By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday,
December 05, 2024
Vikings have been having an extended moment in pop
culture for the past decade or so. There was Michael Hirst’s creatively titled
drama, Vikings, and its sequel, Vikings: Valhalla. There are
dopey neo-pagans and Amon
Amarth fans out there rowing in the mosh pit and stacks of
silly fantasy novels, fashion, grooming
products—the works.
Strange thing: There were no Vikings. Vikings were not a
thing.
The barbaric alien pagans raiding the English coastline
in their horned helmets? Mostly an invention of 19th century Romantic
literature. The English had a word for the pirates and settlers from Denmark
who gave them so much grief over a couple of centuries before conquering them
for good—they called these Danes … “Danes,” and we still have words such as
Danegeld (a tribute payment to a foreign adversary) and Danelaw (an early
English exercise in multiculturalism) to attest to that. As late as 1911,
Rudyard Kipling was writing about Danes, not Vikings, saying of the custom of
paying for peace:
That is called paying the
Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and
again,
That if once you have paid him
the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
Not all of the raiders were Danes—there were sundry bands
of men from the north known in England as “north men,” or Norsemen or Normans,
as we call the ones who settled in France before returning to England to
conquer the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings.
Some of them were pagans, but Christianity was in the
picture pretty early, too, with the king of Denmark (and, for a time, Sweden)
Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson (yes, the wireless technology is named after him;
the Bluetooth logo is a runic version of his initials) officially converting
his kingdom to the new faith in the 10th century. They do not
seem to have worn horned battle helmets; the few horned helmets associated with
that time and place seem to have been religious items rather than martial ones.
(Bull-oriented fertility rituals were spread about as far across the ancient
world as bulls were, and you can still watch such rituals performed in Madrid or Mexico
City to Aire-sur-l’Adour.)
They weren’t exotic foreigners, either: The Scandinavians, the Anglo-Saxons,
and the Slavs all were fairly well acquainted with one another, and it was a
more cosmopolitan world than you might imagine: Cnut the Great, the king of
Norway, Denmark, and England, was the grandson of Mieszko I of Poland, founder
of the first unified Polish state and father-in-law to the first (more or less)
king of the Swedes, Eric the Victorious. There is some suggestion that the
people we call Vikings traveled, traded, and settled as far as Baghdad. They
were a sophisticated people, both economically and politically.
The howl-at-the-moon barbarians of popular culture, like
the modern English word “Viking” itself, are a relatively recent invention. The
origins of the word “Viking” are disputed, but what is not in dispute is that
the evocative name played an important role—a central role, in fact—in
transforming the collection of pirates, traders, slavers, settlers, squabbling
potentates, and colonizers of historical fact into the Vikings of legend. A
good, simple name gives us a way of simplifying a complex set of facts and
making them into something more useful to our busy little brains: a
story.
Which brings me, briefly, to my subject: the so-called
Deep State.
There is no such thing. As with the Vikings, it is a name
invented to make sense of a bunch of different people with different ambitions
in different places in different times. There are long-term, unelected
government functionaries who naturally develop their own sets of economic and
political interests after decades in the same agency or in the same general
administrative realm. That employers and employees often have different and
fundamentally rivalrous interests is a fact of life known to anyone who ever
has had the responsibility of managing people in an organization. But the
notion of a unified set of interests acting in concert across dozens of
agencies over the course of years or decades is, simply put, preposterous. For
one thing, the agencies and the factions within them have rival interests
rather than shared interests—the FBI and the CIA famously do not get along, but
you’ll also find petty turf battles and political maneuvering placing Defense
(to take one example) at odds with Energy, or Agriculture (to take another) at
odds with Health and Human Services.
Bureaucratic self-interest is a real thing—the Deep State
is an imaginary cabal.
But it is easier and simpler to talk about the Deep
State, and Donald Trump and the people around him are nothing if not simple and
in search of the easier way. Boot-licking T-shirt peddler, professional
sycophant, and (if Trump is permitted to have his way) future FBI Director Kash
Patel promises to smash the Deep State, but what he actually has proposed is
working to create, for his own ends and those of his masters, something like
the imaginary Deep State he rails against: a fully weaponized federal bureaucracy
that will be put to political purposes in a simple, brutal,
and—inevitably—stupid way.
They are ready to do a lot of damage, but probably not in
the way many of their critics expect and fear. The last time around, the Rotten
Apple Dumpling Gang and its boss spent the first two years trying to figure out
where the keys to the executive toilet were and the next two years promising
that they were three weeks away from releasing a health care plan. Trump 2.0
basically has seven quarters to get something done before Washington turns its
attention to the midterms, after which it may be difficult or impossible to get
anything done at all, particularly if the midterms go badly for Republicans.
And Trump has decided to forfeit one or two quarters in order to spend his time
rage-tweeting his way through the indefensibly stupid nominations of such bottom-shelf
grifters and goofballs as K$H Patel,
Dr. Oz, Pete Hegseth (“Dead man walking!”), Tulsi Gabbard, and Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., who stands ready to make history as the first felon to serve as
HHS secretary, having been nominated by the first felon to be elected
president. If the Trump administration gets to September 2026 without having
gotten much done, the president’s imbecilic nominations probably will be a big
part of that—irrespective of whether they ultimately are confirmed or rejected.
That’s a high price to pay for—at best—a symbolic
victory over an imaginary enemy.
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