Here come the black flags of Khorasan. Zzzzzzzz.

OK, such fanatics can do a lot of harm and we must be vigilant. But I’m less worried than I might be since I’m referring in this case to their appearance on June 9 of 747.

That’s the date when the Abbasid Revolution erupted against the Umayyad Caliphate in the name of renewing the purity of Islam. The “black flags of Khorasan” are associated with a hadith claiming Muhammad said the appearance of the Mahdi would be signaled by black standards from Khorasan under which true believers would fight the Masih ad-Dajjal, an anti-Messiah roughly comparable to the anti-Christ, mutatis mutandis. Also Muhammad himself evidently had a white flag called the small eagle and a black one made from his wife’s headdress called the big eagle. So there you have it.

Or not. The problem is that while the Abbasids seem to have had a point about the Umayyads, and to have established a rather more inclusive Caliphate than the intolerantly ethnically Arab Umayyad one, the belief in Islam that the community of believers would necessarily be united in a perfect theocratic state has continually eluded their grasp. One sect after another, one political division after another, one conflict after another has arisen.

Now you may say the same is true of Christianity. And of course it is, including conflicts in which the various leadership claimants and the combatants generally behave in appalling manners that are painfully obviously not What Jesus Would Do. But there is a difference. Christianity generally expects it. Islam generally does not. And the reason is at bottom theological.

Orthodox Christian doctrine, not Eastern or Russian “Orthodoxy” with a capital O but sound Christian doctrine across denominations explicitly assigns a subordinate but real dignity to the state, on the undisputed authority of Christ himself, who expressly told his followers to “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s”. And so it does not ask political systems to achieve perfection or bestow or enforce it on the populace.

Again, I recognize that there have been many cases where this crucial point was disregarded, generally ending in disaster both tawdry and bloody. But the orthodox position keeps reasserting itself in the wake of the persistent heretical temptation to enforce sanctity, giving people reasonable expectations of what secular governments should try to do and how well they should be expected to do it. Christian governments through the ages have tended to try to impose one sectarian vision, whether Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Calvinist or otherwise. But it is the exception rather than the rule to find any of these trying to force people to live without sin rather than to go to church and repent of it on a regular basis.

Islam, on theological grounds, tends more toward apocalyptic visions of government, because the Koran does not separate church and state and imply that when it comes to governments you should take what you can get. Remember, the Caesar of Christ’s saying was not nominally Christian, nor would the Emperors be for three centuries after the Crucifixion. The Islamic state was founded by Mohammad, and there was no aw shucks guys I’m a theologian not a politician. The fundamental model and understanding is different, with problematic impact.

Once again, there are exceptions, Islamic rulers who understood the limits of the possible and of their own characters and governed with humility and restraint. But they have been remarkably vulnerable to challenges from the austere purists in love with death, hoisting the black flag and proclaiming the imminence of perfect rule on Earth. Even in Saudi Arabia, where the Koran is the Constitution, they deny the possibility of confusion or error in interpreting it. With the results you’d expect from such an approach, a regime at once brutal, seedy and pathetically theologically pretentious.

Even the Umayyad Caliphate is a bit of a problem. It was the second of four major ones early on, and it arose just three decades after the death of Muhammad, replacing the Rashidun Caliphate which was riven by dissent, violence and assassination virtually from the outset, including the assassination of three of the first four caliphs. Likewise the Umayyad one was torn by constant war and revolt. But neither should have been. At least not from the point of their own theology.

To be clear, I concede that Christian rulers have been equally awful and have died in equally violent ways. Bad King John was at least nominally Christian, along with any number of tyrants you can name. But Christianity is not surprised to find sinners in power, and does not ask them to force us to behave like saints. (Indeed, even the Pope has a confessor.) Islam too often does, and the inadequate performance of governments in the face of such expectations leads to violently Puritanical movements one after another, with grandiose claims, black banners, apocalyptic expectations and grimly disappointing earthly results that prompt not sober reflection on flawed human nature but another violently Puritanical outburst.

So yes, it’s scary when the next band of nits proclaim themselves “the caliphate” or “the black flags of Khorasan” or whatever pretentious title they assume. But it’s also old old news.

On June 8 of 68 AD Galba became emperor. Seven months later he was dead of various wounds. And I know, I know, you’re ready for me to stop with the dead emperors. But I bring Galba up because of a deadly epithet rather than sword blow. After he was done, Tacitus dispatched his reputation with the terse “Omnium consensu capax imperii, nisi imperasset”, that is, “universally regarded as fit to rule, if he had not ruled.”

Now you can bury Galba as deep as you like. In fact his head was cut off, carried about and taunted, including by a freedman who bought it once Otho and his troops were done mocking it so he could throw it on the same spot his former master was executed on Galba’s orders, before being reunited with his trunk and placed in a tomb by the Aurelian Road. But I digress.

The point is that there are better political insults. I’ve always especially cherished Disraeli’s on Prime Minister John Russell, that “If a traveller was informed that such a man was Leader of the House of Commons, he might begin to comprehend how the Egyptians worshipped an Insect.” But there are few more lethal verdicts. And not just for Galba.

For instance Paul Martin here in Canada. John Major in Britain, or Gordon Brown, according to a reader of Britain’s Daily Telegraph who duly quoted Tacitus in the original Latin (approvingly noted by Christopher Howse in that same paper eight years ago in a column full of great insults including Dorothy Parker’s crushing drama review “The House Beautiful is the play lousy”). And doubtless you can think of others. I won’t say Barack Obama, because plenty of people doubted his abilities before he became president and plenty still defend him today. But there are many with sterling reputations, résumés and political backing who aim for high office, achieve it, and are instantly rendered or revealed as hollow before a horrified world and posterity.

There’s George Bush Sr. And there’s definitely James Buchanan. Few men have entered the White House with more impressive credentials, or faced a worse crisis with less success or visible sign of effort at coping, drifting rather than blundering into the U.S. Civil War and saying as he expired three years after that sanguinary conflict: “Whatever the result may be, I shall carry to my grave the consciousness that at least I meant well for my country.”

Oh shut up. It’s not enough to become president and mean well feebly, another deadly shaft aimed unkindly by Theodore Roosevelt at his former protégé William Howard Taft. I don’t say it would actually have been a mercy for Buchanan to be dispatched by rebellious cavalry like Galba was, or for Galba to be. I wish somehow the deed could have been performed politically rather than physically, and by a mirror that revealed their hollowness to them ahead of time rather than to the world too late.

Perhaps we could at least install mirrors over the sinks in the restrooms on Parliament Hill with the words “Omnium consensus capax” and hope people are curious enough to ask what it means and wise enough to reflect on the answer.

It all ties together. As Faulkner says, “History isn’t was, it’s is”. And as I say, June 7 is the anniversary of the 1628 Petition of Right.

It’s not as pithy. But it matters. The Petition was the culmination of Edward Coke’s tireless political efforts on behalf of liberty. It was signed on June 7, under duress, by the fairly new King Charles I, who had his father James I’s taste for absolute rule without his bursts of well-timed tact and discretion, and whose failure to abide by its terms would lead to civil war and his own execution 21 years later. Should have listened, Chuck.

After listing a series of complaints in the Petition about the conduct of the government, and reminding the king of their rights going back centuries, Parliamentarians especially insisted “that no man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such like charge, without common consent by act of parliament”, that is, that there be no taxation without representation. They also insist that the king cease to quarter soldiers on the people or bypass common law through courts martial “lest by color of them any of your Majesty's subjects be destroyed or put to death contrary to the laws and franchise of the land.”

In short, citizens’ property is protected, and so is their capacity to resist oppression so the first promise will not be hollow. To keep the second from being hollow they had of course to be vigilant against efforts to bring back standing armies exempt from normal law, as they were in the runup to the Glorious Revolution, looking forward. And looking back, the Petition of Right specifically invokes not just the 1297 statute “made in the time of the reign of King Edward I, commonly called Statutum de Tallagio non Concedendo, that no tallage or aid shall be laid or levied by the king or his heirs in this realm, without the good will and assent of the archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, knights, burgesses, and other the freemen of the commonalty of this realm” but also Magna Carta: “And whereas also by the statute called ‘The Great Charter of the Liberties of England,’ it is declared and enacted, that no freeman may be taken or imprisoned or be disseized of his freehold or liberties, or his free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or in any manner destroyed, but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.”

It is worth noting that it was in debate over the Petition of Right that Coke famously reminded his colleagues, and warned the King, that “Magna Carta is such a fellow as he will have no sovereign,” that is, that this most basic affirmation and guarantee of the liberties of Englishmen wrested from King John by armed citizens not plaintive appeals was itself fundamental law, which not even the King in Parliament could alter. It was that older understanding of the British system that the Americans invoked in creating their own Constitution and Bill of Rights and that in a weird and unsatisfactory form our sorcerers’ apprentices attempted to invoke in creating our Charter of Rights and Freedoms (see fixtheconstitution.ca).

It is also worth noting that although it all seems so long ago now, well before the latest iPhone appeared, the Petition of Right came fully 413 years after the original Magna Carta and only 388 years before our own time. It stands closer to us than Runnymede, yet it is unbreakably linked to Runnymede. And much of it is still in force although, ominously, the bit about Magna Carta and much language concerning due process was removed in a 1968 “modernization” of British law, the “Justices of the Peace Act”. But it still insists on that most English of ideas, cherished by the Americans, that “by which the Statutes before mencioned and other the good Lawes and Statutes of this Realme your Subjects have inherited this Freedome That they should not be compelled to contribute to any Taxe Tallage Ayde or other like Charge not sett by comon consent in Parliament.”

Exactly. Do not think it is an American idea, or that it is harmless if we in Canada lose control of the right through legislators to stop the executive from running off with the legislative agenda and our wallets. It wasn’t OK in 1215, or 1628. And it’s not OK now.

On this date on June 6 Alexis St. Martin was shot. Not on D-Day, which I haven’t forgotten. But in 1822 at a fur trading post on Mackinac Island. By a musket. By mistake. Fascinating, isn’t it?

No? Well, how about the fact that the shot left a wound that never healed. Yet he lived another 58 years.

Still boooring unless you’re him? Then wait, because it gets… well, I suppose disgusting is the word.

St. Martin was treated by a U.S. Army surgeon stationed nearby, named William Beaumont, who figured he was toast given the seriousness of the wound. A phrase here meaning everything he ate burbled out through the hole. But here’s the weird bit. After 17 days he started keeping food down and digesting it. But the hole stayed open. Somehow the stomach lining had fused with the skin, leaving a permanent revolting fistula.

Naturally Beaumont proceeded to dangle bits of food into the hole on a string and study the then very poorly understood process of digestion. For 11 years. Without even paying. He’d tricked St. Martin into signing a contract he couldn’t read (he couldn’t read at all) to work as a servant, chopping wood, carrying bundles, feeling occasional dizziness and having various things shoved into his digestive tract, yanked out and analyzed.

Eventually St. Martin went back to Quebec inexplicably refused repeated entreaties to come join Beaumont in St. Louis and have more things poked into him and pulled out. Finally Beaumont left him alone after slipping and dying on some ice. But when St. Martin himself died 27 years later, a small measure of revenge, the family deliberately let him decompose before burying him so no ghoulish researcher would dig him up and go whoa, that’s one cool unhealed belly wound.

It is an amazing story that shows you just never know. And yes, medical science learned valuable things about how we process food. But I’m still glad of two things. One, it didn’t happen to me. Two, it was before the Internet so there aren’t endless smartphone videos of it all over YouTube.

It’s bad enough reading about it.

To quote Saint Boniface, “Arghk thud.” Or something like that. For on June 5 of 754 AD he was killed, with 52 others, by pagans in Frisia to whom he was explaining that “dead-Jewish-carpenter-is-God” thing I’ve commented on previously. Where did anyone find the nerve to go tell guys with nicknames like “Blood-axe” and personal histories to match to stop worshipping bloodthirsty deities and start being nice to one another for a change?

OK, OK, I know where they got it in once sense. Devotion to Christ and in some cases visions, whatever you think of their authenticity. But bear in mind that St. Boniface was not a guy in a painting or a statue back then. He was an actual person who had to get into a ship one leg at a time on the clear understanding that they were going to sail east across the North Sea, if they did not sink, to a place where people who found torture amusing would consider them dangerous weak idiots. It must have been tempting to say “Hang on chaps, I forgot something, you go without me,” or “The weather looks iffy, let’s do this in, say, about 15 years” or “Maybe we should just go reconnoitre a bit, not really lay it on too thick about Jesus to start.” But they didn’t.

Now it’s an interesting footnote about Boniface, who was in fact born with a name along the lines of Winfrid, Wynfrith, or Wynfryth in Alfred’s Wessex long before there was an Alfred, that at the time of his death he was somewhere near 80 years old. Whatever other excuses he might have made but didn’t, stalling for a decade and a half wasn’t one.

So don’t believe everything you’ve been told about the Dark Ages. Yes, life expectancy was low. But it’s a statistical thing. Because so many people died in early childhood the average age of death was far below what it is today. But once you hit 20, you could have a long and even a full life worthy of admiration.

He certainly did, reforming the Frankish church, being the first archbishop of Mainz, and promoting links between the Carolingians and the papacy for many years as well as carrying out a number of these perilous missionary missions before the one that brought his career to a dramatic close and saw him canonized, lionized, and made patron saint of Germania.

Of course you can take a dim view of almost anything he did including promote Roman Catholic Christianity. But you can’t brush him aside. His was a long and remarkable career and his death underlined the extent to which he had the courage of his convictions to a striking degree.

Who of our modern prattlers would dare undertake such a thing?

Say cheese. It’s easier than pronouncing Roquefort unless you’re French. In which case you have a monopoly on it. Typical, isn’t it?

In good and bad ways. It is typical of the French to produce a really remarkable cheese with, what’s that thing people are often afraid of in food? Oh yeah. Flavour. (Yes, I grew up with English cooking.) And to have a rich folklore surrounding it, some of which might even be accurate. But it’s also typical that there would be a legally enforced monopoly going back into folklore.

On the plus side, Roquefort is one of those mold cheeses, the mold in question being Penicillium roqueforti. And supposedly some youth (a word here meaning gormless teenage boy) was so stunned by the sight of a beautiful girl that he ran off, leaving his lunch including ewe’s milk cheese in a cave. And when he got back months later (the French apparently know something about kissing), voila. Legend also has it that Pliny the Elder praised Roquefort or something similar for, again, flavour. And archeological evidence of cheese-making in the area goes back into prehistory.

On the minus side, EU law says that only cheeses aged in the Combalou caves in Roquefort-sur-Soulzon can be called Roquefort. Continuing the monopoly granted by King Charles VI on June 4, 1411. You’d think Charles had better things to do, or at least more pressing ones, like fighting the English or running about convinced he was made of glass. (No, really, hence his nickname “Charles the Mad”.) But in France monopolies are in, along with growth lagging behind the Anglosphere.

In 1925, Roquefort got the first French Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée and in 1961 a tribunal ruled that other people could make the stuff but only if it was ripened in the caverns of Mont Combalou could you call it Roquefort. Blah blah blah EU monopoly.

Now personally I’m all for freedom of cheese. I think you should enjoy a special relationship with clients because yours tastes really good not because some politician waved their magic pen at your product label. But I do recognize that it’s also a good idea to have a cheese worth going and getting. Indeed, I’m dismayed to learn that the mold that occurs naturally in those famous caves is also often cultivated in laboratories for greater consistency, and sprayed in as an aerosol. Frankly real cheese appeals in exact proportion as it does not resemble process cheesefood including in its lack of homogeneity.

So yes, the monopoly is hard to swallow. But the cheese is another story altogether.

“Could you do him justice in a single sentence?” “Death by hanging.” Comedian Arthur Johnston (a routine gag with his young son Wayne, aimed at Joey Smallwood, in the early 1960s)

Can I just dispatch one more Roman Emperor here? I know, I know. There are so many. Rome was around for a long time and suffered many instructive disasters including in its long decline. Hence Nepotianus.

Yup. Nepotianus. Not that he went in for long declines. More like whoosh crackle. A son of Constantine’s half-sister, he marched into Rome at the head of a group of gladiators and proclaimed himself Emperor on June 3 of 350 A.D. And lasted 28 days before Magnentius did him in.

Bad news for all concerned. Magnentius was himself a usurper, inside whose usurpation Nepotianus made his own singularly ill-judged bid for illegitimate power. And Magnentius’ claim to the throne was basically that he controlled the imperial guards.

Which worked, sort of. He ousted Constans, who had wrested the throne from his own brother Constantine II, and who was “slain shortly thereafter” according to Wikipedia and to no one’s surprise. But then Constantius II (stop already with the Constan- names) drove Magnentius from the throne and to suicide.

Yes, we’re knee-deep in blood here. Hamlet is tame by comparison. But that’s not the point. The point is that things had gotten so bad that a man could march in to Rome surrounded by gladiators and expect, even wrongly, to be accepted.

These are the sorts of warning signs that your political system is in deep trouble, not just because of those at the top, but because the expectations of the populace have become so low and debased.

We’re not looking at gladiators in our own day. But when you consider the current trappings of power, and the increasingly garish, shallow, self-satisfied presentation of aspirants for popular favour in politics, you see pretty quickly that we’re also not exactly at the level of Cato the Elder.

So let’s smarten up before we become a comically dismal byword for future ages.