"I am the State"

("L'Etat, c'est moi"), attributed to French King Louis XIV

First, just a short digression. I’ve been seeing the phrase “L’Etat, c’est moi” here and there lately in reference to our current president. I wanted to know more about it and learned it may or may not have been said by Louis XIV, but for many people it represents Louis, a wealthy, self-involved French monarch who lived from 1638-1715, mostly in an enormous house outside Paris (Versailles). He was “the first, and greatest, of the absolute monarchs of post-Reformation Europe,” according to Eve Fisher, whose biographical essay on him at “SleuthSayers” is fascinating and well worth a look.

Louis made sure the nobility had no role in government, and that all non-military government roles, positions, and titles were given to the bourgeoisie so he could fire them whenever he wanted. His Parliament’s role was only to “rubber-stamp his decisions.”

At the end of Fisher’s long and detailed article she writes, “Louis succeeded in what he wanted to do. He kept the nobility powerless and he kept himself absolute monarch for 72 years. But he almost destroyed France in the process. He came to the throne of the most powerful, most populous, most wealthy country in Europe, and left it in debt, surrounded by enemies, crippled by a tax system that, depending as it did entirely on the poor, was so bad that in, 70 years, it would spark a revolution.”

Of course the world of Louis was vastly different from ours. Yet humans, since they’re subject to all the whims of outrageous fortune, from where they were born to what kind of parents raised them to the century or decades in which they live their lives, do have varying personality traits, some more present in some people than others. So every once in a while there comes along a bundle of actions and traits that form what we can only call a bully among bullies, perhaps with an empty shell inside. Or maybe it’s a major harm or terrible event that shapes them, leaving not a shell but a tangled ball of rage and resentment, perhaps even fear. Maybe it all gets jumbled together in some to make a super-bully who must also be all-powerful, and despite occasional utterances that sound caring, feels great satisfaction—maybe even happiness—when causing pain, suffering, and even death in others.

The world has been fortunate since World War II not to see too many of these, but now it’s our turn to suffer, and to have to watch suffering and not be able to stop it, because one of the super-bullies has found ways to trick people into thinking he’s a good man, a patriot, and that he will “save” our entire country.

His distorted mental world is taking over our mental and often now physical health, as we observe with each passing day his terrible whims being allowed to go forward, his destructive desires granted freely, and his need for power and wealth and approval of the powerful and wealthy seemingly never diminishing. While we want to live and love our lives, to breathe fresh air and to trust that our beloved forests, parks, meadows, rivers, animals, and our own cities or towns will flourish or at least have a chance to be happy, he takes and takes, stealing all our hopes and dreams, at the rate of several per day, all while distracting us with yet another horrific edict that destroys, sickens, and kills.

It has seemed that this is his country now, not ours, and that he wants the entire world as well.

But centuries of monstrous leaders of the past show that eventually the people will rise up, exhausted by the sheer evil of what they see every morning when they awake, furious that just one person, out of all the world, has been stealing from us for so long. We want and need what’s ours to be returned to us, and we need it now: we need innocent people suffering in torture prisons to return here and to benefit from the law that was always supposed to protect them. We need our scientists and doctors and watchdogs and every one of our fired government workers to be back on the job, and the illegally placed, inexperienced and incompetent workers who are attacking our carefully-built systems to be removed from our government’s offices and agencies. We need our international aid workers and news agencies to be put back in business with full employment now. In short, this is our country, not Trump’s. We need all the democracy-destroying activities to end, and the law that upholds the life the founding fathers tried so hard to give us to be upheld again, and respected. We need justice to reign, and wannabe kings to go back to where they came from.

America has never loved a bully, and it never will.

Notes:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/l%27%C3%A9tat,_c%27est_moi"L'Etat, c'est moi"

https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2017/03/letat-cest-moi.htmlEve Fisher