Word: kingships
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...dominated the rudimentary kingdom for more than 150 years until 1891, when they were driven out by stronger tribes. In 1901, however, Faisal's father, crusty Abdul Aziz, popularly known as Ibn Saud, roared out of what is now Kuwait to recover power. Ibn Saud gradually regained the kingship in rolling battles that involved shifting tribal loyalties and, eventually, British intrigue. Finally, in 1925 a force of 45,000 Bedouins led by Faisal - then his father's fa vorite lieutenant - recaptured Mecca by driving out Sharif Hussein, great-grandfather of the present King of Jordan...
...first years on the throne, the Shah was generally considered a figurehead monarch who cared more for fast cars, fancy living and pretty women than for the tasks of kingship. That impression was reinforced by his failure to deal firmly with Premier Mossadegh during the 1950s, and by his ineffectual early struggles with the landowning "thousand families" who largely controlled his country. In 1950 he attempted unsuccessfully to force them to hand over their land to their peasants; the Shah set an example by deeding 450,000 acres of crown property to the 42,000 farmers who worked the royal...
...purpose of these ritual "impeachments" was both to affirm the unity of the people around the kingship and to highlight conflicts around the person of the king himself. Even when no prince or sub-chieftan actually coveted the throne, the ritual demanded that they act as if they did. Their attacks on the king were necessary to emphasize the contrast between the sanctity of the kingship and the human failings of the king. If a particular monarch was a corrupt or cruel despot, the people would not seek to overthrow the social order, but would simply replace the king with...
Thus, through regular reenactments of their dissatisfaction with the king, the people would acknowledge the essential rightness of the social order and the enduring sanctity of the kingship. These ritual impeachments, known to anthropologists as "the drama of kingship," were a way to handle conflicts that might otherwise have led to the demise of the tribe or nation; they provided both a vehicle for protest and a method for replacing an inept or evil leader--without a major social upheaval. But while regular impeachments bade well for the fate of the society, the fate of each king was always thought...
...this point. But the trouble does not lie with the process of impeachment itself. Rather, the nation's distress over the prospect of ousting Richard Nixon arises from legitimate if somewhat alarmist fears over the durability of our social order, and from the fact that king and kingship--or, more properly, president and presidency--have become strangely synonymous...