# The Good King.

# The Good King. It's not surprising that we come to see our masters as good guys. We probably have to do that, just so that we can deal with them (or their icons hung in the family shrine) every day with the proper tone of respect. Here's how one Kentucky miner characterized a mine manager.

Lawson, Lefevre says, was ‘a good feller’; but so was a local deputy sheriff (‘He was a pretty good feller as far as I knowed him’) who Lefevre believes to have been among the murderers of Rev. Musick’s son. (‘He shot a man’s house down here and killed a fellow’s boy. [The boy’s father] was a preacher.’) Being a ‘pretty good feller’ must have been a very relative affair in Harlan County in the 1930s" (Portelli 204).

It's not that the miners were not acutely aware of the conflicting interests of workers and operators, but they had a

verbal strategy . . . to reconcile the representation of an abstract class power with that of harmonious personal relationships in the camp. On one side is an impersonal ‘they’ (‘they do anything they want to . . .’ and ‘they had gun thugs . . .’), endowed with distant and total power. On the other, a neighborly, personal ‘he,’ identified with ‘Old Man’ Lawson, the visible mediator, who was ‘pretty good to his workers’ and kept them from starvation even at the peak of conflict. The combined picture is the essence of paternalism: a personal bond between the oppressors and the oppressed, which obscures under a veil of human relations, even of affection and friendship, the nakedness of exploitation and the totality of power" (Portelli 205).

One guy I know has never mastered the mental gymnastics required for even a make-believe respect for his bosses; cannot maintain an attitude of deference for more than a few minutes without grimacing or smirking; and has undergone a lot of misery for the lack of this basic skill.


Then there are the stories we tell to put down the others who share our subordination. These are common as dirt: the white welfare client putting down welfare as a program for black people; workers abusing other workers on grounds of race or sex; making fun of the people on talk shows as we egg them on. These stories help us justify the informal services we can provide the boss, such as information about her other employees. We can help her cover up her crimes and blunders. We can act as messengers and enforcers, to get the unofficial word out as to what the boss really expects. We can also rush to enforce arbitrary schedules of reward, such as those that distinguish between a grant writer, for instance, and a child care worker. Lower level workers in some industries --health care or education, for instance-- sometimes take pride in the associated status and resist any attempt to unite with co-workers against their employers. That would mean losing that faint aura of reflected white-collar prestige.


Which brings us to the third kind of story, identifying with the boss. And to the extent that clients have committed to the dependent role and foregone other possibilities, and accepted the high costs, then they are correct: they will rise or fall with him. To my comfortable suburban self, the horror of gangsterism is the implicit or expressed threat: kill for the warlord, or die with him when he crashes. I’m guessing that for people in some neighborhoods or countries, this reality is so commonplace it hardly invites comment. Sieg Heil!

The loyalist-for-hire arrangement can operate on a magical as well as material plane. Writes Cohn of medieval millenarians,

Those who attached themselves to such a saviour saw themselves as a holy people-- and holy just because of their unqualified submission to the saviour and their unqualified devotion to the eschatological mission as defined by him. They were his good children and as a reward they shared in his supernatural power (85).

For many of us there’s no clear reward beyond the thrill of mystical communion with the hind mighty, as when teachers exhort students to act like “little princes and princesses,” celebrate billionaires as role models, and base funding requests on the need to make children more “competitive”; when social services staff take it on themselves to police applications for help as strictly as possible, so as not to misspend money that should go to war contractors; when union staffers berate their members for job injuries; and sales clerks damn the income tax. We do Halliburton’s dirty work for it, for free.

If it’s true that servants know their master much better than the other way around, it must also be true that we have learned to some extent to share his problems and prejudices, to look at things from his point of view. W.E.B. DuBois thought this "bifurcated consciousness" would allow subordinates to cast a skeptical eye on the stories our masters tell, but I think we all know little manikins who adopt the masters' view, quite sincerely. Finally, we sometimes get the feeling that our humble work and lowly status is all worthwhile, because it's for a bigger cause (the great man's happiness; the business; America).

So let me list the fourth outstanding feature of patron-client systems: they cut across class, age and gender lines and interfere with collective action, especially on the part of subordinates.

In a sense we're primed for patron-client systems because of a long tradition of the ideal of a Just King. Our fantasies of being cared for by a superior being go way back. King Arthur was one such. Did you know he and his knights are snoozing in a cave somewhere, ready to spring back to life when their country needs them? Cohn's Pursuit of the Millenium describes a whole series of appearances of the Sleeping Emperor / Emperor of the Last Days from the fourth to the fourteenth centuries.

Here's how it would usually go. In periods of war, plague and famine (or rather, when these were a bit more intense than usual), some hermit or crazy monk would claim to be Emperor Frederick or Baldwin or whoever come back from the dead to bring the reign of peace and justice; he'd raise an army of starving peasants; they'd march around for a while slaughtering priests, nobles, and Jews; they'd eventually get cut to pieces by the better armed knights. As late as the 1770's Pugachev, claiming to be Peter III back from the dead, was raising an army of Cossacks and peasants against the Empress Catherine. Scott describes uprisings of French peasants and Haitian slaves "in the name of King So-and-so", sparked by rumors that the king had restored old privileges or granted new ones.

Nor is this purely a European phenomenon. These examples merely extend a much earlier messianic tradition that we know of through the Bible. The Hidden Imam of the Shia falls squarely within this tradition. Spiro says of the Burmese:

Millenial Buddhism represents the conjunction of the Buddhist notions of a Universal Emperor and a Future Buddha with the Burmese notions of a Future King, weikzahood, and occult power. During the British rule, many peasant revolts were inspired by a configuration of these beliefs. Galvanized into action by an Embryo or Future King, whose legitimacy was often based on his barely concealed charismatic claim to be an Embryo Buddha, these rebels were inspired not only by the nationalist aim of abolishing foreign rule. Their hopes included, in addition, the restoration of the traditional Buddhist monarchy because enjoyment of the goals of the utopian Buddhist society could only be assured by the rule of a future Buddhist emperor. At the same time their courage --with sticks and stones they believed they could prevail against the enemy's rifles-- derived from their conviction that the alchemic and other forms of occult power transmitted to them by the Future King (not the least of whose accomplishments was weikza) would render them invulnerable in battle (172).

Spiro's is as good a summary as I've seen of the power and limitations of the Good King mythos.

In all these instances, the mass of oppressed people are appealing to a higher authority against the injustices of their immediate bosses. It was the local lord or bishop who was responsible for all the crimes against the people; above him sat the good king who, as soon as he learned the real state of affairs, would right all these injustices. Thus it was not the people who were defying authority, it was the cheating, murdering lords. The belief that this good king exists, however inaccurate and opportunist, was a key to unifying people to the point of rebellion; but even so the rebellions mostly failed.

The parallels here between French peasants, slaves, untouchables, Russian serfs, and, for that matter, the cargo cults of peoples overwhelmed by Western conquest are too striking to ignore. The tendency to believe that an end to their bondage was at hand, that God or the authorities had granted their dreams, and that evil forces were keeping their freedom from them is a common, and usually tragic, occurence among subordinated peoples. By phrasing their liberation in such terms, vulnerable groups express their hidden aspirations in public in a way that both enables them to avoid individual responsibility and aligns them with some higher power whose express commands they are merely following. Such portents have, at the same time, helped fuel countless rebellions, almost all of which have miscarried. Social theorists who assume that a hegemonic ideology encourages a naturalization of domination in which no alternatives are imagined possible, will find it hard to account for these occasions on which subordinate groups seem to pick themselves up by the bootstraps of their own collective desires (Scott 1990 p. 148).

To me this long tradition of looking to authority, even in the very act of defying it, makes more understandable our modern expressions: the union member who's sure President Bush is trying to reform the corruption and mismanagement at the Veterans' Administration hospitals, and it's only his evil subordinates who have closed so many; employees who believe that the big boss really cares about employees' safety and health, but is thwarted by foot-dragging middle managers; the popular fascination with benevolent aliens with super technologies, come to show us the way to peace; the tendency at some times and in some places to look to a "firm hand," no matter how violent, to maintain order; the liberals' long & unrequited honeymoon with the Clintons; the sympathy many folks have with Junior's dilemmas as president; and many more instances.

The modern right-wing formula of venerating billionaires and corporate bureaucracies while attacking government has much the same tone as its precursors of the Middle Ages, though now the strategic function has altered somewhat. Way back when bite food was deflowered, kings would discourage attacks by peasants against the nobility, even their fiercest rivals, lest the common people get the idea that they could have a voice in the political process. In what passes for democracies these days, Reagan and the like encourage people to attack civil servants, especially those in the social services, as a way to intimidate and control them.

The Bush Junior phenomenon brought to light something I'd never considered before. It's not just the power that's attractive; it can be the incompetence as well. That guy was so very clueless, some of us --maybe the folks most accustomed to frustration and failure in their own lives-- ended up seeing this frat boy rich kid as the underdog, an endearing idiot. "How could Bush know there were no weapons of mass destruction?" people would ask. "Everyone thought there were!" They ignored, of course, Junior's role in fabricating the evidence, but it seemed plausible to them that in such a tense situation anybody could make a mistake like that. He had to face a tough problem. We couldn't have done any better. Cut him some slack! Among some traditions forgiveness is a powerful integrating force, a way of humbling the mighty without casting them out. There’s a scene in the film The Apostle that expresses this very well. Or think about the whoring televangelists, their public humiliations and eventual chastened return to the fold (the men and women they hired for sex are still damned to hell). A little suffering, it seems, makes us love the powerful all the more.

(Kear and Steinberg edited a fascinating discussion of the politics of Princess Di, that soap opera pheenom of the 80s and 90s. Was its popularity just another instance of bread and circuses for the duped masses, as some lefties insisted, loftily unamused, or a genuine expression of mass resistance to the cold-hearted nobs who don’t know what it’s like to be young and in love? As impoverished as are the occasions to see our own lives reflected in the media, no wonder we find it easy to project our feelings, even the feeling of powerlessness, onto the rich and powerful who dominate the public stage. Won’t fans be surprised when she turns up in a raid on a chop shop in East L.A.)

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“They had spent their lives looking for some faithful authority to whom they could attach themselves-- if not this father, perhaps this boyfriend or this husband.
"What comes through most strongly in these stories from women is the picture they paint of failed male authority. Society teaches women to put their trust in men as defenders, suppliers of economic necessities, interpreters of the public will, and liaisons with the larger community. Women learn that men hold the power and in society’s eyes have the ultimate authority. They are the esteemed teachers, the religious spokesmen, the medical, the military, the corporate, the respected creators. But for many subjectivist women there was an absence of stable male authority in their personal lives (Clinchy 1986, pp. 57-8).”
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Promise Keepers would agree, and modestly offer themselves as the answer to our desperation for Daddy.

The upside to this dynamic is that a newly installed radical regime, facing an investors’ strike and other sabotage by the corporations, might yet be able to count on a broad and patient reservoir of popular support. ¡But ditch the $300 designer shades, Ortega!

There may also be a legacy of working class experience that teaches that unity even on a mistaken course offers a better chance of survival than everyone striking out on her own. Judging by the United We Stand yard signs and bumper stickers, a lot of the right's persistent support for war seems to stem from the hope that it will finally make us One, and deep anger that it does not. When polled about Iraq II before the heavy U.S. casualties, "18% (of the full sample) said, 'I am not sure if going to war was the best thing to do, but I support Bush’s decision, because he is the president'" (PIPA / KN poll, 7-31-03).