The Emperor of Plagues
I, the official scribe
of my people, write this with full authority of the ruling body for those of
you who should come upon it in good time. It is the story of a long-ago Emperor
about whom you ought to know.
The father of the
Emperor was said to be a god from an ancient land across the sea who often imbibed
too much mead and had many wives. Others whispered his real father was the
pedophilic poet who lived on the other side of the island with his wife. These
people said the Emperor’s mother made up the story about the father god. In any
event, the Emperor never lived with either man. The man from across the sea
sailed away soon after his birth. For a while the boy lived alone with his
mother and then when she moved away to a faraway place and married (or
remarried depending on which version of the legend you prefer) she was made
goddess of the blacksmiths. She was busy with anvils and such and sent him here
to live with her parents, the gold-counting grandmother and the
good-time-teller-of-wild-tales grandfather. The boy who became emperor felt all
alone but his grandparents and the poet told him he was brilliant and meant for
great things. And he believed them.
The
Emperor’s education was also remarkably strange. True, he was sent to the
island’s most expensive lyceum, but his free time was mostly spent with his
grandfather and the island lowlifes. He smoked a lot of choom, the weed of
strange dreams, and was educated to despise order and thrift, diligence and
competence. Natural-born genius leaders of men have no need of such
characteristics. His teachers and friends and family led him to believe that
the people of his island were responsible for all the ills of the world, that
want and disease were caused by the islanders’ greed. They called this
greed “imperialism” and “white privilege”. As the islanders had been
called upon regularly by the outside world and expended vast amounts of their
best lives and treasure -- treasure earned by hard work and accumulated by
means of an ordered society -- to render aid to others with no reward to
themselves, the charge seemed bizarre. But they believed it and so did their
star pupil who lacked the wit to discern cant from truth.
As
a young man the emperor was always just given what he wanted and had no idea
how wealth was created, what uses it could be put to -- besides buying
choom and stuff -- and generally despised anyone who had it. Except for
himself, of course. He thought the wealth of others was all gotten through
theft and he dreamed of the day when he could steal it back and give it to
his friends.
Still
the emperor was young and impressionable and he believed these silly things.
Then
there came a day when he was older when the old emperor passed out of office
and his friends -- and those who liked the idea of getting back the wealth they
thought had been stolen from them and people who shared his view that this
society’s institutions were corrupt to the core and failures -- joined together
and made him emperor. He had huge pillars and a stage made and showed himself
to the people as their new emperor. He promised to keep the seas from rising
and impossible stuff like that. They cheered and clapped. Some people
thought this a dangerous sign of an ego out of control, and as the emperor set
about weakening the institutions that hold all civilizations together, he
wasted the island’s wealth, stealing from his industrious, orderly foes and
handing it to his lazy and crooked friends. As he did so his sense of his great
powers grew. It helped, no doubt, that he surrounded himself with incompetents
just so he could continue to believe he was smarter than anyone in the empire.
It also helped that those who knew better were too embarrassed by what they had
wrought to speak out. What kind of pundit helped foist this on his own people?
They secretly hoped no one would wise up and diminish their hold on power along
with him.
The
Empire’s friends were insulted and harmed. Its enemies were feted and
supported. The island found itself increasingly reviled and isolated from the
productive world. The world’s lowlifes (unsurprisingly) didn’t actually love
the island more in its weakness than it did when it was strong.
As
you might expect, the island grew poorer. Not his friends or those serving the
capital’s expanding needs for tailors and chefs and hairdressers, wigmakers and
chariot drivers -- no, they were fine. It was those who paid the taxes who
watched their lives and livelihoods diminished who bore the brunt of his
disastrous policies and actions.
But
that was not even the saddest part of the story of this Emperor. He let in many
people from islands south of here who brought with them a pestilence
called enterovirus, killing and crippling his people and he would not halt
their coming, even when they were known carriers of this disease. The children
of his subjects were dying and becoming crippled with no recovery in sight. And
then from the other places he welcomed in yet others who carried another
plague, Ebola. He would not keep people from those countries out either,
even though it was not even known how exactly to stop its spread. Did it travel
in the air? For how long was the carrier contagious? People asked and got no
real answers.
But
the emperor did not recognize that these plagues were developing elsewhere
because the societies these immigrants came from had irretrievably broken down
and lacked the services to sustain their people’s good health and hygiene and
medical care. Nor did he recognize that by allowing those infected with lethal
diseases entry without restriction he was likely to so disturb civilized order
that the same disasters that befall their native lands would occur here.
We
forced him out of the palace and into the scrublands and scraped his name off
all public buildings, and he is so despised I dare not even write his name on
this document, which I am sealing for people far in the future to read as an
object lesson. Although I can’t believe anyone would make a mistake like this
again.
No comments:
Post a Comment