The idea that we get the leaders we deserve is subtle admission that something other than careful consideration of the facts or weighing up of the arguments is at work.
The individual becomes free of a complex when s/he finds out what s/he needs it for. The collective can be free of poor leadership when they ask the same question.
For what purpose, a fool/king?
A story from Grimm’s, ‘Lazy Harry’, would point to an answer. It’s the kind of tale that is the uninvited guest at the banquet, a glimpse of our collective underbelly, the dark side of three aisles of chocolate at Tescos.
Harry was very lazy and even though he had only a single goat to take out to pasture he resented this intrusion into his day. ‘Why should I have to work like this?’ he demanded under his breath and put his mind to freeing himself from Life’s burdens.
”I know, I’ll marry Fat Trina. She has a goat of her own. She can take mine out with her when she goes to pasture.”
So he marries Fat Trina….
who turns out to be just as lazy as Lazy Harry, ‘Husband, why should we trouble ourselves so much with the burden of two goats? Their bleating disturbs our sleep. Let us swop them for the neighbour’s beehive. They need no looking after and will give us a great wealth of honey.
So they did.
Followed by a long nap.
By the Autumn they had stored up a great pitcher full of honey which they kept next to their bed for safety. Fat Trina armed herself with a mean looking cudgel to ward off thieves, just in case.
Only…, Harry began to suspect that Fat Trina kept checking on the honey way too often. He became afraid she’d eat it all up on account of her being a woman an’ all, or so he reasoned …. ‘Let us swop the honey for a gosling..’ he suggested. Fat Trina was persuaded, ‘but not before I have a child to tend the gosling,’ she declared..
‘But a child won’t listen to you…’ reasoned Lazy Harry. ‘Nowadays they consider themselves cleverer than their parents..’
‘Oh yeah? grimaced Fat Trina, ‘well, I’ll soon show him..’ and began to thrash the air with her cudgel to show how her unborn child’s wickedness would be payed out, when she hit the pitcher of honey and it spilled all over the floor.
‘Not to worry,’ said Lazy Harry gaily, reaching for the last drop as it slid between the floor boards, ‘we can have a rest after the fright we’ve had.’
‘Yes, replied Fat Trina, ‘you know, a snail was once invited to a wedding and arrived at the christening. Outside the house it fell over a fence and said, ”speed does no good”.’
This story, first told centuries ago, is the dark and disturbed cousin of all the other stories that end happily ever after. It plots the doomed flight of collectively inflated ego which imagines that it’s way of life, it’s customs, it’s religion, is more worthy than those of the next person. Harry’s laziness is really a form of assumed privilege that simply expects to have every whim attended, every prejudice ratified. Each decision is about having more entitlement, an ever easier life, instant gratification enshrined.
There is the prospect of something in our immediate future of greater threat than dictatorship emerging in ‘the free world’. It is that anyone opposed to the fool/king, anyone who might affect change, also falls under the mantra/spell, ‘This is not who we are,’ coupled with, ‘if it weren’t for the Russians.’
because it implies that Scrotus has somehow happened despite you, that he is an aberration, an unlucky throw of the dice, rather than the stone cold inevitability of a system subscribed to for centuries that denigrates the Feminine, mocks Otherness and preaches First and Only.
Its not just because Apathy had to yield to Trump even though it got 47% of the vote to his 26% on account of not being bothered about winning and not showing up to anything…
But because even the liberal end of the spectrum is still in denial of the relentless logic that narcissistic culture is bound to spit out more than its fair share of the preening and power hungry that feed on the hate of their detractors.
And when they become the leaders that we love to hate, when we collectively sit about with baited breath for the next serving of bad behaviour to tut and cluck at, there’s some investment in the arrangement that warrants unpacking. And it is this, that for as long as the fool/king is drawing so much attention to himself, our own narcissism, instant gratification and privilege ceases to be an issue and we are returned to righteousness.
The fool/king understands that everyone seems to need him in their own way, as a saviour to identify with for some, or as villain for others; and he’s happy with either role so long as its unequivocal. Likewise, Lazy Harry is utterly nonchalant about the loss of the storehouse of Honey resulting from Fat Trina’s paranoid outburst because it is more important not to be discomforted than to invest in the future. ‘At least the pitcher didn’t fall on my head.’
Any culture that considers itself sufficiently superior to invade others for their own good for centuries at a time is going to imbue the entire collective with materialistic values, disconnection from one another and from oneself, competitively schooled in appearance without concern for substance, alienated from the common good, out of which dark melange the shadow of piety is bound to materialize and run for office.
as candidates for Sleaze.
Being collectively better than everyone else also means being loosed from the constraint of ancient values, unfettered in consumption of the remaining planetary resources dribbling through the floorboards, wasted on angry fantasies about younger folk onto whom our own greed has to be projected in order for the older generation to continue standing tall amongst all the waste, neglect and breakage.
Despite Congress unanimously slapping the President’s wrist this week, they also endorsed a massively inflated military budget for 2019, greater than the next ten nations combined, an increase of 17% on last year, enough to fund free college education for every citizen.
But that might be too much trouble. And it would discomfort the incumbent order. And offend religion. Lets swop it for something more immediately profitable, easier to manage, even if the regression involved winds up smashing the pitcher and wasting the little profit obtained on foreign wars that can’t be won instead of feeding ourselves and our children.
Facing this means acknowledging the advantage of privilege afforded to you by the same institutionalized racism that produced the Donald and which has brutally colonized much of the world ‘for its own good’ since the days in which the story of Lazy Harry was first told.
If, ‘this is not who we are,’ could be tweaked ever so slightly to, ‘this is not just who we are,’ much might be accomplished.
