7/8/2017, 2:32 pm
The oldest known story in human history is the story of King Gilgamesh. King Gilgamesh was a very bad king. He thought that being king meant he could lord it over the city which he governed. He abused the people to serve his own ends. The people prayed to the gods that Gilgamesh might become a good king. And the Gods answered their prayers. In a roundabout sort of way.
Through a series of events the young brash Gilgamesh became so concerned with his own mortality and desire to live forever that he left the city in search of the secret of immortality. Meanwhile, the people of his city still needed a good king to do the things the king was supposed to do to maintain law and justice and protect them from invasion by outside forces. But King Gilgamesh was absorbed with himself and with how he could live on forever.
At journey's end, on an island in the middle of the sea of the dead, he finally found that immortality was not something he could force. He discovered that the only thing close to immortality was to give the people of his city the protections that a king is to provide. Not use society, the city, to make his name. But simply protect so that the city becomes a great thriving place on its own so that people can live and live well.
He found that his own immortality would ever only be in protecting his city so that his people could be free. And that greatness would only come from maintaining his people's freedoms, not from forcing people to see him as great.
Barack Obama's search for immortality through legacy defined his administration. Now it all slips away like a child's sand castle. There was no there there.
Because real government is in society itself and that is immortal so long as the human race survives - and the state, the institution we created to protect us so that we have our governance of ourselves, is but the walls of a city built to protect us.
The State is but the container we made so that we can have our Government. The State is but like a glass that holds the wine. It is not THE government. To lose sight of that is to think that the glass is the important thing.
Barack Obama will never understand. But isn't it something? The epic poem of Gilgamesh and its lesson was well understood by the ancients and told to the delight of audiences who fathomed it without explanation, perhaps better than we moderns. We are so steeped in the statist thought of our day that we lose sight of what government is - and what it is not. And who is deserving of honor and legacy - and who is not.
There is no such thing as forcing a legacy on society.

