers were around for that, and only retirees remember the days of desert booms and fallout in the backyard. Nuclear war is no longer the sum of all fears (especially if an a-bomb dropped in Baltimore doesn’t disrupt the Beltway too much.) So impoverished is our imagination that it seems quite thinkable that we’ll see a nuclear bomb—not a so-called “dirty” bomb, which is just some explosives that spread a little radiation and a lot of panic, but a bona fide big bang nuke---used by some country against an enemy—before the decade is out, perhaps well before any more chi-chi WMDs. We came close to the first actual nuclear exchange just a year or so ago, and India and Pakistan have not exactly resolved their differences since.

This is not to downgrade the dangers of your favorite WMD; biological and chemical and soon genetic weapons can be deployed cheaply and by small groups, and pretty soon by individuals who find automatic weapons too limiting. It would be nice if our leaders were actually doing something about these dangers other than trying to scare us into voting for them and increasing their power, but of course that's your usual liberal wishful thinking. No, the likelihood of a big bang is just a predictable consequence of our apathy. The nuclear threat has been around so long without anything much ever happening, and people no longer fear it, that it just becomes more likely that it will finally be fulfilled, and we'll see what it really looks like (that is, if we don't happen to be real close to where it happens.) Bet the cable channels can't wait.