By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, October 20, 2020
In the matter of monarchy, Thailand has made one critical
improvement over the United Kingdom: Whereas the British imported their
ridiculous royal family from Germany, the clever Thais have taken the much more
sensible step of exporting their ghastly monarchy to the same country,
with the king, Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun, a.k.a. Rama X,
having abandoned his homeland, famous for its beautiful beaches and gorgeous
police state, and set up housekeeping with his extensive harem at the Grand
Hotel Sonnenbichl in the ski resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, near the
Austrian border. It’s a famous spot: The funny little fellow with the funny
little mustache presided over the winter Olympics there in 1936.
(One might be tempted to think of Garmisch-Partenkirchen
as the Eurotrash Aspen, except that the Eurotrash Aspen is Aspen.)
The absentee monarch is an avid cyclist, and avid for . .
. other pursuits: The Economist quotes a source close to the king
describing his daily schedule: “Bike, f***, eat. He does only those three
things.” No doubt the Bavarian alps provide interesting and rewarding
opportunities for all three. Try the Alpen Käsefondue.
Vajiralongkorn is one of those entertaining throwback
monarchs, one who promoted as the military’s “chief air marshal” his splendidly
well-attended poodle, Foo Foo. And he apparently has a special air-force unit
composed exclusively of his various sexual partners.
Very amusing stuff, if you don’t have to live with it.
But the Thais do have to live with it. The country’s
notoriously strict lèse majesté law makes it a serious crime — up to 15
years in prison — to criticize the monarchy. And, like other police states,
Thailand conflates criticism of the government with sedition, and uses
trumped-up prosecutions for non-political crimes as an instrument of political
coercion. Like any number of left-wing utopias — the Soviet Union, Cuba —
Thailand recruits the medical profession into the service of political
repression, and critics of the king end up locked up in psychiatric hospitals.
(The American psychological and psychiatric organizations’ attempts to classify
certain kinds of political dissent — the kind you might read about in National
Review, for example — as
a form of mental illness should be understood in that context. Plus ça
change, plus c’est la même chose.) Recent protests have been met with
arrests, water cannon, and an emergency decree forbidding any gathering of more
than five people, but the protests have continued. News organizations that have
reported about them are being subjected to persecution.
Even so, when news broke that the king had relocated to
Bavaria, millions of Thais took to Twitter to ask the same question: “Why do we
need a king?”
They don’t, of course. Lots of countries, including this
one, have got along just fine for a good long time without so much as a viscountess,
much less a king. But H. sap. is a barely improved chimpanzee, and the
desire for a king is imprinted very deeply into human beings, who crave
something to which to submit. So they will have a king. “We want a king over
us!” the Israelites demanded. “Then we will be like all the other nations.”
Samuel warned them:
This is what the king who will
reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his
chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots.
Some he will assign to be
commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his
ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and
equipment for his chariots.
He will take your daughters to be
perfumers and cooks and bakers.
He will take the best of your
fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants.
He will take a tenth of your grain
and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants.
Your menservants and maidservants
and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use.
He will take a tenth of your
flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves.
When that day comes, you will cry
out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the Lord will not answer you
in that day.
(What, a tyrant who takes only a tenth of your
income? Mirabile dictu!)
Why would the ancient Israelites — or anybody else — want
a king?
The king is first and foremost an object of idolatry.
Idols are usually familiar things, even household things. They take the shape
of people or animals, or other objects one commonly encounters. We do not go
out into the world looking for things to idolize but idolize that which we
already know. Idols are a way of making abstract and slippery things more
concrete and tractable. Writing in The Golden Bough, James George Frazer
instructs his reader not to sneer at the primitive man and his quaint
superstitions, but to understand them as the first blindly groping effort of
our species to articulate what we would now understand as a product of science:
a set of stable, predictable rules governing how the universe behaves.
But we had (and have) a hard time thinking in incorporeal
terms, so we fixate on the things we understand most intimately: people and
animals, especially domesticated animals. (Remember, it was a golden calf the
Israelites worshiped, not a representation of a wild animal.) We secular-minded
moderns are hardly immune to that: Look around Washington, and you will not see
monuments and memorials to liberty
and democracy, but a city named
for a man filled with shrines to men: Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Martin
Luther King Jr., the fallen in Vietnam. There is no denying the religious
character of these depictions: Constantino Brumidi’s frescos decorating the
Capitol dome bear the very forthright title The Apotheosis of George
Washington.
The conception of the king as a god on Earth, or as god’s
representative on Earth, is so widespread as to be nearly universal: Egyptian
pharaohs and Japanese emperors are gods or god-men descended from gods; Roman
emperors were deified not only after death but during their lifetimes,
receiving worship in the temples; the British monarch is the head of the
national church; the Chinese have their “mandate of heaven”; and Sarah Huckabee
Sanders insists that Donald Trump is God’s own special anointed leader, a
belief shared by about half of Evangelicals.
The American presidency has always had a sacramental
aspect. But, in recent years, the sacramental and liturgical understanding of
the presidency and the president has crowded out the main character of the
office: chief administrator of one branch of the federal government. As the
president evolves into a kind of semi-divine personification of the nation,
normal politics becomes impossible, because we are not fighting about taxes or
farm subsidies but instead are engaged in a war for the “soul of the country.”
Joe Biden insists his campaign is “about winning the heart and, yes, the soul
of America”; Donald Trump’s campaign ads promise to “Save America’s Soul.”
Elizabeth Dias, in the New York Times, limns
some of the history of that rhetoric:
The soul of the nation is “a very
ancient trope that is revived when all sorts of cultural ideas are in flux,”
Eric Gregory, professor of religion at Princeton University, said. “It reveals
something about the current political conversation, in times of crisis and
change, a corruption of sickness.”
Often we stress systems and
institutions, he said, but in the Trump era there has been a return to ancient
concepts about the welfare of the city, where politics is about right
relationships. “In ancient politics the health of society had a lot to do with
the virtue of the ruler,” he said.
It is for this reason that we believe that the country
cannot be put right if the wrong man is president — and about 40 percent of the
country, maybe more, is going to believe that the wrong man is president at any
given time. Worshipers of this or that tribal totem feel themselves to be
excluded, degraded, and humiliated if the highest elected office in the land is
held by a member of the rival clan. The sacral king is the vessel in which the
tribe as a whole worships itself — and America is no longer one tribe but two.
And so, in that respect, we are not so different from the
Israelites who cried out for a king. As the Lord explains it to Samuel: “They
have not rejected you — they have rejected me, that I should not
reign over them.” People are born terrified and live much of their lives naked
in the darkness, and they are going to worship something: that dopey Thai
king conducting a yearlong orgy in his alpine quarantine, Harry and Meghan, or
even something as debased and tawdry as the American presidency.
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