The Past Isn't Even Past

Canute the Great was an English king who lived and ruled in the neighborhood of a thousand years ago. Four of you are shaking your heads and remarking softly to your dog/cat/spouse, “He’s gone off his nut—Canute was a Danish king.” It’s true. Canute was a Dane—a Great Dane, it must be noted—who sailed to England and, after a year of bitter struggle defeated Edmund Ironside, the Anglo-Saxon king and six-time winner of Best Qualifying Appellation by the Big Book of Facetious Awards. Canute took possession of much of England, and Edmund took as a consolation prize a turd-shaped hunk of the southwestern corner of the island, along with an agreement that whoever outlived the other would reclaim his opposite’s piece. There is a persistent story that Edmund was subsequently stabbed to death whilst “dropping a deuce,” as goes the treasured expression of my dear friend Stacy, but whether or not the manner of his departure is an embellishment, he was doubtless very deceased less than a year after the pact was inked. 

This is the sort of story I really want to hear right now. I find myself—more frequently as gears and shafts pop out of the American engine case, whizzing across the firmament to be swallowed by the black hole of cable TV—weirdly drawn to ancient English history. 

Hear me out. I think what interests me in this matter is the following:

1. It’s sufficiently distant in time to render the stakes devoid of emotional weight. Does the death of Edmund stir a boiling broth of injustice in my heart? Or perhaps I feel the relief of Canute, knowing that his gamble had succeeded in spite of all those long, cold days when mere survival seemed unreachable, to say nothing of victory? Meh. Flip the script and make Edmund the winner; I don’t really care. 

2. It’s sufficiently related to the present that I imagine I might find some sort of moral or perhaps a lesson suitable for a trendy business advice book titled “Ironside Decision Making: How to Apply the Wisdom of the English King to Modern Business Situations.” 

3. The histories are written in English and feature lots of English names that aren’t a stretch for me to learn and remember, Canute notwithstanding.

These three elements combine to form, for me anyway, the perfect escape from the enervating stupidity and malignancy of modern life, expressed most recently in the river of excrement emerging from GOP state houses around the country, led by my own state of Georgia. Everybody ought to know better than to expect a ship the size of the Peach State to change direction like Frogger. It may look blue on national media, but Brian Kemp is still the man-child face of Georgia; his marble-mouthed drawl is still the voice of Georgia; his ludicrous shotgun and pickup truck props will be included with the Brian Kemp action figure, since without them Brian Kemp is not a man but a quivering jelly.

It’s easy though, after a long stretch of defeats, to think of a single victory as some sort of watershed. At least, it’s easy for me to do that. I do it over and over and over. Celebration is good, but I think it might be worthwhile at those moments to ask myself, “Exactly how much more just is my state than it was a year ago?” A frank answer to that question will say a lot about how many battles are left to be fought.

But I don’t do that because I’m intrinsically optimistic and somewhat intellectually lazy where acknowledgement of inconvenient facts is concerned, and so I get caught off guard every time when once again the reactionary swamp monster clambers back out of its ancestral cave to announce to the world, “Greetings from Georgia: we still haven’t figured out civilization.”

And so Canute. 

Observant readers might have noticed I’ve invoked the Danish Dandy on more than one occasion, vis-a-vis the tide—those ululations of the seas brought about by the Moon’s gravity. Canute and the tide is a handy symbol for either wisdom or hubris, depending which interpretation of the tale one pretends is definitive:

On the side of hubris, Canute was so impressed by his own expansive power that he told his courtiers he could stop the tide, and asked them to place his throne on the beach so that he could exercise this authority. Results were mixed: Canute did not stop the tide, but he did invent sunbathing.

This is the easier story to believe, as “power-mad sovereign” is such a hoary old trope it barely merits the somewhat ridiculous Canute allegory which, given anything like a proper ending, should involve the king flopping around in the waves while his subjects look on in horror at the ignorant whelp to whom they have ceded so much power.

The charitable version is that Canute’s courtiers were trying so hard to stuff their heads up Canute’s ass that they told him he could stop the tide if he wished. Recognizing their folly for what it was he requested that they place his throne in the surf, and presumably the damp result taught them the value of humility, though of course it must be said that the truly humbled one would have to be the king, once again covered in sand and lolling around in seawater whilst everyone else stands around trying to look convincingly like figures in a picture of nobility.

Probably better not to think about the details. “Canute against the tide” is a compact and useful phrase without getting into specifics.

English history is loaded with great stories, many more verifiable than this lark. I often find myself drawn to William the Conqueror—not a sympathetic figure, though certainly worthy of respect insofar as he could absolutely destroy a to-do list. Depending how you felt about the collateral damage he produced along the way, you could definitely look at William—the Norman duke who sailed across the English Channel in 1066 to claim England for himself, defeating an English army and killing the then-king Harold at the Battle of Hastings—as a great example of an in-box zero kind of guy. 

But let’s hear about that collateral damage. The chronicler Roger of Hoveden wrote of William’s campaign to stamp out rebellious sensibilities in the north of England following his establishment as monarch. Let’s give Roger an ear:

A famine prevailed to such a degree that compelled by hunger men ate human flesh, and that of horses, dogs, and cats, and whatever was repulsive … it was dreadful to behold human corpses rotting in the houses, streets, and high roads, for there were not enough left to inter them.

Another writer, Orderic Vitalis, also remarked on this subject:

The king stopped at nothing to hunt his enemies. He cut down many people and destroyed homes and land. Nowhere else had he shown such cruelty … To his shame William made no effort to control his fury, punishing the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that crops and herds, tools and food be burned to ashes. More than one hundred thousand people perished of hunger. I have often praised William in this book, but I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter. God will punish him.

I’m not going to suggest that we should all be hunky dory because whatever the grotesqueries of the Georgia statehouse, whatever the outcome of the Derek Chauvin trial, whether or not crowds of maskless people gather on Second Avenue in Nashville to do a little boot-scooting and Covid-spreading, at least nobody is marauding through the countryside burning crops and forcing my wife and children to eat our four fat useless cats. Quite the contrary: progress is made by chipping away at injustice and inequality, and regress is made by stacking up small injustices into large ones. It’s a sedimentary process punctuated by periods of terror or joy, depending which direction you’re heading. 

I really do believe, though, that the arc of history bends toward justice. Maybe that makes me the fool, insisting that Martin Luther King could stop the tide, but I stand by it. All of the individual complaints we might levy today are no worse than those levied in 1980 or 1960, but there’s greater awareness and empathy toward those affected now versus then. Though there’s not really that much difference between Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens and Donald Trump’s shithole countries, Reagan rode racism to two terms with an idiot grin and a fake sunny disposition while The Donald merely lucked churlishly into one very unsuccessful one. As a former casino owner he of all people should know that putting money on 00 is not a recipe for riches.

Comparably, segregation is often a state of mind, but it’s no longer given the imprimatur of law. This may be cold comfort to those ground into the gears of unjust systems, but I can’t help but see the difference as akin to water eating away at the underside of a cliff. Justice is the tide. It moves slowly, almost imperceptibly in places, but nobody can stop it.