The Dictator in Exile wears no socks.
There are no ties in his luggage. His jackets are light, humming with threaded color. For the time being, he has banished any blue darker than serge; he has rolled his baggy linen trousers to mid-calf. His dark glasses glint in the sun, his smile dazzles.
The Dictator in Exile waves to his security detail as the wind takes his sail. (They smile back, lolling in their island mufti.) He flies for a while, skimming above the bright ocean. For long moments he is held aloft, weightless in the Caribbean breeze. For long moments, he thinks nothing of the people who deposed him or the nation he has left behind.
The Dictator in Exile does not Twitter or Facebook. He takes no briefings. For the time being he has rediscovered the allure of reality and the primacy of private life. He sits on the beach and sips a native beer. He feels a warmth blooming within him, the dissipation of dissatisfaction.
The Dictator in Exile pities his successor, the King with the furious pen who is trying to sign away incremental yet inevitable revolution. He knows the King has supporters who expect absolute reversal, a restoration of an era of good feeling they remember from their baby days when they watched the Good Sheriff on the television.
The Dictator watched the Good Sheriff too. He liked the Good Sheriff and his common sense, he felt the show was graceful and well-written. But he also remembers how delimited and constrained that black and white world was, how it was contained in a box in a corner of the room. He remembers its effect on the world beyond the box was negligible. When, in the real world, the cities were burning, the Good Sheriff could not bring peace.
Instead, he stayed in his small Hollywood backlot town and offered homilies that assured the people they were essentially good souls, a commonality collected from diverse parts.
Since this was the 1960s they were not too diverse, though the Dictator remembers Opie's piano-playing football coach--a remarkably nuanced character considering the times and the medium--was played by a gentleman of African descent named Rockne Tarkington. (This is the sort of thing that the Dictator often remembers, small facts that work to complicate or even dispel the conventional narrative. There were black folks in Mayberry after all.)
And the Dictator remembers the Good Sheriff in an old movie where he was not the Good Sheriff but a folksy grifter who got his comeuppance after he snarled at the rubes on the radio. The Dictator thinks that maybe the King's supporters have not seen that movie.
Were he to resume his worries, the Dictator might be fretful for a nation that prefers nostalgia to history and disbelieves in the relevance of the actual. On the other hand, the Dictator senses that the sun is setting on the age of monarchs and that there are too many people of the sort who were under-represented in the fictional worlds constructed by screenwriters in the 1960s for the old order to hold.
Released from power, the Dictator is free to pity the King as the last of his kind, a plodding symbol of the left-behind. The Dictator knows that those who support the King are generally angry and have a right to their anger. The Dictator understands they were not dealt with fairly and that their expectations were thwarted by forces that took pains to disguise themselves. And sometimes the Dictator wonders if he could not have done better. Maybe he should have tried harder to confiscate their guns. (Just kidding.)
But no, there is only so much a man, even a dictator, can do. People are frail and tender things who long to be cooed to and told their suffering has both point and remedy. They can stand only so much truth, so much heartbreak. The Dictator knows hope is a balm, but he wonders now whether he gave them enough. Or maybe too much.
All that is behind him now. For now the Dictator feels the freshening flow of air and water, he revels in the baking sun. His daughters kick in the waves. A drink waits sweating on the polished teak deck of a friendly billionaire. Someday he thinks he might return and--having received the blessing of nostalgia himself--be received as a gray eminence, an exemplar of a golden age that never was. But the ever-moving present pushes out thoughts of the future and obliterates the past; the Dictator finds himself getting the hang of flying.
The Dictator knows the King, the Great Eraser, is, despite his talent for self-aggrandizing bluster, old and tired and beset by ambitious and competitive councilors, each of whom believes they might become the big man's Iago, directing his hand toward their own selfish ends. The Dictator knows that his successor is impatient and distractable, that he blinks baffled when his whims are pushed back upon by petty bureaucrats. The Dictator feels a pang of compassion for this man, as he is weighed down with unmeetable expectations and more alone than even he realizes. He knows the King struggles with the cruel images and sharp words that inevitably afflict those who would raise their heads about the parapet.
If the Dictator could, he would take this sad man by the hand and lead him out of the high weeds into the clean afterlife of exile. He would bend to whisper in the King's stony ear that it is not so bad, that this too will pass. That there may yet be a future free of high buildings and close rooms stale with the breath of dignitaries and sycophants. Escape is just unlikely, not impossible, and life awaits just beyond the palace gates.
If he could, he would instruct this King; he would tell him about the secret tunnel.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 02/12/2017