No More Kings!

My dad claims we’re descended from King Cnut the Great (also spelled Canute and Knut), king of England, Denmark, and Norway, 1016-1036.

King Cnut has been ridiculed for trying to command the tide not to rise. Rather, his point was liberal and rational for the time: Even a divine king cannot command the tides. He mocked the presumption that kings have god-like power. Thus began the slow transition from monarchy to democracy.

Perhaps Dad’s claim was a grandiose assumption, but my family’s actual relation to kings astonished me this last month. I am reeling from the inheritance of my lineage! It fits my character in two iconic ways.

First, it turns out, I’m descended from Thomas Carrier, a very tall man who was once on the Honor Guard of King Charles I, the only English king to be beheaded by the people, January 30, 1649. Thomas may have been the shrouded executioner. That person is unknown, but Thomas went on to serve in Oliver Cromwell’s army, fighting alongside the Parliamentarians against the Monarchists during the English Civil War. He served the Commonwealth, not a cruel king. A Welshman, he soon changed his last name from Morgan to Carrier, perhaps to obscure his identity and evade retribution.

He left old England for New England, settling in what is now Colchester, Connecticut, and later, Andover and Billerica, Massachusetts, near Salem. Thomas was tall, seven feet four inches! He was known for his walking speed. He died at age one hundred and nine in 1735. He was a man of extremes.

This leads to the second iconic connection that fits my life. Thomas married twenty-one-year-old Martha Allen, twenty-seven years younger than he, in 1674. She was eight months pregnant with Richard. They eventually had five children. I am descended from her first son, Richard and Thankful Brown’s son, Amos Carrier, born 1704.

Martha Carrier was one of the last so-called witches to be hanged following the Salem Witch Trials. Nineteen people were hanged, five died in prison, and one was crushed to death beneath heavy stones. “More stones,” he gasped as his last breath.

Martha was principled and outspoken. She refused to confess to being a witch, which would have spared her life. She chose to die rather than to lie. She was only forty-two years old. Two of her children were coerced into confessing she had made them witches, which she had advised them to do for their safety. Sarah was eleven, Richard was eighteen. That let them live. Dorothy Good, age four, was imprisoned for eight months. Massachusetts eventually apologized, but not until 1957.

I am grateful to my newfound cousin, Kathleen Kent, for writing a fictionalized but historically accurate account of the horrid event as seen through the eyes of eleven-year-old Sarah, “The Heretic’s Daughter.” Other reports of this dark time include Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” “A Delusion of Satan,” “Salem Possessed – the Social Origins of Witchcraft,” and “Death in Salem.”

These two iconic events in the emergence of America and democracy fit my life.

I’ve always been politically outspoken. Lately, I hate what Trump is doing, acting like a king. I’m not alone. Millions of Americans recently marched in the No Kings protest.

Trump mocks the law as he twists it to serve himself and his wealthy handlers. He attacks judges, universities, media companies, newspapers, our government’s functions protecting our health and environment, and even comedians. He lies as a matter of course. He’s arrogant. He imposes masked military types to secret people from the streets into vague but sturdy prisons. He’s revered by his base base as if a rock star or an anointed savior. He’s vile. His romps with multiple young women and porn stars are the least offensive things he’s done. If unimpeded, he’ll be the end of our American story.

It was ironic that he riled up the insurgency that led to the attack on our Capitol and the injury and death of those defending it. Ironic because the so-called patriots had only gripes of unspecified anger. Neither what they were attacking nor what they would impose in its stead was defined. Social media algorithms, some of them Russia-financed, magnified emotional posts into riled chaos. Angry-eyed rebels adopt military garb and weapons to bully their way to power. Wild violence erupts more frequently. The FBI, which had monitored such domestic terrorists, has been disbanded from that, and those involved in the attack, even those who brutalized police and guards, have been blanket-pardoned by Trump. Whether they take up positions in the military and police forces goes unmonitored.

Meanwhile, global overheating increases. The fossil fuel industries, which cause the spikes in temperature, storms, and massive worldwide trouble, helped finance his way to a bare (and dubious) win. Their investment is paying off, temporarily. The cost of this transnational, humanity-wide predicament will mount. Our children’s children will suffer and pay for this colossal ruse. Ignorant and gullible people condone this trans-historic predicament.

“Climate Change is a hoax,” proclaims this new ersatz king. He’s standing in this new rising tide, and he thinks he can command it. He’s a bad and dangerous joke, nowhere near as wise as King Cnut. He’s rousing up a needless civil war, attacking our government and society with stubborn stupidity, hyped grandiosity, and deliberate divisiveness. His tactics are analogous to King Charles the First.

I don’t suggest we should have his head cut off, but a haircut, at least, is due.

The other iconic connection for me is to Martha Carrier. I’ve long resented dogmatism. Religion is as much a malady as a benefit. I note how fanaticism infects Western religion, especially. Zealots who force their beliefs on others are rife in our history. From Saul to Paul to Constantine to Calvin to Cotton Mather to the Witch Trials, from Crusades to Inquisitions, from the clamps on science to the blessing of a cruel and lopsided economic cystem, we’ve seen how piety protects the perverse power it plies. Even my own supposedly non-dogmatic religion is splintered and dwindling due to a new form of telling, judging, and excluding. I’ve seen how groups of people can lose their common sense and humanity when pushing fanaticism.

I admire my great, great, great-grandparents, Thomas and Martha. I grieve their difficult plight, I thank them for their sacrifice, and I promise I will stay true to their cause. I’ve spent fifty years preaching freethought and humanism, Enlightenment values, environmentalism, and human ability/fallibility in our self-run democratic republic.

I’m in a lineage of effort and accomplishment. My dad was wiser than I knew. He tried to tell of the past and see the future, passing that on to me and his grandchildren.

My sons leap into an uncertain world.

Their dad (me) was sometimes a wild man.

But I have confidence in them and their generation.

My youngest son, Benjamin, is now an accomplished environmental lawyer.

My mother, Alice, gave her all. Here’s how she looked when I was born.

And here’s how she looked while dying from cigarettes, misled by the same media-influencing companies that now deny and evade climate change.

She and Dad did the best they could, given their generation’s challenges of wars and the Depression.

Dad, born in 1901 (or maybe 1898), came from the scattered situation of our country’s initial oil wells and the western migration. All I know of his dad, my Grandpa, Amos, is this photograph.

I was born on Hiroshima Day, two hours before the blast.

But I was very young and wasn’t responsible …

… then. But now I am. We all are.