Good Kings, Bad Kings

Good Kings, Bad Kings

      

       by Douglas Ridemare

             

                 and this goes for kings too

                        in times of trouble

                        call in all your chips

                        your friends

                        for if you have none

                        you'll not provide

                        as the old frosty one foresees

                        then long as the rivers flow

                        you will not know

                        and not see and not seeing

                        or knowing will be kingly

                        only in the land of naught

                        so says the exhorting poet

                        if anyone 
                        he should know it

                        knows provision

                        when he sees it and

                        flouting makes

                        the rivers

                        float

Intellectuals out there, in the Arabian Nights there are no wise kings; in the Old Testament all kings are wise. Those who are not, like king Nebuchadnezzar, King Saul, or King Herod and a few other kings who become selfish and vain, and forget Yahweh, when they are not wise they are very bad and worthy of destruction.

       Among the good kings you've got, first, King David who slew lions, slew Goliath, dangerously argued with King Saul, befriended the threatened Jonathan, loved the long-haired Absalom, wrote 200 psalms, and led his people in wars, but made the big mistake of sending a beautiful woman's husband to the front lines against the Cananites to be killed so that he could sleep with her. God forgave him because one, David repented, and two, things sexual are quite forgivable, though not so much things murderous. Finally, when he was old, he had the kindness done him by his people of having a girl sent to his bed to warm him in his old age and help him forget. This is a gloss, a cultural attitude, and not the whole story. Over the five or ten years of his geriatricy he will have had twenty of thirty different girls sent to him, I would think. Us Jews, you got to hand it to us!

       Then there was King David's successor, King Solomon. Good king. He built the great temple, almost against his own sense of what was right for his people, knowing that God, not a human facsimile, should be their king. Solomon wisely judged for his people. Every so often he opened the court to those with litigations that required counselled resolution. Once, he offered to cut the baby of two bickering prostitutes in half so each could have one part, but then gave the whole baby to the prostitute who wanted to spare its life. On another court day he sent an unforgiving merchant to jail for refusing to extend time to a debtor.

       King Habakkuk, too, was wise, as well as other kings of whom we hear infrequently. King Darius. King Maccabee. In short, whereas biblical kings are depicted wise, the kings of Arab lands in old literature, Judeo-Christian literature, are shown to be luxuriating, over-sexed, death-dealing, and possessed of other qualities dangerous to the healths of beautiful maids and lusty young men of ordinary breeding. These kings usually loll in gain from their dirty alliances with various skillful and menacing merchants who, dressed in neat clothing, blowsy canvas tent-like dresses with vertical stripes of black and white that make them resemble zebras, fat, immobile zebras, hover around their king to influence and pay him.

       Thus, with Arab kings, you get stories recorded of beautiful maids inventing remarkable stories for the king, years in the telling, stories kept long and without end in order to save their lovely skins and heads, heads that would have been chopped off the first night after the said regent had made love to her. Instant boredom, quickies with a twist, nefariousness of the highest sort. You have stories of maids in boxes kept by huge and monstrous genies who, letting these damsels out of their confinement in order to admire them for just a few seconds and, lucklessly, falling asleep on their laps, not watchful and jealous for that brief moment, fall prey to the libidinous wiles of these kept maids who seduce and make love to innocents in a tree overhead. And the like. Much de Sade took from his readings here.