The “King” is “un-dead”! Long live the “un-king”?
View(s):There’s something about being a monarch that trumps every other mandate. Priests are often venerated if they are good; poets worshipped if they are bad, mad, and dangerous to know. Prophets have a charismatic edge that often makes even their enemies admire them. Psychologists of an ilk cull profound insights that help them to win friends and influence people. Philosophers have the ear of royalty and rabble alike.
But if you are a leading politician of the uppermost crust, a king, a monarch of all you survey, you have it all. So the bigger you are, the harder you fall… “O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!” (As the Bard would have us believe: Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2, Line 1.) “Then I, and you, and all of us fell down, whilst bloody treason flourished over us.”
Does this not bring to mind the events of the past week, and more, and more to come in similar vein, it seems, despite the pyrrhic victory of the passing of the budget?
Still, it’s way too early to bury our Caesars. Because so many are still rendering unto him and them what is their due. Because the worst lives after them, whilst the good (and there is some of it) is oft interred with their bones. And this kingship per se (the institution, not the individuals) has had a long and chequered life… and will no doubt live on long in the public imagination after all the rhetoric dies down, the road to dusty death has been traversed from president’s house to polling booth to parliament, and the poll is done and dusted in a little over a month.
First, though, let me clarify something; in your interests, dears, and for my safety’s sake! It is not of or against a person or a persona or a personage I sing… rather, it is of that office of which it can be said, as the Lord Acton said of another supreme priesthood (the Roman pontifex maximus), that “there is no greater heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it”. It is that office which persuades us that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. It is that office which convinces you, dear reader, that “great men are nearly always bad men”.
It is the executive presidency per se – or kingship, as common coinage has made of its currency – of which we speak and swan about. So this is not an ad hominem comment. On the other hand, the office and the incumbent are almost always inextricably intertwined: like a double helix. The awesome mandate makes the man a movement, then a machine, and finally a monument to itself. Even in so petty a republic, the Mikado is no pocket Caesar, somebody special, and his Lords High-Poo Bah themselves are not to be pooh-poohed.
But this is precisely what both defenders and detractors of the kingly crown so hotly being contested are all but begging us to do. Consider.
Those who wanted the crown to be a splendid one shaped whole constitutions to warrant it. Those to whom it was ostensibly intended to pass on did not inherit the first wily old fox Caesar’s mantle. The plebeian on whom it descended had an uneasy head over whom the sceptre hung like a Damocles’ sword after the able Brutus and his capable compatriot Cassius sought it through an impeachment. The unwitting and unwilling Cl-Cl-Claudius who came into power quite unexpectedly but didn’t last long enough to make a difference to the august office either way was quite pedestrian in his presidency. A warrior queen in the person and work of Boadicea who swept in on a wave of emotion and empathy made an egregious and dishonourable mess of it, allegations of bribery and corruption and all, pre-empting her altogether more noble but effete nemesis’s stab at the purple by pulling the rug out from under his feet whilst extricating three key ministries from his grasp. And the last late great incumbent has his work cut out to continue wearing the imperial toga, while his challenger, the latest aspirant, seems to leave something to be desired in terms of sterner stuff that ambition must be made of.
Those who won’t stand a chance of achieving it for themselves, condemn it roundly. Those who don’t realise or appreciate its value, call for its abolition – a repeated clarion that has been the swansong of many failed coalitions who can’t recognise that the people have come to rely on it, for better or for worse.
It is a rock for the weak. It is a refuge for the unsure. It is a rubbish heap for the ambitious, unscrupulous, corrupt. It is a respectable cloak for the emperor with no new clothes at all save the skin of fallenness.
And the fault lies not in ourselves, or the office itself, but the faded or shooting stars who aspire to the purple, the imperial toga, the seat of Caesars, the kingship of a little island republic awaiting the advent of a true king.
This reminds me that today is Advent Sunday, when an ancient tradition remembers the first coming of such a One. That also recalls to mind a favourite song of yours truly, penned by a long-dead lover of Lanka who has been called The Poet of Ceylon. There are lines in that hymn to true kingship which our would-be Caesars would do well to heed. The ending is particularly uplifting, as it describes the attitude with which the writer’s imagination captures the heart of adoring citizens of that kingdom:
“To him our land shall listen / To him our land shall kneel / All rule be on his shoulder / All wrong beneath his heel / O consummation glorious / Which now by faith we sing / Come cast we up the highway / That brings us back the king.”