Long Live The King! - The Importance Of Monarchy And Why Americans Should Not Be Afraid Of It

No Kings! was the meme of the recent anti-Trump protest, a hastily confected, airy thing concocted by opponents of the President who have been at sixes and sevens since his victory.  The Left, flummoxed by his decisive reforms and scrambling for a legitimate, policy-oriented response, have come up with nothing but nostrums - nothing of any substance to counter the President's moves to reduce the size of government, remove every trace of DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusivity), refocus the military on muscular defense and soldierly warfare, energize the private sector, close the borders, and promote a Machiavellian nationalism. 

 

Instead, the harping, wheedling, and whining continues, toy arrows shot from children's bows, insignificant, harmless sallies against a strong, defiant, and unbowed president; and the demonstrations intended to expose his supposed anti-democratic, arrogated royal concentration of power have been seen by opponents and defenders alike as a gasping, childish attempt at 'veracity'.  The truth of this monarchical bigot must be known, and the king toppled. 

Now, if the truth be known, the idea of monarchical rule has its appeal.  The assertion of concentrated power and authority has been history's rule for millennia.  The world would still be a Paleolithic veldt had it not been for kings, queens, shahs, emperors, and shoguns.  Louis XIV, Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Suleiman, and Cyrus the Great were not just imperial puppets, but masterful, determined, visionary men who extended empire and high culture, created wealth, learning, and art, and are examples of the best of human intelligence, will, and ambition.

The empires of Europe, Persia, India, China, and Japan are the result of such kingship, monarchy, and supreme rule; and those countries which remember their past cultural history and still hew to its imperial principles have avoided the divisive, chaotic, impossibly ungovernable situations of the Europe today, awash in anti-establishment immigrants determined to undermine the very foundations of Christian liberalism. 

China is unapologetically imperialist, Confucian, capitalist, and authoritarian and is soon to become the world's unchallenged politico-economic power.  Russia, Turkey, Poland, and Hungary have turned to their imperial pasts for inspiration and defiance against the flaccid democracies of the EU and the West; and the conservative opposition in France, Britain, Italy, and Germany has made clear their intentions to return their countries to Christian, European, traditionalist roots.

 

Shakespeare wrote scathingly about Jack Cade, the peasant turned would-be revolutionary in Henry VI, Part 2. He was a caricature of the ignorant, willful, venal, and brutish peasant.  He and his like knew nothing – could never know anything – about affairs of state, high culture, and courtly sophistication.  For better or worse – and Shakespeare pulled no punches when he described the inanity of the petty causes and feeble justifications for the War of the Roses – the aristocracy was the foundation of England.

The aristocracy provides an important cultural anchor to society.  It embodies the unbroken history of its culture.  The Queen of England was the inheritor of Empire, Enlightenment, parliamentary democracy, and a long tradition of the unification of Church and State.  The ancestors of the present Conte de Villiers de Rochambeau Artois fought the Infidel in Jerusalem, sat at the court of The Sun King in Versailles, and fought against the Scots.

The ancestors of Emmanuel de Miramon Fargues rode in the Third Crusade.  He was the last in a long line of French aristocrats who had fought for Christianity, suited up in the wars against usurping English kings, fought Henry V courageously at Agincourt, survived the Jacobin Reign of Terror, defied the little Corsican Napoleon in his predation and murderous wars of vainglory, were advisors to Louis XIV, and arbiters of high French culture for centuries.

Getting rid of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was easy, but not so the aristocracy. Even the most patriotic Frenchman understood that the post-Revolutionary period was far too bloody, vengeful, and above all chaotic for the new Republic, and eventually welcomed back the aristocracy which could provide the social order that France had enjoyed for centuries.  Emmanuel's family was one of those celebrated and revered and quickly regained its position and social, cultural, and moral authority.

French greatness, said Emmanuel, was thanks only to the aristocracy.  Yes, the peasantry had tilled the land, worked the mills, and fought in the trenches in foreign wars, but it was the dukes, counts, viscounts, and other well-bred members of the court who patronized the arts, promoted and preserved French culture, and continued to serve as the anchor of a great nation.

Alexander Hamilton disagreed with Jefferson's populism and promotion of majority rule.  The mob could not be trusted with the fate of the nation, and at the very least a body representing a more temperate, broad, intelligent view of governance should be created to mitigate the necessarily self-interested, venal, and uneducated views of the many.  The English system, regardless of its colonial rule over America, was a masterful combination of monarchy, aristocracy, and democratic institutions, room for all as long as the central, historical, cultural ethos was not disturbed. 

The American society that Donald Trump inherited from his successor, Joe Biden, is a chaotic, divided, culturally rudderless nation.  Progressive policies have encouraged cultural separatism in the form of race, gender, and ethnicity.  The ethos of America as written in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, is Christian, individualist, patriotic, and respectful.  This ethos was intended to be and always remain central to the Republic.  America might be a pluralistic nation, but all should gravitate towards the center, pull for the same objectives, live according to common principles.  

There would be no need for a king, said Jefferson, because the fundamental intelligence of a democratic people would prevail.  Hamilton disagreed, and his vision of a nation descended into a chaotic version of governance has come true. 

So if Donald Trump has kingly intentions, they are not of the Caligula variety - the brutal, savage, oppressive rule of tyrants - but of Victoria, Tai Zong, Xerxes, Peter, and Chandragupta I.  Trump understands that a country so far gone in centripetal politics, the fragmentation of culture and society, and the morass of sectarian fighting cannot survive against the imperial will of China and Russia.  He cannot become king, but his attempts to restore an originalist core to the nation is kingly. 

America shares this ambition with much of Europe, whose conservative leaders have seen the same descent into chaos, the same loss of a central ethos, and the resultant ungovernable, weak, inchoate society and have decided to do something about it.  They are not apologetic about their respect for the Christian, imperial, highly cultured world of the past and hope to restore at least some of its influence. 

This contemporary era is a political watershed - the times are changing, and the democratic free-for-all is over.  Order will be restored and all citizens will march to the same drummer.  A call to Orwellian autocracy? Far from it.  Only a return to originalist values, a cultural, spiritual, and philosophical center around which culture can diversify and proliferate. 

No kings? Shortsighted, historically myopic, and hopelessly vain.  The centralization of Donald Trump is not a concentration of federal power but a concentration of citizens around a central, ethical core. 

Lourdes In Bethesda - Miracles, Magic, And Two Old Virgin Marys Preach Righteousness To Suburbia

Adalina Perez and Paula Oleander were old ladies of worth - or at least that was what had been ordained from them early on in their lives.  Adalina, a Dominican, showed light and promise as a young child growing up in the Bronx, a girl of simple faith and devotion, a pert, curly-haired little girl who was often seen on 116th Street selling fresh empanadas made by her mother Luisa who worked for a wealthy Jewish family downtown but found enough time to to make her special, savory, delicious treats. 

Adalina did well at school but never near the top of her class.  She was rewarded more for punctuality and attendance than any academic promise, but unlike many of her classmates who dropped out early, she graduated and somehow - some said it was thanks to her sexual precocity and friendship with Alonzo Rodriguez,  Alderman from the Bronx who took a shine to the young girl and secured her a place at City College. 

It was there that the young Adalina became aware of her heritage. The times were long before the identity/diversity movement of today, and rather than being included for her difference, was marginalized because of it. She was indeed far less bright and talented as the majority Jewish students, many of whom were later to become well known jurists and Hollywood producers, but she had enough piss and vinegar to resent, revolt, and object.  She became known as 'that wiry-haired cunt from uptown' who was never given the time of day, and who spent a dreary four years making her way but little more. 

She became a school teacher in a white East Side school - she had tamed her hair, lightened her skin, and lifted all Bronx Latino-isms from her speech. She was a good, if ordinary teacher, and without much fanfare collected her paycheck, prepared her lessons, and returned home to the Bronx at night. 

It was on the Lexington Avenue line that she met Luis Rodriguez, a Bronx Hispanic of Puerto Rican and Dominican parents who, like her, had made his way downtown with the same providential political friendships but without the sexual allure of Julia, and his admission to Columbia despite his ordinary academic record and test scores, was secured; and when he met Julia he was on his way to law school, admission again politically engineered, for he had neither the ability or legal penchant for normal acceptance. 

 

In any case, they were a good match, one thing led to another, and they were married in the Church of Santa Maria on a sunny May morning. 

Their move to Adams Morgan, then a solidly Hispanic neighborhood of Washington DC, was the perfect nurturing environment for their transformation into progressive activists.  There, among thousands of Latinos, most illegally in the country but trying their best to survive if not prosper, the Rodriguez couple were converted from white wannabees to Latin movers.  Everything Hispanic was right and proper, from street slang to enchiladas, tacos, and black beans. 

Luis joined a Latin advocacy non-profit and Adalina became a member of the Hispanic Teachers Alliance, a subsidiary of the teachers union and one committed to the promotion of Latino educators and the promotion of Hispanic culture within the school system.  The two had become wedded to a cause, and had dedicated their lives to preserving the dignity of the Hispanic. 

All this would have been well and good, but along with their Hispanic focus came necessary allegiance to the emerging progressive canon of the times, and before long were as fully participant in all measures of liberal enterprise as any.  In time, progressivism became more than a means to an end but the end in itself.

 

Although welcomed by their progressive colleagues, they were never accepted by their more conservative peers. In fact, they both had become rather fervid and tightly wound as they got older, refused any dialogue with 'the uninitiated' and were wholly and unremittingly cancel-minded when it came to outsiders.

Adalina became insufferable, and she became hyper-sensitive to perceived insults and ethnic innuendoes.  Everything to her ears was a slur, a deliberate attempt to demean, derogate, and dismiss her.  Of course the current debate on illegal immigration inflamed her and drove her over the top.  She became a whirling dervish of anti-ICE and anti-Trump hatred, a vixenish, ugly, demented harridan. She and her husband built impenetrable walls around themselves and no one but the politically saved were let in.  Acquaintances with even a trace of circumspection let alone conservative sympathies were cancelled. 

Personality, character, humor, faith, intellect, irony, and creativity went out the window. Political philosophy was the only measure of faith and reliability.  The two of them had become insufferable, narrow, hectoring, inmates of a horrifically crazed institution. 

Paula Oleander was born and raised in Bogota by wealthy middle class parents, had come to America as many of her cohorts had, to study, and graduated from a respectable eastern university - not Harvard or Yale but by no means at the bottom of the list. There she majored in Hispanic studies with a minor in South American literature - a rather obscure area of study since the continent, other than for a few fantasists of Magical Realism, had produced little of note.  Yet she went at her studies like a feral dog and managed to graduate with acceptance to another third-tier university for graduate studies.  There, as she had as an undergraduate, pursued Hispanic studies and culture. 

Well-educated, well-bred, and moderately-schooled, she became drawn to progressivism via academics. Most eastern universities at that time, as now, were solidly liberal, and soon she was drawn as a poster child for Hispanic identity and as a living example of diversity, equity, and inclusivity.  In fact she subsumed her by now quite white, traditionalist American persona into this political nexus, and like Adalina became a committed progressive. 

Paula, however, unlike Adalina became a moderately wealthy suburbanite and somewhat of a Gertrude Stein.  She held gatherings, social seances, poetry readings, book clubs, and ladies teas all in the interest of 'culture' but always with strong progressive undercurrents.  Most recently she organized a celebration of a minor Maryland artist whose paintings of Keane-like wide-eyed black children displayed the kind of inter-racial sensitivity and empathy that Americans needed. 

She had the good breeding and good taste to keep her passionate progressivism in check and moderately expressed, but at heart she was no different from Adalina in her commitment to social justice. While temperate and quiet, her offerings were as pedestrian, uninspired, and lacking in any thought or insight as her counterpart. 

As fate or serendipity would have it, the two by now old women met each other in Bethesda where Adalina and her husband had moved - their only capitulation to capitalism ever - to the suburbs and were virtual neighbors of Paula.  It was only a matter of time that the two met at one of Paula's seances. 

While never good friends - their backgrounds and education were simply too far apart - they were the progressive bookends of Bethesda, both committed to the same idealistic progressivism, but each going about it in different ways.  They were called a bit harshly but not unfairly by some as 'The Old Virgins Of Bethesda'.

They rarely saw each other but were aware of each other's doings, respectful at a distance, but dogs from different packs.  The flapped away and banged on in their own ways about diversity, equity, and inclusion, shook their heads at the anti-Hispanic Gestapo-like roundups of their ethnic soulmates, but by now were too old to demonstrate. 

They both faded into obscurity once the Trump revolution had become endemic and universal.  All the shibboleths of progressivism were being toppled one by one, and the two old ladies didn't know what to do with themselves.  The stuffy basement gatherings of alte kockers who fell asleep at the throbbing pedantry of Paula's events became fewer and fewer; and Adalina and Luis eventually moved to Florida where they both had Hispanic family roots. 

And so it was across the nation, or at least up and down the coasts - liberal women like Adalina and Paula faded into the woodwork, took up crochet and gardening, and retired quietly. 

Community - The Last Refuge For The Faint Of Heart

The hostess at the vernissage - a gathering to celebrate the works of a local artist - talked about community.  As she looked around the room and wondered at the marvel of such a diverse assembly all having come together to celebrate the life of an ordinary woman who turned childhood reflections into art, she smiled.  Comfort for the aged, she intimated, but defiantly added, 'But we are not done!' 

Her appeal was lost on the group all of whom wished they were somewhere else rather than in an airless suburban basement listening to the artist's interpretations of the childhood memories she put on canvas; but such is the nature of the beast.  Getting old is not for the faint of heart. Any port in a storm, although this one, rotten timbers, emptied bilge, and oily, scummy residue, was perhaps not the one these friends had expected. 

Community is lifeblood, said the hostess who was full of the moment, warmed by the association of so many friends and former colleagues who had come together to celebrate the artistry of an ordinary person who had given heart and soul 'to the world'.  

'If you knew that the rule that you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?, asks the Anton Shugur character in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men; and that surely was the thought running through many of the heads of the assembly when they heard that the artist, now in her eighties had spent five hours a day, every day, at the easel. 

 

But most of the group were old academics who had taught at a minor university, an institution that had just been bumped up by the state from community college to something more respectable, but still was the go-to place for students with little promise but hopes of something bigger than the third-rate suburban life in which they had been brought up. 

Art at Milford College - MK as it was cattily called because of the low literacy rate of its students - was an add-on to the core technical curriculum offered there; so for the group there was no disconnect between the simple swatches of color and exaggerated effects of the artist's works and great art.  All one and the same, so everyone was happy.  They all had soldiered along huffing and puffing to make intellectual ends meet, so her effort was applauded not for excellence but with empathy. 

'Community', the hostess went on.  'Community, that all-important glue that holds us together, especially in these troubled times'. 

 

It was only a matter of time before the miseries inflicted by Donald Trump were brought up, and there was a knowing nodding when the reference was finally made.  

A murmur went through the gathering and a black woman stood up and said, 'Amen'.  There was a gleeful happiness in everyone in the room reading from the same prayerbook, feeling the same desperation, the same empathetic sympathy for each other, the same gloriously righteous feeling of belonging to a community of the like-minded. 

Resisting the urge to go on about what was happening outside the room, the hostess returned to the business at hand, and went on with her eulogy of the artist 'whose insights, sensitivity, and sublime perceptions have enriched our world'. 

One by one the artist displayed her canvasses, each more incredibly ordinary than the next, but felt it necessary and in keeping with the spirit of the group, to explain how and why she came to paint the scene before them. 

'Where does your inspiration come from?', she was asked. 

The artist looked confused, for of course the question had never come up for her as she painted whatever image came into her head that day.  She stumbled to find an appropriate answer to an essential question getting at the nature of artistic enterprise; but since there had been no depth of feeling, insight, or existential questioning of this pots and pans weekend dabbler, she could not reply. 

'Let me rephrase the question', the man in the back went on, and more kindly and gently, he moved the question away from serious matters to the fanciful colors and jagged black marks on the two paintings before the group. 

'Oh, yes', the artist said. 'Now I understand', went babbling on for ten minutes about nothing of any importance or relevance whatsoever. 

The show went on and on until the back row had fallen sound asleep, and the front row was nodding off. The artist, for the first time publicly celebrated, was in her element and simply could not shut up. She rambled on about her beloved father who was losing his sight and his vitality until she read him one of her poems; her long-deceased brother 'who picked acorns in the Fall'; her friends who braided each other's hair until she realized that no one was paying the least attention. 

The hostess was right in a way.  The group that had gathered around something other than potted plants and verbena had indeed left the assembly happy and satisfied. There was, as the hostess had remarked, more to life than they expected; and if it took some bad, horribly pedestrian art to wake up this somnolent dying-in-place crowd, so much the better. 

The idea that their deeply-felt progressivism had been conjoined with a new appreciation for beauty and artistic inspiration made them feel especially good. 

This affair was not exclusive to Bethesda, Maryland but to living rooms and improved basements everywhere - Bible discussion groups, men's sensitivity sessions, book club gatherings, victim's commiseration meetings were de rigeur, par for the course, part of the inevitable rush to closure.  'Our kind of people' in small groups, a subset of social class, was what helped make some sense out of a very imposing, competitive, individualistic world. 

So, who are we to take exception to the insufferably bad paintings displayed that May Sunday in a suburban basement? Or the treacly poems or the off-the-shelf women's romances chatted about in ladies' book clubs?

Yet there is always something depressing about all of them - time-fillers, cute bibelots on the mantelpiece, distractions, communal empathy - but reminders only of our eager futility. 

She meant well - the bad art, the dutiful questions, the soggy empanadas, the 'breathless love for each other' - and all ended well, back to the Barcalounger and cold cuts, but no one expects Picasso in a suburban Maryland neighborhood, so be happy with what you've got even though you might be fumbling around for answers in all the wrong places. 

The Art Celebration was a waste of time and effort, but part of the end of life scramble; and who is to criticize that?  Well, maybe there are lesser and greater wastes of time and this one was near the bottom, but everyone tried, and we have to give them credit for that.