Once upon a time, there was a royal palace and the big chief was lord of the land. Oh! Then we knew to step aside when the big chief walked past. If the king’s guard knocked us on the head with a club for talking to the big chief without permission, we understood and we humbly apologized, because we knew that the big chief was of royal blood and the gods were with him. We didn’t mess with the gods because they had a habit of striking people with little plagues like madness, inescapable poverty, childlessness, unappealingly erratic swelling of the balls and occasionally big ones like death and the terrible curse dooming your soul to wander for eternity or to wander until your soul tires of wandering and sits in a place.
In those good old monarchical days, we didn’t have a problem with the big chief choosing his replacement on the big seat when he had tired of the job. If we had any contrary opinions, we kept them to ourselves. The big chief was the smartest; whatever decision he took was the best, we were really lucky to have him. If the big chief’s replacement happened to be a weak, drooling drunk with less than half the brain the Good Lord gave a fish, we respected him all the same. We were supposed to.
“I want this” was quite a normal phrase and was usually responded to with a quick procurement of whichever article was the subject at a time. It didn’t matter what it was; our wives, children, farms and unusually well-crafted mud bowls were not withheld from the big chief. We understood the flow of life, we didn’t complain out loud, or for too long. The big chief got what he wanted.
If the big chief yelled “off with her head!” we didn’t ask why, we chased down the head and ripped it off the neck of whichever individual possessed the offensive head. We knew our place, we didn’t expect anything different. We were content with our places, we really did not mind much. Of course, we would have loved to keep our wives to ourselves and maybe have a little less headless bodies around us, but things were going on alright.
Then the scammers came, with their peculiar, yet appealing words “Freedom!” “Rights!” “Power!” “Choice!” We fell like drunken whales, (if whales drank, and stood, and were not really whales) fell for the peculiar ideas. We grabbed them like take-away packs at wedding ceremonies, the good weddings with good meat, not the ones with the meat looking like a tenth of a baby’s finger.
The big chief was chased away from the big seat, and the big seat was resized, it became an almost regular sized seat. Some other guy wearing fewer robes and a wider smile sat on the new seat and told us we could take him away from the almost regular sized seat; he told us that any of us could be on the almost regular sized seat, he didn’t have royal blood.
Years later, there’s another guy on the seat, but the seat has gotten bigger over the years, and this guy does not like to be called the big chief. The guy on the seat says he is one of us and he says he doesn’t rule us like the big chief, he says he “leads us”. So, we don’t call him big chief, we call him our leader. However, this looks like the big chief situation all over again, except this time we picked the blithering idiot sitting on the big seat. When our leader can’t sit on the big seat any longer, he hauls out some other guy just like him and tells us this guy is the messiah so we run quickly to approve our damnation, with our inky thumbs at the ready. The leader’s guard can knock us on the head with a club if he feels inspired to do so and if we complain, the leader doesn’t have to yell, he just has to be slightly displeased and our heads will be ripped off our “free” bodies while we sleep comfortably in our beds cuddling our “rights”.
Find me a guy with royal blood, sit him on a great, big seat, bedazzle him with gems and yellow metal, make him the most ostentatious crown and shove a scepter in his hands. Let us all go back to the middle ages and to monarchy, where it’s all clear, because this new situation is like one of those stage acts where you’re wondering how you got there.
Democracy is a scam; the leader is a wayo man
