If They Had Wings
We have suggested from sunrise to sunset that in the end we people manage our world on Myth, not Rational Contemplation. We have also suggested that even though we sometimes behave like them we struggle with the misfortune of not actualy being locusts. And I think we need to compare and contrast Edward Longshanks and the carnival that is the current US adminstration.
I suspect that nobody actually reads my contributions to the whole so I won't labor, or labour, the details of one of England's most brilliantly devious chief executive officers. He wanted Wales to calm the hell down and accept that England under the tutaledge of the Norman Menace, this was a couple of generations after the signing of the Great Charter, were the clean and obvious rulers of an island twenty odd miles off the coast of France.
What Edward Longshanks did was throughly defeat Llywelyn ap Gruffudd at the Battle of Orewin Bridge, forcing a humiliating submission from Wales which itself produced a series of wonderful myths that to this day reverbarate across the holy ground of Cardiff Arms Park when Wales engages in ritualistic combat with England's rugby players, who for some reason insist on calling rugby a game.
Longshanks, on the other hand, was very familiar with the passions Wales' Dragons were capable of producing in their poets and he knew that the military victory he bathed in would last just a short while before some rabble rousing wordsmith with an impossible to spell and even harder to pronounce name would rouse the hackles of a defeated people and wop they'd be sticking leeks on their tunics, calling for Saint David to do a bit better than raise a hill.
Having gathered his corporate box-wallahs, Long shanks came up with a Welsh Myth about The Legendary King Arthur - not to be mistaken with King Alfred, an easy mistake to make because both Arthur and Alfred are sources of legend, myth and the fine art of making stuff up that could be true because it sounds true to minds that have come to the end of their capacity to beat themselves against the cave walls of reality.
For centuries, the Brythonic people had survived English incursions by observing the myths of the Mab Darogan—the "Son of Prophecy." One legend promised that King Arthur, a proud Brythonic leader, was not dead. Everyone knew he was sleeping in Avalon, and one day he would return, lead the red dragon of Wales, and purge Britain of the "European menace"—the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who had stolen their valleys and become "England."
Longshanks and his queeen, a woman called Eleanor, who was a Spanish Princess, together made a grand tour to Glastonbury Abbey which was safe inside England, in Somerset. He wanted to inspect a tomb the famously honest Monks of Glastonbury had discovered. The tomb had contained the bodies of King Arthur and Guinevere!
Edward handled the bones of King Arthur and Guinevere himself. He wrapped them in magnificent silk, and reburied them in a grand marble tomb before the high altar. The message was brutal and definitive, Arthur was not coming back. His bones were under English lock and key. Edward was honoring a king, he was closing the book on Welsh sovereignty. He declared, I am the true heir to Britain. The prophecy is fulfilled, Arthur is gone, he won't be coming back, the new empire of nouns has arrived. He might not have said "nouns" but you get the drift.
Feelings and Myth, Comrade! I try to look to Gibbon's decline and fall, and I see how difficult it was for him to arrive at a conclusion as he looked around and saw bits of Rome everywhere. I also look at Eastern Empire and see the new iteration of an old myth, a new children of the book, that took Constantinople, and Spain. My feelings are deep in a hope that the myths supporting the current US catastrophy will be replaced. Round here Longshanks and his Slavian Consort - his ignoble deal with a banker - can do no wrong so long as the Churches remain charities
