As Senator John Kerry climbed to the top of the heap in the democratic primaries, one descriptor of him always stuck in my mind: "patrician." Now most pundits seem to count it as a liability - as though he has to overcome his upper-class heritage in order to win.
On, the contrary, it was his blue-blood status that was actually going to win him the election. I just needed the data to back up my suspicions.
It came last week and I breathed a sigh of relief. I no longer have to worry about President Bush winning a second term.
For the past 200 years, Burke's Peerage, a highly-respected, aristocratic genealogical publishing house in Great Britain, has conducted analyses of the nominees. They then make a prediction: "The presidential candidate with the greatest number of royal genes has always been the victor, without exception, since George Washington," Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke's Peerage, said to the Associated Press in 1996 when predicting that Bill Clinton would defeat Bob Dole.
On Friday, CNN reported that this election the bluest blood belongs to Kerry.
Of course all this is rightly met with boatloads of skepticism: "That has nothing to do with anything!" my roommate declared when I told him all about this blood business. One would like to think so. (Though, it's hard to argue with a system that's never failed.) When information comes to light that conflicts with the accepted world view, most people choose to label it a coincidence, "conspiracy theory," or both. After all, that's always much easier than actually investigating the ideas.
Hence we arrive at another fun aspect of the election: for the first time in history, both nominees are members of Yale's Skull and Bones secret society, a creepy, ritualistic organization that propels its members to high ranking positions in government, intelligence, education, and the media. (And this is a group with only 800 living members at any given time.) In interviews on "Meet the Press," Tim Russert grilled the candidates on this bizarre "coincidence." Both were particularly tight lipped, refusing to give too many details.
For obvious reasons, Skull and Bones tends to feature prominently in many conspiracy theories as a part of a vast network of elite secret societies like the Illuminati, the freemasons, the Bohemian club, and others who are allegedly manipulating the world toward a unified totalitarian state. These elaborate, all-encompassing theories are a little tough to swallow given the nature of the circumstantial "evidence" that their proponents tend to use to support them.
Putting on our conspiratorial thinking caps for a moment, there is something that links the royal blood theory with Skull and Bones. When an initiate joins Skull and Bones they acquire a code name. For example, according to a May 2000 Atlantic article, the name "magog" goes to the initiate with the most sexual experience - former President William Howard Taft received this name, as did George H.W. Bush. (Who would expect that?)
Our current President's name: "Temporary." I kid you not.
"But that means nothing!"
Yeah, probably. But it's still hilarious. We'd like to think that all this stuff is just a series of meaningless, entertaining coincidences. And that's what it probably is. Then again, that's just what they would want you to think!
Write to David at swimminginbrokenglass@yahoo.com
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