The demise of Moamar Qadaffi reminds us that there are not many kings left on earth. A form of government which was so obviously right as to be unworthy of debate for most of human history is now largely considered to be an anachronistic absurdity.
Qadaffi did not call himself a "king", of course; his hatred for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia dictated that he refuse that title, as did the fact that he gained power at the ripe age of 27 by overthrowing King Idris of Lybia.
But a king he was, of course, made evident by his cult of personality and the planned succession of his sons. Most of the world today sees that model of government as unacceptable. This is a profound revolution in human thought and organization.
Kingship relies on two irreducible assumptions, whatever form it comes in. One assumption is that decisions are best made by one person, as debate tends to dilute and delay any effective action. The second assumption is that when the king dies, the only way to avoid bloodshed and chaos is to have an obvious successor predetermined.
These assumptions actually work sometimes, but when they don't chaos and war is almost assured.
The first assumption is that power is most effectively wielded by one person. And that is true. But the problem is that "power" is a value-neutral thing; it could be good, but it could just as easily be awful.
When one person has unlimited power, we are all at the mercy of that person. If that person has a good idea, we are in luck. But if that person has a bad idea, there is nothing to ward of that idea.
When power is shared, good ideas are watered down and delayed. And that is incredibly frustrating. But more importantly, awful ideas are watered down and delayed as well. And for that, we should all thank God.
The second assumption is that inherited power prevents chaos and war. Again, sometimes this works. But even when it does work, there is absolutely no reason to think that the best person for the job just happened to have been born to the King.
Henry VIII is an interesting example. His obvious heir was his son, who was only 9. The fact that making a 9-year old King was "obvious" is but one example of how absurd this system is, especially when we consider that the 9-year old boy had a 31-year old sister when he became king.
Henry's 9-year old son became the ruler instead of his 31-year old daughter. So in addition to the absurdity of the idea of inherent and divine right and might, we have the absurdity of sexism to the point where we choose a 9-year old instead of a 31-year old solely by virtue of what's in their pants.
Henry's 9-year old son was king for 5 years. Then he died. The daughter then took over for 5 years. She died, known as Bloody Mary. So who came next? Was there a search for educated and empathetic people? Of course not.
Next in line was Elizabeth. Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn, had been declared (literally) an incestuous witch and had her head cut off, despite the fact that she was the Queen of England. Yet her daughter became queen and remained queen for half a century.
So the system failed in England. They had a female ruler for a half-century, born to a witch, no less. According to their worldview, that would be like us having a......well, having a 9-year old boy be our president. But their system allowed them no other choice.
There is still great nostalgia and romance associated with kingship. (Our obsession with the recent "royal" wedding in England serves as proof). But we have also witnessed kingship, as an idea, being utterly eviscerated for the past century.
There are very few kings left. Some are not called "king". (Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il) Some are. The good news is that they are few and far between. The bad news is that they are occasionally necessary.
But the impossible part of it is that nobody can identify the necessary conditions for a king except for....a king. And a king always wants to be king.
As Americans, we were all raised on a steady diet of white hat-black hat, good guy-bad guy stories. But in real life, of course, morals and motives are always far more mixed than in our preferred fictional templates.
The Clinton scandals are representative of this truth. Yet pro-Clinton and anti-Clinton partisans muddied the water by insisting on a black and white approach. Pro-Clinton people often implied that there was nothing wrong with the President's conduct because it was "personal".
Anti-Clinton people implied that anyone not demanding the President's resignation was endorsing his personal behavior and that all means were justified towards the end of discovering personal sins.
The truth, however, is that there was no shortage of "wrong" on both sides of this fiasco. But the amazing thing is that President Clinton did less "wrong" than his attackers. This messy truth calls into questions many of our perceptions of law, morality, and privacy.
We all know that what Clinton did was wrong. And since it's so short and sweet, we'll stipulate that point first. Clinton engaged in sexual acts with a woman who was 1) not his wife 2) his subordinate in the workplace, and 3) half his age.
That's what Clinton did. What is important to note is that 1) I don't defend any of his behavior, and 2) NONE of the above behavior is illegal.
The President was impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors concerning an action that was not a crime. That should give us pause.
Here is what his enemies did wrong:
1) After investigating the Whitewater land investments that the Clintons made in Arkansas, no criminal conduct by the Clintons was ever found. When they realized they could not indict the Clintons in this matter, Clinton's enemies did not end their investigation; Instead, they expanded it into the President's sex life.
2) The excuse for the entree into Clinton's sex life was a sexual harassment suit filed by Paula Jones against the President. Since nobody ever alleged that the President's affair with Monica Lewinsky was not consensual, this conduct had no relation to the Jones suit other than that they both involved "sex" (even though there was no sexual conduct in the Jones case)
3) In investigating the President's affair with Lewinsky (remember, there was never any allegation that this affair was "illegal"), Clinton's enemies used illegally tape-recorded phone calls between Monica Lewinsky and her "friend", Linda Tripp.
4) In order to extract a confession from Ms. Lewinsky (a "confession" about something that was NOT a crime) the investigators detained her in a hotel room and refused to let her call her lawyers, instead threatening to send her to prison. When this did not sufficiently loosen Ms. Lewinsky's lips, the investigators then threatened to imprison her parents.
5) After determining, through illegal phone recordings and coerced statements from Ms. Lewinsky sans lawyer, that the President had an affair with Lewinsky, the investigators planned to ask the President if he had sexual contact with Lewinsky, hoping to trap him in a lie. They did so during the Paula Jones deposition.
6) While testifying in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, investigators asked Clinton about Lewinsky even though Lewinsky had never alleged sexual harassment, making that line of questioning entirely irrelevant. And when they asked the President about this non-relevant non-crime, he lied.
That is the "crime" that Bill Clinton was impeached for, after being investigated non-stop for 6 years. The issue is not whether we defend Clinton's conduct with Lewinsky, but rather how anyone could justify the conduct of his accusers.
Clinton's pursuers spent $80 million to prove that he committed adultery and setting up a situation in which Clinton would lie about this affair while being deposed about an entirely unrelated issue.
The budget for the 9/11 commission was $5 million.
The persecution of William Jefferson Clinton was not a good vs. evil morality play; it was bad vs. evil. And just how evil does one need to be to make Bill Clinton look like a victim?
While I have enormous moral and ethical and economic arguments against many of the laws of our land, I am proudly a part of the huge majority of people who feel that laws are necessary. The subject of law is as old as civilization itself. The need for law is clear to most people.
But I do not wish to question the need for law. The issue here is not whether laws are needed. Instead, this is an exercise in identifying unasked questions. As soon as these questions are asked, their merit is obvious, and we chastise ourselves for being so foolish as to not raise them earlier.
So here's the question: The question is not "do we need laws?" because the answer to that is obvious. The question, rather, is "who WROTE the laws that we are all beholden to?" Long story short, we largely follow dead mens' laws.
Perhaps our most-quoted (and therefore our most misquoted) founding father was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had an idea that there should be a revolution every generation. The more famous words in this quote have to do with the "tree of liberty being watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants".
But Jefferson was not calling for the perpetual violence that seems implied by the statement. He was not calling for war every 20 years, but rather a revisiting and revision of laws and assumptions, preferably through the democratic process.
A biography of Caesar which I am currently reading does a fantastic job of articulating this shackling to the past. Just as in the United States today, Rome had become dysfunctional due to this blind allegiance to the assumptions of men who had been dead for centuries.
"Their judgment was not necessarily powerful because it was right, but it was right because it was powerful."
In other words, might makes right. This has been a fixture of American domestic and foreign policy for decades.
"From the earliest times Rome had set great store by preserving and handing down the customs of the fathers. And as no one knew or could even imagine that the Roman order as a whole was no longer able to respond to the exigencies of the age, the only possible explanation for the present crises and emergencies was that the old customs were no longer properly practised. It was therefore necessary to be all the more punctilious in observing them"
This idea also increasingly dominates our politics. Since we cannot conceive of any flaw in our system, which we consider to be inherently ideal, the only explanation we can offer for our failures is that we are failing to properly mimic men who died a century before the invention of the automobile.
In other words, we refuse to consider that Jefferson's system may no longer be relevant, so we therefore assume that our problems result in us not properly imitating Jefferson.
"Respect for the old, formerly a rule, now become a binding law. Often it was no longer the rules of the ancestors that were raised to the status of dogma, but what was written about them, as it were, in the history books."
This is an important caveat, because in our desire to imitate the founders, we selectively edit their actual conduct according to our own preconceived biases. So, rather than following the founders (which is irrational enough in its own right) we instead follow our own self-projected and self-serving images of what the founders would do in our shoes.
"The Senate regime was anything but convincing, with its insistence on complaisance and consideration, its time-wasting and obsession with trifles, and above all its utter refusal to countenance anything new.
The political order was full of absurdities, which only made sense because society still believed in them. Yet what was so maddening was society's increasingly rigid attachment to the past."
All nations reject any other nation's right to occupy their territory or meddle in their politics. But sometimes, we are not occupied by foreign armies; sometimes we are occupied by dead ones.
