Angina Monologue 37

Tap.

Tap tap.

Tap.

Tappity tap tap.

His Majesty is perfectly capable of using a computer, but I think he likes the noise made by a mechanical typewriter. And he takes pride in his typing accuracy (if not his speed) in the same way that he takes pride in filling out his 1040 every year, by hand, in ink.

I have no idea what he’s writing, except that it seems to be a serious project. He’s been at it now for  months and seems to be just warming up. Research appears to be involved, based on the frequent pauses while he reads something on the Internet or cracks open a paper-and-ink book. I suppose the books might be a clue: Biographies of every President between FDR and Reagan. A biography of Goldwater and another of William F. Buckley. Several books on rock and roll bands. A history of the Korean War.

I have not been so impertinent as to ask, and there have been many chores and worries taking up my attention.  My cow-orkers at Death Star, Inc., have lately been living by the old axiom that a government drone’s work is never done. By this I mean that government drones don’t know how to complete anything, no matter how much they bustle about it, which is frustrating to an old Sith like me who is accustomed to His Majesty’s ways of motivating minions. I have sworn off that kind of thing, but it’s hard some days.

I took the Vadermobile to the shop yesterday. It’s an older car, but it checks out. Except that the car has been rattling an awful lot on bumpy roads, of which we have no lack. I mentioned this to the mechanic, and he reported that the front shocks were shot and it will cost $1200 quatloos to replace them. On the other hand, the new ones have a lifetime warranty, which seems like an easy thing to promise when the car already as 180,000 miles on it. His Majesty is displeased and wonders aloud where that money is going to come from. I tell him to leave that to me. (I am, after all, the one with gainful employment.) There’s enough slack in our budget to cover it, though it means putting off the remodel of His Majesty’s bathroom for another three months. And now is not a good time to be buying a new car.

Then there’s the front screen door. His Majesty made the mistake of reading the headlines the other day while still coming back into the house with the paper, and, as a result, the doorknob ended up on the floor in pieces.  The door was already not in great shape, so a couple of friends from church came and helped me put up a new one. They made it look easy; I’m blessed to be in a ward with some very competent people. The new door will be adequate to keep the mosquitoes out and the cats in, so it’s adequate. I don’t remember what the headline was, except it had something to do with another proposed local law.

My relationship with His Majesty has been succinctly described as “I must obey my master”, but there is a little more nuance to it than that. At this point, it’s more like a son looking after an aged and querulous father. I never had a father, of course, though Obiwan somewhat filled that role, before trying to kill me. That sort of thing can put a bit of a damper on one’s enthusiasm for Father’s Day. His Majesty has not been entirely satisfactory in that role, either. In fact, I frequently find myself recalling what Edmund Burke said about the conservative reformer. You know: The part about approaching the faults of the state “as the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude.” The analogy is sometimes uncomfortably apt.

My own children are unlikely to call or send a card. Leia at least is civil, but Luke hardly speaks to me. Something about being much too brutal a disciplinarian with him that time he tried to interfere, after I put Leia in timeout and tried to freeze her no-good boyfriend out of the family. I knew that relationship wouldn’t work out, and I was right, but there is nothing that offends someone more than being proven wrong.

“I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality.”

What’s that, Your Majesty?

“As individuals, men believe that they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, ecomomic and national groups they take for themselves, whatevere their power can command.”

You are curious what my book is about. Those are two quotes I plan to use in it; the first from Goethe, the second from Niebuhr. Goethe believed the human tendency towards mob villany to be a peculiarly German failing, which only shows how parochial the worldview of even the most cosmopolitan man of the early 19th century could be. By the time of Niebuhr, thinking people knew better. The trait is universal.

I am exploring the thesis that humans have a very difficult time living in harmony in anything other than the smallest groups — the family, certainly, and perhaps an extended band of not more than about a hundred others. The observation and number are not original with me, of course, as you and your pitiful little band have often made it yourselves.

I’m not sure if His Majesty refers to my ward, or to the gang here at Junior Ganymede. Or both.

I note that your Mormon ward is around 300, significantly larger than the figure usually tossed about for the maximum size of a real community. The sheeple nevertheless seem to be getting along all right. I suggest that the sense of isolation from a larger community actually works in favor of the small, insular community, allowing it to be larger than would otherwise be the case. I note that similarly large wards in heavily Mormon areas often develop various cliques and other forms of fragmentation.

His Majesty is not impressed with the Church’s effort to jettison “Mormon” in favor of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the name given by revelation. But then he doesn’t believe in revelation. But neither is he really an anti-Mormon. He views my religious affiliation more with avuncular amusement than hostility, and “sheeple” was a deliberate attempt to troll me. I cannot be sure, but I think he views us as a band of misfits, likely aiming to misbehave, but too few to be significant. Which is not actually far off, as the world reckons it.

I shared with him once the observation that anyone who believes Latter-day Saint women are brainwashed and passive has never met a Relief Society president. He responded with that weird cackle of his, but I’m not entirely sure whether he was laughing at me or at modern feminists. Or perhaps both at the same time.

Goethe and Neibuhr were right, of course. The really nasty misbehaviors come out most in the collective, and the larger the collective, the more nasty the misbehaviors. This is why I devoted my political career to establishing a benign autocracy.

His Majesty looked at me with that peculiar gleam in his eyes that suggested he was baiting me. Well, of course he was.

The institution of a royal family is very important. It brings society, at its highest levels, back to the simulacrum of a family organization, with its sense of unity and noblesse oblige. I assert that it is the only way to order a large society so that the worst tendencies of the mob are checked.

Including beheading wives you wish to discard?

Including executing family members who betray the family and break up the family unity. Oh, I know; Anne Boleyn was probably innocent of the specific charges against her. That’s irrelevant. The English people never liked or accepted her and so she was a threat to the image of the harmonious royal family.

I cannot help noting that you never had a royal consort or offspring.

I chose a different model more in keeping with Sith philosophy. Joseph Stalin was a widower by the time his cult of personality peaked, and Hitler avoided marriage. An uncle figure, or a Big Brother, works almost as well as father and mother figures under some circumstances. It helps, of course, if marriage and the family are already weakened as institutions (as with Stalin) or if celibacy is portrayed as a noble sacrifice in service of a Cause (as with Hitler.)

Hitler was not actually celibate.

Of course he was. “Celibate” means “voluntarily unmarried”, not “chaste.”

Now look at the history of these United States. Its founders had a positive horror of democracy, properly understood. They instituted instead a republican form of government, ultimately serving the people and answerable to the people, but not run by the people. Lincoln was only two-thirds correct, which is actually a remarkably good batting average for a politician.

But the human need for a father figure has run over the constitutional order. The President has become much more powerful than the Founders ever intended or would have found acceptable. The mob demanded it. I am not speaking of any particular President, of course; the trend goes back at least as far as Woodrow Wilson, and perhaps as far as Andrew Jackson. The mob demands a father figure.

But this hardly seems like a check on the passions of the mob. Quite the contrary.

Precisely! [Evil cackle].  The problem is that the President is chosen by the people. You must not allow people to choose, and therefore to discard, a father figure. Monarchy solves this problem quite effectively; the king is not chosen by the people, nor even by the elite, but by God. It is true that he cannot push the people too far in a direction they do not wish to go, but his influence for checking their worst passions can nonetheless be considerable.

It’s hard to imagine the mob accepting such a king nowadays.

Nor is it necessary. Remember Hitler and Stalin. Even avowed atheists tend to fall back on a source of transcendence: History, or Science, or Progress. Any of these will do as a basis for legitimacy of an autocratic ruler.

But what if the ruler is a Hitler or Stalin? One can hardly say they checked the impulses of the mob. On the contrary, they embodied and channeled the most murderous tendencies of the mob.

And that is the focus of my study. How does one square that circle? We know that enlightened autocrats, the Marcus Aureliuses and Franz Josephs and Elizabeths and Victorias, are possible.  I see no other way to truly check the mob. How do we put such persons in charge?

I think the more ardent Trump supports could make some suggestions.

Trump is not actually very suitable for founding such a dynasty. It’s not the fecklessness of his offspring; they’re probably not significantly less competent than he is. The problem is that the monarch must be above popular culture, whereas Trump is a creation of popular culture. Britain faces this same problem today, of course; Elizabeth II has successfully placed herself above media scrutiny and is immensely popular, but Charles has been a disaster. The only solution I see is for the monarchy to skip Charles and go straight to William, who has a fairly good public image, if only as the son of the idolized Diana.

Romney might actually have pulled this off, if he had been interested in doing so, if he had been a moderate Democrat, and if he had not been a Mormon. Pity. JFK might also have pulled it off — “Camelot” was an apt metaphor — had he not been assassinated. Nowadays it is particularly difficult to imagine a successful presidential candidate being above popular culture. He would almost have to be an already popular but distant figure, drafted by a party rather than (visibly) seeking the nomination, but that requires that the political parties be much stronger than they presently are. We live in a time of paradox: Very strong partisanship with very weak parties.

The way for political parties to reclaim power is through stronger campaign restrictions on non-party actors. The Democrats led the way on this with their abortive attempt to gut the First Amendment, but that failed badly; and now both the liberal and conservative justices on SCOTUS seem to be close to free-speech absolutists, so our work is cut out for us. Fortunately, we still have the universities and corporate America on the side of censorship, so there is reason for hope.

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap.

His Majesty may be ready to play Taps on the American experiment in republican government, but I think we will all miss it when it is gone. In the meanwhile, I find myself reflecting on a slightly different tradition of societal organization.

President Nelson was not chosen by the members of the Church nor, really, by its elite. The choice of a man as Apostle comes through other men; but after that, it’s up to Providence which Apostle lives long enough to become President of the Church. And for believing members like myself, the choice may come through men, but it is not of men.

And President Nelson is a father figure. He’s literally a father figure, with ten children of his own.

Everything I have seen in the Church in the last few years has highlighted the role of families and wards as communities in which the individual virtues are enhanced, while ensuring that the higher hierarchical levels of the Church do not bring out the human ochlocratic tendency.

It will be very interesting to see how the confrontation between the Church and the mob politics of our day play out.