You might not have heard of the short-lived NBC drama Kings. It’s a modern retelling of the rise of David from humble Goliath-slayer to majestic ruler, but that’s not important. What’s important is the sheer pleasure of seeing a world much like our own, in terms of technology and culture, that’s geopolitically stuck in the Old Testament. Picture The West Wing, but with the lovably presidential Martin Sheen replaced by a ruthless, theocratic dictator, King Silas, brilliantly portrayed by Ian McShane.
As with Deadwood, Ian McShane alone makes the series worth watching. But there’s something else that struck me after a few episodes. If there is a message to the series, it’s this: Everyone loves King Silas for the occasional mercy that he shows. (Most acutely, we learn in episode six that there’s an annual holiday, “Judgment Day,” on which the king hears exactly ten appeals from the lower courts.) To us, the sophisticated, democracy-loving viewers, this is obviously absurd: Why should the king get credit for rectifying injustices that he merely restrains himself from committing? And yet, any government, even an elected one, is subject to this same paradox. Having an unquestionable king is just the extreme case.
I can’t say for sure whether King Silas is intended to be the complex, conflicted, sinister yet sympathetic personification of “Big Government.” But it’s certainly possible to interpret him that way. Ayn Rand could learn a thing or two from Kings.
Tags: philosophy tv
I had a grotesquely familiar experience in an econ class today: The prof drew up a simple example of a simple concept, yet no one—myself included—understood it. Why? Multiple inconsistencies. A variable name meant one thing in the premises, and something else in the conclusion; a vector was used interchangeably with its distance; the matrix dimensions didn’t match up. Individually, each of these small errors could have been caught and corrected. But taken as a whole, they destroyed every trace of coherence. As a result, half the lecture was spent with the frazzled professor trying to clarify things, only to confuse the audience further, to the point that students were yelling, “Enough! Forget it! Let’s move on!” These are PhD-level students at one of the top econ programs in the world. Yet the situation was so agonizing that it drove them to pandemonium.