David Beresford
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Many years ago I interviewed the former British prime minister, James Callaghan. He was foreign secretary at the time.
The event was unremarkable, except that it was conducted in a nursery school classroom. We could not find anywhere to sit and he ended up wedging his considerable frame into one of the small chairs that were attached to equally small desks.
When he later became prime minister and I watched him striding the world platform I would recollect that scene; Callaghan, hunched in a toddler’s chair, expanding on international affairs.
Callaghan, the queen, Nelson Mandela … it is striking how ordinary Very Important People are when one meets them in the flesh. Their importance is, I suspect, a fiction at which the media colludes for fear of running out of news.
At the weekend, for instance, international news broadcasts were dominated by the death of the “Lion of Syria”, whose supporters took to the streets in their tens of thousands to express their spontaneous grief and whose name I will have to look up later.
“Now why is his death so important,” I muttered in exasperation as the newsreader assumed the undertaker’s look which presaged yet another announcement of the dead man’s death. “Well, Israel’s got the bomb,” offered a friend, sticking his head around the corner to see what I was muttering about. He hurriedly retreated – no doubt unnerved by a look of anguished indignation crossing my face.
I was about to point out to him that if the advocates of chaos theory are right – that the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in China can lead to a hurricane over the United States – then Israel’s bomb could equally be triggered by the postman breaking wind in my street without the latter event leading the international news every hour on the hour.
To devote so much attention to the death of a ruler smacks to me of confusion. There is nothing as unimportant as being dead. No matter what poets might say about the giddying prospect of being crowbarred into some musty corner of Westminster Abbey, there is no condition more likely to disqualify one from the VIP lounge at an international airport than being dead.
It is perhaps time to investigate the origins of the importance of Very Important People. Presumably it stems from the divine right of kings to rule, a fiction designed to cover up a general confusion about what life was all about. In an early version of the social contract, perhaps, kings took on the responsibility of knowing the answer to these troubling questions in return for a royal salary and fringe benefits including palaces and so on.
This would have produced a terrible sense of angst among the rulers, of course, because if they knew anything it was that they knew nothing, or at least nothing of more importance than was known by the Master of the Royal Chamber Pot.
This would help explain the obsession with death of such as the pharaohs. They spent most of their lives preparing their funerals in excited anticipation that they would be departing this vale of tears to assume divine status and thereby discover the answers to everything – including the identity of the bastard responsible for killing Ramses the Great with toothache.
The denial of that assumption has of course been discovered in the no-longer-impatient, distinctly mortal remains of the mummies excavated in Egypt. It is also to be discovered in the tradition maintained to this day by the House of Windsor by which the monarch’s subjects are not allowed to speak unless spoken to. This is a device clearly intended to prevent anyone raising awkward cosmic questions and instead allow Her Majesty to concentrate on other imponderables of more reasonable concern to her, such as the outcome of the 2.15pm at Turffontein.
In the decline of royal pretensions, from the days of the pharaohs to the said queen, is reflected the disintegration of that early social contract. There have been attempts to shore it up with the invention of democracy which is essentially an attempt to broaden the contractual base in hopes of co-opting the growing band of cynics out there questioning assumptions about divine insights that were central to the old order.
Unfortunately with the disappearance of royalty have been lost old family wisdoms especially with regard to the unfitness of anyone to govern inherent in such as a prince’s childhood memories of grandpa who thought himself to be a pork chop.
Lacking such insights into the nature of rulers, the new brand of rulers come to power nursing delusions about their lonely genius, which has found expression most recently in our own Presi … well, we won’t go over that again.
The point I am trying to make is that it is time society got its news values right. Rumour has it that the mapping of the human genome will be completed in a matter of days. The moment could be as important for the biosciences as was that moment for engineering when an early man stood up amid the rubble of square, rectangular and oval prototypes and, proudly holding up his invention, declared: “I shall call it the wheel.”
Regretful though one might be as to anyone’s passing – and that includes whatshisname, the Lion of Syria – it needs to be appreciated that in the greater scheme of things, Very Important People are not very important at all …