A propos of nothing, I found The Proclaimers' "Sean" in my head this morning. Well, actually, that was because I was running around the house trying to get out and swearing loudly and colorfully in a bad Scottish accent, which reminded me of the Proclaimers, which led me to "Sean."
"From kings is where you come," The Proclaimers sing in that song.
This reminded me of a colleague I had once who became slightly unhinged in a meeting. "We come from kings!" she screamed, referring to African Americans like herself.
So this idea runs through a lot of cultures, and it's complete crap. Many people are descended from societies that had kings, but very few people are descended from kings. In the past, as now, the great majority of people on earth were not kings--they were subjects. And, you know, poor and hard working and not walking around dressed in robes of gold or anything.
"How do you know he's a king?" they ask in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "He's the only one who doesn't have shit all over him," is the answer. Most of our ancestors, no matter our ancestry, had shit all over them. And so, really, in this way, we're all one big shit-covered human family..
