Political Model No 1.
Leadership and Shared Responsibility.
Let’s say, for instance, that your cunning has paid off, you’ve managed to con your way to the top, past the largest member of the tribe, who’s slashing club was what passed for “a slight disagreement” back then, and now you’re a leader; a semi-magnificent specimen of a low-brow hominid and you and your mates have cornered a succulent, young Giant Elk. You’ve managed to avoid a spiking by those massive horns and visions of yourself, the leader, taking the largest slice of roast venison-and-ash, swiftly followed by unceremonious sex with anyone you feel like, are floating in your head; the Elk’s down for the count; all that’s required is for you, as brick-team leader and all-round-good-egg, to administer the last rites. Knuckle-bone clubs are sooooo last year, and you can’t help but feel a tinge of smugness as you draw out your ‘this-season’s’ flint hatchet. This magnificent tool you stole from one of the more creative but far dumber and weaker team members. He’d been living on vegetation due to his hunting inabilities until he joined the group………I mean, how do you expect to be treated when people find out you’ve been existing solely on chanting and roots? You get beaten up and your flint hatched stolen, that’s what. So, brandishing this delicate piece of flint-art with which you are about to bash in the brains of this daughter-of-Bambi, you make your advance. It’s then that the late-owner of the flint axe suffers a bout of premature-emasculation-first-hunt-fever and lets out a whoop of such blood-curdling savagery (at a volume that no-one thought possible without the perpetrator having a bowel movement, particularly on that all-fruit-diet) that it halts even your steps, thereby spoiling the fine dash of a figure you were cutting as you closed in for the kill. Unfortunately, and just forty-yards away, it also halts the progress of a very large, male, Plains’ Lion that was just wandering off in the opposite direction to this hunt (being, as he was, unaware of it’s taking place until he heard the rebel yell) to a shady spot by yonder bog to try and catch a few flies for lunch, so slim have been its pickings over the past eight days.
Now this well-maned chap has the build of a Humvee, the temper of a seriously pissed-off hornet, the patience of a well-struck shotgun cartridge and the appetite of garbage truck, and that’s on a good day. Today? Well, today is a real bad, Plains’-Lion day; in fact it’s the mother and father of a shit day, it would’ve been penned in red ink on the calendar, were they to have one, and our little group of intrepid huntsmen will have to search pretty damn good to find even a spark of gaiety or slap-on-the-back camaraderie in their soon-to-be, furry, companion. Today this lion would tackle a feeding frenzy of alligators that had the piranha squad as minders just for a morsel of slug excrement so poor has been its diet of late; then your man with the fruit-squits lets out the calling-card whoop and all of a sudden our team leader is faced with an undeniable truth; government built upon legend is doomed to proving itself one day.
All other members of the group take one step back, leaving semi-brick-man leader unexpectedly at the forefront of the party as the cuddly beast steps into the arena and surveys the still warm and palpitating, main course Elk, and the choice of hors d’erves in back of it. As our man in hiresuit costume and pouting rectum faces what seems to be a set of teeth the size of Telford, he realises that the proletariat have voted with their feet and he’s expected to claim the prize by shoo-ing away this ravening beast that looked like the role-model for Goodfella’s, bearing nothing but what was an object of beauty and envy, but is now just a very inadequate ‘short piece of stick with a bit of stone at the end of it’.
At this point in his early political career, it dawns on our leader that being top man is only O.K. so long as it doesn’t involve being eaten in the first flush of power. “Fuck this for a game of soldiers!” hadn’t been invented then, and neither had the AK47; it was however the birthplace of “political strategy”. Moving carefully backward our slight-of-build leader bows down before Fruit-and-Root-Whooping- Man and offers him the return of the flint axe. Now, if you had any brains, you’d refuse the axe with a look of disdain that says, “Do I look like I just stepped out of some hippo shit?” Unfortunately there were three things against this happening. Firstly, the pea whizzing round in a vacuum that was fruit-loop’s head was all he’d been blessed with for a brain; great for being creative, useless for being strategic. Secondly, he was totally unaware, being as thrilled as he was in getting back his beautiful axe, seeing its glint in the setting sunlight, feeling the shape of the head, the graps of the handle.......... that the leader had placed the axe in his hand then crawled behind him just as all the other gathered hunter/cowards had also taken another step backwards to distance themselves from the slight of hand and the Plain’s Lion. And thirdly, it really did seem that he’d just stepped out of some hippo shit seeing as how easily he was moved from also-ran to favourite in one swift move. It only remained for our leader with an eye on survival to give fruit-loop a hearty push towards the fuck-up-on-four-legs and the poor sucker was eaten in a trice, flint axe and all, went down really well as an appetiser. As the last of his skinny little and sadly underused legs disappeared down the chomping, Plains’ Lion-maw, it didn’t go unnoticed by his fleeing troupe of fair-weather friends that modern weaponry couldn’t come too soon. To the happily surviving leader there was a realisation that tribe top-man could be a particularly short-term occupation in its present form. To make it a job worth continuing in it had to have some form of longevity built in; at least until after the next hunt had finished.
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