Learning From Henry Vby
Vin Suprynowicz "Henry the Fifth" is a great play in service of a pernicious doctrine, that being that we should all cheerfully go fight and die in any adventure the king may dream up, and if his cause be wrong, "our obedience to the king wipes the crime out of us." No war crimes trials under that program, baby: "Just following orders." One of the ironies here is that the true historical significance of the battle of Agincourt had little to do with the concessions King Harry was subsequently able to wrest from King Charles, which were rendered moot when Henry died. The significance of the battle – added to the similar outcome at Crecy, 70 years before – was that a small band of commoners managed to defeat the cream of the armored knighthood of France in a manner so one-sided that history still gasps, rendering the whole concept of "armored knighthood" silly enough that they were soon reduced to tilting at windmills. On Oct. 25, 1415, a bunch of Welshman with longbows dispatched in one day the notion that we should rightly be ruled by rich horsemen in fancy outfits. The outcome in that muddy field gave commoners a place at the table in deciding the affairs of state for the first time (in those locales) since the fall of the Roman republic – an experiment in "democracy" which reached a high point in 1649 and which is still, for good or ill, ongoing. Yes, my fellow yeomen, you have a vote because of the longbow and – subsequently – the battle rifle. Still got one at home? No? Because you think the guys in charge wouldn’t love to put all us pesky peasants back in the condition our forebears endured before Agincourt? I find your trust in the good will of our rulers astonishing. "Henry V" has many memorable scenes, "gentlemen in England now abed" and all that. But it was a long time before I grasped the significance of a single moment of clarity. Quite near the end, the mounted French herald Montjoy returns to speak to Harry a final time. Up to his knees in sweat, mud, and gore, an exasperated Henry asks if the little popinjay hasn’t tired of asking for his surrender. The herald is shocked. No, he says, his message is "The day is yours." Henry – portrayed by the bard as a commander who led from the front, though it’s not firmly known whether he really waded into the fray quite like Alexander – has won the battle, and he doesn’t know it. This rings true. What does a battle look like, to those who are there? Not all neat and orderly, the battalions maneuvered across the field like chess pieces, the way it’s later diagrammed in the textbooks or on The History Channel. In the chaos of fear and courage, men scream and bleed and sweat and die. In more recent centuries, smoke and whistling shells and exploding shrapnel have been added, making it even harder to grasp what’s going on. "Democracy," aforementioned, now has us involved in another battle – a highly crucial one, I submit, and one whose players and motivations can be just as hard to discern in the fog of conflict, one in which the righteous may similarly be approaching victory unawares, even if the smoke and the shrapnel in this case are largely rhetorical. You can hear it every day. What do they say about those who wish to trim back the size and intrusiveness of government at least to, say, the levels prevailing under dastardly child-hating conservative John F. Kennedy in 1962? (I might settle for 1911, myself – small schools with mixed-grade classrooms under local control; no income tax; dollar bills still "payable in silver" or in gold; no War on Drugs.) Why, we "hate the teachers!" these zealots insist. We want old people to "starve in the streets!" We’re willing to tolerate "social services ranked at the very bottom, like some Central American hellhole!" Since this would be an odd set of desires, it’s not hard to conclude there’s some misdirection being employed here – starting with the premise that only "social services" delivered by tax-paid bureaucrats are worth measuring. First, who are "they" – the other side in this struggle for our nation, our freedom, our souls? Their method is redistributionism: They want armed government agents to seize more and more money from "the rich" (that is to say, from people who work and earn it), thereupon redistributing this seized loot to those who want more "free services": Tax-paid schools, tax-paid medical care, child service workers to bust down doors with warrants and make sure parents don’t "abuse" their own kids by failing to get them their shots, etc. They seem to prefer to call themselves "progressives" again, now – Limbaugh & Co. having scared them off "liberal." They don’t seem to take much umbrage at "redistributionist." (I hate to suggest they simply don’t know what it means, though they ARE mostly former government-school inmates.) They’re convinced they’re not "communists," since they don’t wear funny hats and (one presumes) they honestly hope they’ll never have to resort to the methods used by Trotsky, Beria, Dzerzhinsky, et al. Though in candid moments they’ll often admit "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" sounds about right. And they are insatiable. Ask them if there is any tax rate – any percentage of the nation’s wealth, of the fruits of our labors – flowing into the government maw to be spent and controlled by bureaucrats authorized to enforce their edicts at gunpoint – which would be "too much." They will not answer. They will not admit that we have a right to take up arms and hang all the taxmen and their masters in the capital if the tax rates reach 90 percent, or 95 percent, or 102 percent. After all, "There could always be some emergency." I submit they are now a solid majority – a condition made possible by the near-universal propagandizing of our young in the government propaganda camps (more generally dubbed "public schools"). They believe the majority must rule in all things, of course – except when the majority opposes their agenda, whether it be gay marriage, mass transit, "protecting" some sand fly, or free health care for the entire population of Mexico. But here is the doctrine that truly defines them: No matter what the ginned-up "need," no matter what the problem, they believe it is best satisfied and solved by government – by the creation or expansion of one or another government "agency" or "program," backed with the threat of force against those who refuse to see the wisdom of their "agreed-upon" agenda. Thus their conclusion that the "greedy taxpayers" are "refusing to contribute enough." After all, since bigger and better-funded government agencies and programs are the solution to every need and problem, and since needs and problems obviously persist, simple logic tells us that, ergo! the cause of these problems must be ... insufficient funding of government! Suggest that government interventions may actually amplify existing sociopathologies – that by cushioning miscreants from the natural results of bad choices and poor planning, by rewarding sloth and misbehavior we only encourage more of the same – and that the bureaucratic interventions meantime add new and innovative problems previously unknown, and you can expect to be set upon by a chorus of shrieking harridans. Scorn and sarcasm (along with labeling the remnant of resisters "racists," "sexists," "child-haters." "troglodytes," "cultists," or whatever else they think might stick) are their major tactics, designed to evoke a terrified silence which they can advertise as surrender and "consensus" – easier all the time, as more and more careers fall under the shadow of government permits, licenses, and largesse.
Next time: "You won’t go bankrupt. You’ll always produce." June 18, 2007 Vin Suprynowicz [send him mail] is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of The Black Arrow. Copyright © 2007 Vin Suprynowicz |
