The emperor's trump
By Michael Bergmann
If the elephant's trump is the elephant's trunk trumpeting "Here comes the elephant", as I wrote in my previous article, then what is the emperor's trump? Though the elephant appears to be a much more contemporary figure than the emperor, a friend advised to me interpret the re-emergence of the ridiculous strongman with Hans C. Andersen's tale "The Emperor's New Clothes".
Before I come to my friend's point, I want to take a short look into the past where the "emperor" seems to belong. If it is true that we are currently witnessing the end of the enlightenment, we should understand how its opponents have learned from history and changed their appearance.
The emperor's trump was his subjects' timidity to be blinded by the emperor's vanity. The extravagance of absolutism made it easy for the enlightenment to see through the vanity and expose the emptiness of the monarchs' intimidating authority.
When Andersen wrote this tale in 1837, he could mischievously indulge in the absolutist monarchs' attempt to "civilize fear", to impress their subjects with both their crown and their extravagant hairstyle. The end of an era had made it obvious that authority solely depended on people's fear not to tell what they all saw: that authority lacked both reason and qualification. Andersen's heroic child was not alone in the crowd to see, just alone to tell what they all saw: no clothes to hide what was anyway no secret anymore. They "saw nothing" but a naked man showing off his shame.
The combination of vanity and intimidation seemed forever broken once just one finger would follow its impulse to straightly "point at nothing". The king-turned-braggart would never recover from the embarrassment, the vain strongman never regain power.
Or can, two centuries later, the braggart become king again? People might miss his extravagant vanity ― but will they ever again respect his authority? But remember, the absolutist monarchs' mistakes were their pretensions to civilization. The trunk-trumpeting elephant is more honest than the nakedly parading emperor in a way that one pointing finger is not enough to make him stumble over the truth.
The trick is simple: An elected elephant should be feared by others ― while entertaining his domestic audience. Of course, the belief in his transparent decoration, the magic power of his vanity, cannot be fully restored. But people might love him for residing in a Disneyland-castle, not constrained by courtly manners, but equipped with nuclear buttons, threatening foreign kingdoms, instead of the toys of obsolete royals.
Is this the new, post-enlightenment balance of ridiculous vanity and intimidating authority? Just one day, the parading strongman might not allow even his domestic audience to laugh at him anymore. And finally, this "balance" totally contradicts the universalistic trust in humanity, the belief that civilization has no borders.
Michael Bergmann is a teacher in Seoul. Write to bergmann2473@yahoo.de.