Why did Tolkien complete his beloved epic with The Return of the King?
Why did the elf queen Galadriel depict herself as waxing terrible with power?
Why have children’s fairytales since the Middle Ages adored The Prince?
Why do modern elites despise the strongman, the patriarchal figurehead, to such a degree that having a barely masculine—masculine in only the most modern, materialistic sense—president elect sent the entire social construct into a frothing rage?
Why is the witch the villainess in fairytales and the unrealized king the hope?
“When it became obvious to Menendez that the strong-willed Calusa would not bow to Spanish authority or religion, Menendez proposed to Spain that he be allowed to take them as slaves and sell them to plantation owners in the Caribbean. The request was denied.”
-George Franklin Feldman, Cannibalism, Headhunting and Human Sacrifice in North America
Every Spanish conquistador was urged by the King of Spain and his agents to spare heathen kings and to treat humanly with the heathen people, sending priests and monks among them. Yet every conquistador slew the heathen kings at the first opportunity and massively slaughtered and enslaved the populace on scales hitherto unknown in the home country or the heathen lands. Just as the lords of England forced their king to break his covenant with the common man and hand them over as slaves to the elite with the signing of the Magna Carta, the bully-soldiers of New Spain—half a world away—shattered the possibility of this patriarchal covenant between the lowest and the highest as a check on the rampant elite.
Is it any wonder that Latin American people have yearned for a strong man to deliver them from evil since the inception of the conquistador states? The rise and fall of dictators in Latin America has been so common that it had become a joke before most of those reading this were born.
The social contract arrived at in the Middle Ages made the best of a miserable situation by placing a divinely ordained king [sanctified by the Church] as the nominal lord of all men. In effect this did little other than keep some measure of hope alive in the lowest of men that there was some authority above those who ruled his day-to-day existence, that the robber baron on the hill, the slave master lord in his big house, had himself a master and might, at least theoretically be called to account for his worst outrages. Most kings were in no position to make rulings on behalf of most of their aggrieved subjects. Even so, peasant myth kept alive the idea that a just king might one day alleviate their suffering, which was brutal, direct, and from the class of people just above them, their owners.
For this reason, common white men in 1783 saw George Washington [himself a murderous oppressor of their class] and would have confirmed him as king if not for Washington keeping his pact with the legislative body. Likewise, since emancipation, black men have worshipped Lincoln despite his documented antipathy toward their kind and the fact that he, as a lawyer, had sent black men back into bondage.
Many kings were bad.
Many kings were weak.
But some kings got it right, which was a hope at least, for it was known through generations of experience, that the man that owned you and the land they you worked never had your best interest in mind and would always exploit you because he had a ladder to ascend. The king did not. Putting a good man on the throne could at least serve up examples of God’s agent on earth ruling against the enslavement of the common people.
In June, 1349 the Parliament of England affirmed the right of propertied men to enslave any unemployed man or woman under age 60.
In 1572 the Queen and her lords enacted the Vagabond Act, making the penniless, jobless and homeless subject to enslavement.
Then came over 100 acts of “enclosure” in which small land owners had their lands confiscated by the elite, to become homeless—which was, incidentally, a capital offense, for which they might be enslaved.
Similar acts were enacted in the very plantations these acts were used to found in America. In America anyone who did not own land or people could himself be taken into irons and enslaved. It is clear in numerous colonial office reports and The Declaration of Independence that the Founding Fathers resented Crown officials attempting to put limits on their enslavement of the low and their abuse and use of those slaves.
Below are some suggestions as to why ordinary people have often hoped for a savior, a savior that would always be a man, a man that would stand up to those that the common man cannot stand up to.
1490s: Under Queen Isabella the move to enslave the inhabitants of an entire hemisphere of the globe was set in motion.
1500s: Isabella’s male successors pleaded with their conquistadors not to slaughter their new subject kings, not to enslave their new subjects, but were unable to rein in the wave of exploitation that Isabella had set in motion.
1500s: Queen Elizabeth sanctioned and partnered in the African slave trade and agreed to laws making slavecatching in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland highly lucrative, as well as giving the go ahead for the “plantation” of slave colonies in America.
1640s-60s: Cromwell [not a king but a factional tyrant] accelerated all forms of white slavery.
1670s-80s: King Charles II tried to curtail kidnapping of English children, admonished colonial governors for abuses and set age limits on human trafficking, to no avail.
1700s: The King of England and his colonial advisors continued to press for limits on enslavement and on slave master treatment of their human property, to no avail. On this trajectory, and upon reading the Declaration of Independence, The Articles of Confederation, U.S. Constitution and first 14 amendments, it is apparent that the American Revolution was fought in part to preserve the leverage of the elite over the lower classes and to sever the common man’s ability to seek recourse from the monarch.
The reigns of Queens see the expansion of the elite [such as in Isabella’s, Elizabeth’s and Victoria’s times] and the reigns of strong kings tend to see the curtailment of the elite power structure to further develop its parasitic web. The king is not supposed to be factional but supra-factional, an intercessor, a balancing figure. Kings, for instance, had their strength enhanced by ruling over separate intact cultures, as these different peoples provided specialized military formations before the age of uniform industrial warfare. Factional tyrants and oligarchies, however, benefit from the erasure of cultural identity, giving them an opportunity to implant ideological differences in order to split the masses along more manageable lines.
I close with a notice from The Articles of Confederation:
Article IV.
“…the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities entitled to free citizens…”
What this meant, on the ground, was that if you were free and had no money, owned no property and were in possession of no “freedom papers” guaranteeing that you had worked off a term of service and had been released by a master, than you could be abducted and sold, your sale advertised in a local newspaper by the jailer.
Benjamin Franklin, a former runaway servant himself, who stated that over half of all Pennsylvanians were unfree, would, in 1787, have a firm hand in the drafting of a document dedicated to maintaining their bondage. In such a morale climate how could a man with an R burned on his cheek and an iron collar welded around his neck, not look up to heaven and wish that God would set down a man over these petty tyrants, a man that counted his power in the number of souls under his rule capable and free to bear arms, rather than according to the number of dollars in his bank account?
The elite have always feared that the demagogue would rise in their time to assume the lost role of the intercessor, filtered through Romanized Christianity down through the Middle Ages from ancient Egypt. He is often—like Alcibiades or Hitler—as much a danger to those who serve him as oppose him. But what he—the man who can appeal directly to those from whom he is separated from by the elite class—represents is the yearning for a father king, one who will not let the big brother torment the younger. In many ways this figure is a myth in the worst, comic sense, as his functional being is, with every passing century, less plausible as the web of social parasitism grows ever stronger and more intricate.
To me, Donald Trump reeks of this elite class, for it is from what he sprang. But, deep inside, the working man in me wishes he’d seize power, dissolve the house and senate, and don a crown of his ancient ancestors instead of the wig he seems to have inherited from the rotten bastards that penned the corrupt documents that confirmed our ancestors bondage beneath on oligarchy of soulless parasites.
Books by James LaFond
James this is truly outstanding. You could read a trunk full of American History books and not get an inkling of the veins of history this one small post has in it. It's so startling in it's conclusions that I'm not so sure I'd get it if I hadn't have read all these post that you peppered me with that lead up to it. True tour de force. You've tied together hundreds of years in a nice tidy package.
I'll tell what's really odd is I was thinking about some the same ideas in a disjointed, erratic fashion. I hear the news every now and then and it seems that ALL they say, and I mean all, is influence election, Hacking votes, Russia Evil, over and over and over and over. I'm thinking to myself surly Trump will crush this CIA director when he gets in office and also how can we ever get out of this mess. I was also thinking that there seems to be no decent honest large institution on the face of planet Earth. They seem to all be corrupt to one degree or another. I guess if you look at it in the fashion you've presented we can:
Refuse to consume and have as little to do with their system as possible.
or
Violently wrench their heads off.
They're not leaving us many options.
Thank you, Sam j.
I have been twisting in the inner winds over this piece for some while and as you can see, it's not pulling as many reads as dykes fornicating in parcel pickup.
I am shocked at myself for leaning so hard on Tolkien these days, having dismissed his mythology along time ago just because so many faɡɡots were so into it.
I hope to round this out some day, some way—I'm thinking of Aristotle, Alexander and The Prince.