A lesson from the Mad King of the Far West: just blame the poor

24 Feb 2025

Why have a democracy when you can have an oligarchy to buoy the rich, shun the needy and take in the world’s whitest victims? Ask Trump and his sidekick, Elmo.

The news from the Far West was rather troubling. The Mad King, who’d been deposed for a patch, was back on his gaudy golden throne, and this time he was being advised (if that was the right word) by an Evil Wizard, known by many names but most often by Elmo, who was taking a whole lot of power into his own hands and doing rather strange things with it.

“They’re dismantling the government? Their own government?”

“Well, yes, they believe there’s too much government going on in the Far West and it should be reduced. The people should stand on their own two legs, if they still have two. They should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and so forth.”

“And if they can’t?”

“Well, then, it’s their fault, and they don’t deserve any help from the government.”

“They’ll starve in the streets.”

“The Mad King and the Evil Wizard will doubtless have them removed. I’m sure they won’t want to endure the sight of very poor, even homeless, people hanging around their wonderful cities.”

“Well, there’s something to be said for that attitude. Our own streets have far too many homeless people on them. It’s not a good look. It makes it look like we have a very large number of poor people in this country and we, as the government, are doing nothing for them.”

“We do have a very large number of poor people in this country, and the government isn’t doing much at all for them. In fact, we don’t even know how many there are of them, altogether — that is, the indigent people filling the sidewalks, sleeping in entranceways...”

We don’t want to know exactly how many indigent there are.

“Ah, well, yes, but we don’t want to know exactly how many of them there are. The indigents, that is. If we count them up we will, of course, get a much larger number than we have on the books already, and then we’ll have to help them. That will cost us a lot of money.”

“Hmmm. Maybe we’ve got to start thinking like the Mad King and the Evil Wizard. Blame the indigent for being indigent, which gives us the moral high ground, and then we don’t have to help at all. Most of them are alcoholics or drug addicts, aren’t they?”

“Yes, but —”

“Well, there you are then.”

The above conversation took place between two of the advisers of King Cyril the Boneless, monarch of the realm of WakaBanana. It was recorded and transcribed for posterity by a secret service agent who stood behind pillars and curtains in the Great Meeting Hall and, with his trusty Walkman, recorded what the advisers and other dignitaries were saying.

King Cyril himself, at that point, was just recovering from a weekend away. Or he was recovering from the shock of coming back to the palace after a weekend at his stud farm, where he’d had the immeasurable pleasure of watching one of his great stud bulls inseminate several cows the king had bought, at great cost, because he liked their big brown eyes. They always seemed to be looking at him with great empathy.

His Majesty had done his big annual speech to the nation, and that went well — partly, it must be said, because few people were paying attention, so shocking was the news from the Far West. A government dismantling itself? Such an idea was totally alien to the state of WakaBanana, where it was taken for granted that the state should be bigger, and should do more, not less, and should indeed do more together — these words were King Cyril’s way of assuring the nation that everyone was cooperating and working together, people and government, for the greater good of all.

Whether that was actually happening was another matter, but they’d doubtless come back to this issue in time. In fact they came back to it regularly, round and round in loops, without any real forward progress being made.

Those kinds of problems never went away, and the king would be required periodically to put on his best robes and his biggest smile and stand up and tell the nation, once more, that everyone was working together for the greater good of all. In fact, everyone except the elite was getting poorer and more desperate, and the greatest city of the nation was falling apart because the officials in charge had forgotten to patch anything up for a few decades and, actually, they didn’t really understand the scope of the problem because they hadn’t updated their government computers for about 20 years and now they couldn’t afford the software.

“Why are they doing this?” the king had asked his key advisers, traditionally known as Gog, Magog and Cheryl. “The lords of the Far West, I mean.”

“All we can discern,” said Gog, or it may have been Magog, “is that they want to channel more money to the richest of the rich. Take it away from government, collapse government services, and give all that lovely lolly to those who are very rich, but especially the Evil Wizard, who’s snatching pennies from widows and orphans so the government of the Far West can put more billions in his pocket — more billions for him to build magic cars, and magic rockets, and magic satellites, and various other magic things. Oh, yes, robots — he’s building robots.”

He’s working towards a point at which he no longer needs any humans at all.

“Clever,” said Cheryl. “He’s working towards a point at which he no longer needs any humans at all. The robots will go to work on all those magic things he’s making and the actual people, well, I suppose he’s quite happy for them all to starve to death. That will certainly solve a lot of social problems. Robots don’t need to eat, do they?”

“It’s curious,” pondered the king. “What do you do when you have no government, and no people left either, just a few oligarchs and wizards sitting on a pile of money in the middle of a wasteland?”

“Perhaps that’s the brilliance of the Mad King’s latest intervention,” said Cheryl.

“Which is?” asked King Cyril, worried.

“Well, you know we have some whitewalkers in some far-flung regions of our glorious country,” said Gog. “Yes? Whitewalkers? Not to be confused with the zombies of KZN.”

“The Mad King of the Far West,” said Magog, “wants our whitewalkers.”

There was puzzlement. “Gosh,” said the king. “Doesn’t he have enough whitewalkers of his own?”

“He has plenty, Your Majesty,” said Cheryl. “But it seems he wants more of them. He claims we here in WakaBanana are being nasty to our whitewalkers, so he has offered to give them all a new home in the Far West.”

Send all our whitewalkers to the Far West!

“Fabulous!” cried the king. “Let him take them! We’ll provide the planes. Line them all up, and let’s go — send all our whitewalkers to the Far West!”

“If only it were so easy, Your Majesty. We think there’s something else going on here, so we’re just investigating... Does the Evil Wizard Elmo wish to somehow revivify these whitewalkers, turn them into an army under his command? Does he want to do experiments on them, perhaps, try to make hybrid whitewalker-robots, to fight wars on his behalf, or maybe to send down the mines for all those precious magic minerals he needs for his magic projects? I think we should know before we send our whitewalkers across the ocean to the Far West.”

King Cyril sighed. “Always an obstacle, isn’t there? Or more than one. Many.”

“Yes,” said Gog, with pride. “We are famous around the world for our obstacles.”

“Then,” said the king, “this discussion will continue. First, though,” and he gathered up his richly brocaded robes as he prepared to stand up, “I need lunch.”

Recording ends. DM

Shaun de Waal is a writer and editor.

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This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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