The View from a Drawbridge

The primary subject of this post is King George III, the king we Americans revolted against to establish a free country. But as you’ll see, writing about this at this point in time resonates with me on both a political and a personal level. I never thought I’d say this, but I really relate to this monarch. How we have been taught to think of King George is a symptom of two much bigger problems.

When we heard about the Revolutionary War in elementary school, King George III was painted as a cruel despot from whom we had to break free because he was trying to crush us under the weight of taxes without our consent. He was described as a bumbling fool who was completely out of touch with the world. He was arrogant and didn’t care about us. Oh, and later he turned out to be as mad as a hatter, so his earlier lack of mental acuity was probably a warning sign. (Because of course all mentally ill people are also mentally delayed, right?)

To reinforce that image, I recently had the opportunity to see the musical Hamilton, and Jonathan Groff played George III. He absolutely stole the show with this song below. His songs alone would have been worth the price of admission. He’s that good. And he plays the character exactly as he should for the purposes of this play. His King George III is hilariously petulant, cartoonish, but at the same time intimidating and raptor-like and clearly a bad guy.

To be honest, I hadn’t given George III a moment’s thought since elementary school until I went to see Hamilton. I had even forgotten about his going mad toward the end there. Hamilton renewed my curiosity about that.

My electronics somehow glommed onto that curiosity, because at some point a news article popped up on my newsfeed about him. Entitled “What was the truth about the madness of George III?” It totally debunked the theory that he had porphyria, which had been going around since the 1960’s. Now the prevailing belief is that he had manic depression.

One indicator of that was his writing. When he was in a manic period, it wasn’t unusual for him to write 400-word sentences with only 8 verbs. As a writer, I was dying to see a sentence like that. And since more than 8,000 of his letters and 200,000 of his papers can be found in the Georgian Papers Programme online, I had high hopes of doing so, but so far I’ve had no luck. (If you do, please share it in the comments below.)

Of course, my fruitless research sucked me into a George III vortex, and the only way for me to get out of it was to get to know him better. So the next audiobook I listened to on my commutes to work was The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III by Andrew Roberts.

It was from that well-written biography that I discovered, once again, that we have been taught a bunch of lies in school. I mean, I’ve only recently gotten over being misled by all the Thanksgiving nonsense, and now this. This is why it’s so damaging that the current administration is forcing schools to leave out significant chunks of history and banning books. The more they indoctrinate, the more damage they do, and the more those kids will have to recover from as adults, if they’re ever given the opportunity to realize they should do so. Parents shouldn’t be playing into this. They should be outraged.

Now, normally I wouldn’t take just one book’s word for anything, but given all the documentation available, yes, the scales have fallen from my eyes. We were brought up to believe that our revolution was a noble one, and that our fight was for freedom, and that our government was some radical, liberating experiment that has set an example for the rest of the world. Yay us.

If you want to continue living in that fantasy world, you may want to stop reading here. Otherwise, brace yourself. We have been duped.

First of all, the Revolution had absolutely nothing to do with the rallying cry, “No taxation without representation!”

As a matter of fact, the people in the 13 colonies paid a mere fraction of the amount of taxes that their British counterparts did. The only reason that taxes even became a part of the American news cycle at that point in time is that the French and Indian War had lasted for 9 years, and had only just ended in 1763. Britain had paid for it entirely, and more British had lost their lives than Americans.

It is not unreasonable to expect people to share some of the financial burden for their own protection. Even with the taxes suggested, they would still be paying much less tax than their British counterparts, and it would only recover a small part of the expense for that war. And another significant detail is that every penny of those taxes was to be used within the 13 colonies. Frankly, throwing a tantrum about taxation under those circumstances is a bit rich.

Now that they felt safe from the French, the fact was, America felt they didn’t need the British anymore. It wasn’t that they wanted representation in order to make sure they were paying a fair amount of taxes. They already knew they were getting a sweetheart deal. Proof positive of this is the fact that Britain set aside seats in the House of Commons for them, and America did not take them up on occupying them. Representation meant nothing to them when, in reality, they just didn’t want to pay any taxes at all.

But “No taxation without representation” is a catchy slogan in the propaganda war. And that’s the war the American revolutionaries truly wanted to win. According to this article, only about 20 percent of the colonial population were diehard revolutionaries in the beginning. If they were to have the revolution they craved, the propaganda war was the one they had to win first.

The Stamp Act was a nice, visible supposed insult to the colonists. Tax our playing cards? Seriously? Outrageous! In fact, the tax on playing cards was so minimal that the colonists would barely feel it. It was the lawyers who really would feel it, with taxes on their legal documents, but they could afford it. But just as it is today, rich people know how to spin their outrage in such a way that the poor get riled up.

And by the way, King George opposed the Stamp Act. He thought it was an unreasonable way to raise funds. And when the colonies protested it, he encouraged its repeal. And it was repealed. But it was a great way to get that propaganda machine going. This was how the revolutionaries began making people believe that George was an evil despot who was out to get them.

If the revolutionaries were truly worried about taxation without representation, why did they declare in the 4^th resolution of the Declaration of Rights and Grievances of the Stamp Act Congress “That the people of these colonies are not, and from their local circumstances, cannot be represented in the house of commons in Great Britain.” This may have stated their current circumstances, but it also prevented anyone from taking those seats in the house of commons, and in fact made it seem like the seats had never been offered.

At that point in history, the colonists enjoyed more freedom than just about any people on earth. The colonial press had more freedom than any press in the world. So why did the revolutionaries want the revolution so badly?

First of all, let’s take a closer look at the Boston Tea Party. There was a HUGE and quite profitable black market trade in the American colonies. Britain, of course, wanted the colonists only to do business with them, in an effort to recoup some of the money that had disappeared into this colonial money pit. But  that meant that Americans couldn’t always get the best deal on products.

The tea that Britain was selling them had a tax imposed upon it. The Americans could get cheaper, tax-free tea from other countries through the black market. They snuck it into Boston Harbor all the time. Unfortunately, British Customs agents would often confiscate these shipments and then sell them in the name of the crown, so the black marketeers would lose their profits, as well as their initial investments, entirely. The revolutionaries did not like that one little bit.

The second thing that made rebellion almost inevitable was a desire for land. In order to end the war with the French sooner in an effort to save lives and preserve property, George had negotiated with the French that the colonists would not move Westward into the Ohio Valley. The French were to have it. Yeah. That wasn’t going to happen, as far as the colonists were concerned.

The third thing that made revolution so attractive to them was power. Of course it’s much nicer to be your own boss. And as citizens, they had gained confidence. They felt safer, they were more politically savvy, their infrastructure was built up. Like teenagers, they had reaped every ounce of benefit they could from their parent, and now they were anxious to spread their wings and fly. (They never call, they never write…)

The annoying thing about the propaganda, and about the fact that it persists to this day, is that George was no tyrant. He was a constitutional monarch, and a decent one at that. The big lie was that we, the people, simply traded one controller for another.

Not one of the papers in the Georgian Papers Programme indicates that George III had any desire to increase his powers in any way. In his entire 60-year reign, he had never vetoed a parliamentary bill, even though he had the power to do so, and even though he most definitely did not always agree with parliament. Still, no veto. Not once.

Before the revolution, George never closed American newspapers, never prevented Americans from assembling for meetings, and no arrests were made without trials. No troops were put out on the streets until unrest had already begun in Boston. And George did not behead any revolutionaries as was happening to the revolutionaries in Russia during that same time period. He never ordered mass arrests, or suspended Habeas Corpus (as President Lincoln did.)

So, in order to convince the rest of the colonists that George was a tyrant, they had to provoke a tyrannical reaction out of him. They had to make it seem like they would be fighting for a greater good. They had to convince the people they were fighting to make America great, rather than trading one ruler for another.

But in fact, presidents have a lot of the same powers as monarchs. They can appoint judges, receive ambassadors, issue pardons, sign or veto legislation, serve as commander in chief, commission army officers, and convene the legislature. They can also appoint supreme court justices and cabinet officials (albeit with senate confirmation.) They have always come from the upper class. The difference is, the powers of monarchs have weakened over time, whereas presidents have steadily expanded their own powers, and are now much stronger than they were in the very beginning. That’s a little scary to contemplate.

When George Washington gave his first pep talk to his troops before battle, he told them, in essence, that if they lost, they’d become slaves to Britain. In fact, George III opposed slavery, and England abolished the slave trade in 1807, 56 years before America’s Emancipation Proclamation. And in fact they freed those slaves that fought on their side.

Another low blow to George’s reputation was the implication that he was not intelligent. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are thousands of things that prove otherwise, but here are a few:

• He founded the Royal Academy, which is still the premier institution for artists in the UK.
• As a teenager, he wrote essays on constitutional theory, political economy, and moral philosophy.
• He enjoyed spending time in his library, and amassed 65,250 books, 19,000 tracts and pamphlets, and 4,000 maps, which were donated to the British Museum after his death.
• He played the flute, harpsichord and piano.
• He promoted the scientific aspects of Captain Cook’s voyages.
• He had an observatory built with his own funds so that he could observe the transit of Venus, and appointed official observers to continue making astronomical observations. George would visit and participate as often as he could.
• When Uranus was discovered, it was first called Georgium Sidus (George’s Star) in honor of the king, because he had enthusiastically and generously funded Herschel’s astronomical pursuits from his private purse.
• He promoted vaccination, even though at least one of his children died of smallpox post-inoculation.
• He enjoyed disassembling and reassembling intricate clocks and watches.
• He was a competent architectural draftsman.
• He created extremely detailed lists of provisions for troops during his nation’s wars with the French.
• He established the world’s finest collection of scientific instruments at the time, and appointed a mathematical instrument maker.
• As his country was mostly rural during his reign, he kept abreast of the latest agricultural and livestock developments and could recite the annual crop yields.

Another thing that I find personally annoying is that people speak of his mental illness as if it’s a character flaw, or something he should have been able to control. This ignorance over mental illness persists to this day. (I’m having to deal with this very same crap even as we speak.)

George III did have 5 manic episodes during his reign. The first was a bipolar prodrome attack in 1765, and the other 4 were full scale mania, the last of which consumed his final decade. The last 4 were particularly tragic because he knew what was happening. He knew, as he was restrained in strait jackets. He knew as he was locked away and cut off from the world. He knew as he was separated from his beloved family. He knew as he was subjected to countless numbers of torturous medical “treatments” of the Georgian era that did no good whatsoever. He knew as he descended into total blindness due to cataracts and became increasingly deaf with age. He knew, as his (quite understandably) detested son, George IV, waited like a vulture in the wings to become one of the most inept, and financially destructive rulers that George III’s beloved country would ever know.

Two tragic stories about George III’s descent into madness really stand out to me. As one of his manias was in its beginning stages, while he was still in his right mind enough to be aware of what he was about to go through, he once cried in the arms of one of his servants, and then pulled himself together before entering a room full of people. The other story was that his youngest child, Amelia, the absolute apple of his eye, died at age 27, just before the king’s descent in to his last, longest mania. During that mania, he would sometimes talk to Amelia as if she were in the room with him. “They” would talk about what her funeral had been like.

Yes, King George had his flaws. He did not travel. He never visited any of his colonies. He never even went to Ireland or Scotland or Europe. For someone who was so intellectually curious about the world, that was a strange blind spot. He was also so religious and conservative that he preferred to stick to customs rather than to innovate. That, too, was strange, given his love of science. He believed so firmly in his role as the head of the Church of England that he actively ensured that British Catholics would continue to be deprived of rights and freedoms.

The French Revolution occurred during his reign, and it was miraculous that England did not follow suit. Human rights in general were not at their height. Most men were unable to vote. In England, this led to the Peterloo Massacre. This atrocity and much of its aftermath came about due to governmental decisions, and George was horrified by the death and violence, but he did not intervene with Parliament as strongly as he might have.  All these things seem even worse when viewed through a modern day lens. But compared to the outrageous actions of our current leaders, one might argue that they’re relatively mild.

The author of the book summed up George as follows: “Well meaning, hard working, decent, dutiful, moral, cultured, and kind, yet cursed to lose his mind no fewer than 5 times, and also to preside over the loss of the American colonies,  George III is one of the most tragic monarchs of British history as well as being one of the most underestimated and misunderstood.”

Discovering more evidence that I had been indoctrinated in school to comply with someone else’s agenda, in this case about who we are as a nation and what motivated us to become one in the first place, makes me angry. More proof that people are quite comfortable stigmatizing mental illness rather than trying to understand it makes me furious. And the fact that I can relate to being misunderstood, despite my best efforts, for a lifetime, leaves me… there’s something beyond fury. It kind of feels like resignation. But it’s not. Exhaustion mixed with rage mixed with profound grief? Something like that. If I ever come up with the proper word for it, I’ll let you know.

As I implied in my recent blog post entitled A Love Letter to My Blog, I have been having an abysmally shitty summer at work, and from the looks of it, it’s only going to get worse. Thank goodness I had an amazing trip to Italy in May with Dear Husband, or I’d probably have gone off the deep end entirely by now. But I can’t/don’t want to/probably shouldn’t talk about it in detail.

I’ll just say that I’m struggling with the harsh realities that I’ll always be misunderstood, no one at work has my best interests at heart, and they are absolutely unwilling or incapable of gaining a greater understanding of neurodivergence, and therefore they will always assume the worst of me. They think that my behavior is stupidity and defiance rather than autism, and they keep demanding that I conform to neurotypical standards that I can’t achieve, which is then interpreted as further defiance, and makes me legitimately fear for my livelihood.

And all that, if distilled to its purest elements, comes down to the fact that I’m getting heartily sick of always having to defend myself. George, I feel you. I see you. I wish we could talk.

He, too, was misunderstood. He, too, really did mean well, and yet seemed to have to defend himself more than should have been necessary. And he, too, had at least one moment when he was so frustrated that he just wanted to cry in someone’s arms. No one who genuinely cared was there for him. I’m glad that servant was there, at least. Poor man.

So, yeah, I’m engaged in this personal battle, I’m relating to George, and then along comes something that’s the cherry on top of this shit sundae.

I discover that the Despotic Orange Toddler just signed an executive order that will allow him and his Alligator Alcatraz cronies to lock up anyone with a mental illness, such as myself. “Oh, no, Barb!” his deluded followers might say, “That only applies to the homeless nut jobs, and those who pose a danger to themselves or others, so you’re safe!”

Don’t be fooled. Does the order define what constitutes a danger, or who gets to make that decision? No. Does the order specify that the mentally ill person in question has to be homeless? No. (Not that any of that should come into play in the first place.)

The fact that I’m justifiably outraged at what’s happening at work might be considered a danger if the person who is making that decision has an agenda. Even though I’ve never harmed anyone in my life and never would, there are people at work who find my frustration annoying and would love to see me gone. And as the extremists gain yet more power, and as places like Alligator Alcatraz become increasingly normalized, actions like that become accepted. Just ask those who wound up in concentration camps, or those who are sitting in Alligator Alcatraz at this very moment, or the spirits of those who have already died there, for that matter.

Have you seen pictures of that place? It looks a lot like Auschwitz. A modern day Auschwitz, if you add swarms of mosquitoes and unrelenting heat.

The truth about King George III can teach us quite a lot about how propaganda can mislead people to embrace agendas that are not their own. His unjustified legacy, to this day, also demonstrates that we as a society have quite a long way to go in terms of how we perceive mental illness. Until we come to grips with these two problems, I fear this country will continue to decline.

Indoctrination. Legislation without representation. Authoritarianism. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being led around by the nose like a bull.

Oh, and by the way, nearly 5 million US citizens, in Washington DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have been taxed without federal representation (non-voting representatives in the House, and no Senators at all), in some cases as far back as 1790. None of us seem to get particularly worked up about that. The hypocrisy.