One of my favorite writers is Terry Pratchett. A genius in the field of comedic fantasy, his first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. What originally began as a send-up of fantasy tropes became a rich, deep, and multi-layered cosmology, and the Discworld, and its main city, Ankh-Morpork, holds a special spot in the hearts of fantasy lovers everywhere.
I have been thinking about Sir Terry and his books often over the last several days. This is because of one of my favorite books, Night Watch, and its relevance to our own times.
The hero of this book is His Grace Sir Samuel Vimes, Duke of Ankh, Commander of the Night Watch. Vimes is basically a jumped-up thug, but with a stone-hard moral core. Transported back in time, he becomes his own mentor during a time of extreme social unrest. He becomes the unwilling leader of the rebellion against Homicidal Lord Winder (soon to be succeeded by Mad Lord Snapcase), and during a lull in the fighting ponders revolutions:
”Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People.
People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.”
I am not going to get into the whole Clinton/Sanders drama. But one of the amazing things about the primary season was that Sanders and his followers seemed to be genuinely offended when they lost elections.
The answer of course, is that America has the wrong sort of people. If we had the right sort of people, who thought properly, than Sanders would have won those elections.
Of course, if we had the right sort of people, there never would have been a need for Sanders in the first place.