January 20, 2005
Hail to the Chief
Once upon a time there was a big country ruled by a parliament with a bit of input from a king. The king was a decent enough fellow--not the sort who would go down in history as the greatest of all time, but also not the sort that made the peasants throw dung and Molotov cocktails at his carriage.
He ruled at a time when people were relatively content. The wealthy raked in their dividends, the middle class got by, and the disenfranchised still had little hope for getting their share. It was just typical of the times, and while everyone knew there was room for improvement, none really blamed the king.
Actually a few did blame the king. They had ideas of their own. One of these fellows was the king's brother Wallace. Wallace thought the country was falling into an abyss of moral turpitude that only he could remedy. He also wasn't getting nearly as many juicy dividends as his brother so he wanted to remedy that as well. The only way he could see to achieve this goal was to become king himself.
Of course there are rules to becoming king. Traditionally if one isn't born to the crown, but has a powerful army, one can take over through a violent coup. Such leadership rarely lasts, because soon some other fellow comes along and does the same thing. Now instead of being head of state, one finds his head cut off and displayed atop of pike. Messy business.
But if one is born to the family, one has more options. A sharp knife to the throat of the monarch serves quite well if one is second in line for the throne and can find a scapegoat to take the fall. In this case it is best to find a scapegoat that everyone can agree upon. If you can find someone with different religious beliefs who has already professed to disliking the king, that's even better.
Wallace had no moral qualms about killing his brother, but the idea of watching him bleed made him a little queasy. So instead, Wallace brought together his best cronies to hatch a new plan. Well-versed in the ways of marketing and public relations, the cronies decided to send the king on a series of state visits to countries chock full of natural resources and people who dressed and prayed differently than did they.
While on tour they arranged for the king to simply disappear. The people were in shock. Never had such a thing befallen one of their own. Wallace took it upon himself to calm the nation. His cronies wrote up a series of inspiring speeches in which he coerced the masses into condemning the evil others. The media picked up the pace spreading the word far and wide that Wallace would not allow such atrocities to spread unchecked. As acting monarch he declared war, invaded the offending nation, and quietly filled his coffers with the shiny spoils of war.
The people cheered, for they knew they were spreading their own values of goodness and decency to the world. They had no idea that one of their own countrymen had taken the king to a remote island to live out his reign in silent exile. They had no idea that the people they were killing already possessed their own notions of goodness and decency.
Wallace said they were right and that was all they needed to know. This made them all feel good about themselves, because even if they were out of work or down on their luck they knew they were better than someone else and that made them happy and righteous. In fact it made them so exuberant that a tiny fraction more than half of them voted to have the King declared dead so that Wallace could take the throne.
Thus only a few years after the King had disappeared, Wallace was crowned in the most elaborate coronation ceremony ever conceived. Dipping into royal coffers he spent so much that even some of the disenfranchised were put to work--for a full day. Wallace spent the night celebrating on the dance floor, never realizing that somewhere on a distant island another king was slowly and methodically making plans to return.
Copyright © 2005 Heidi A. Cool
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