I'm catching up on some reading and have been scouring some of the city info from our trip we picked up along the way. I was perusing a magazine from Sigtuna which is a quaint little outcrop of Stockholm. Very cute little town that you can see if you've perused my pics. Apparently, this is where Stockholm got started; established in 970 AD by King Erik the Victorious, who either won the battle for it (hence the title) or just claimed it back in Viking times. As I was contemplating on that, it dawned on me that KIngs and Queens had such cool monikers back then... Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible; Alexander the Great; Julian the Apostate; Catherine the Great (there were a lot of Greats) Boleslaw the Brave... etc. etc. You got a sense of their persona from their titles. Then again, those were the days when kings actually went out and fought for their titles and empires. Right on the front lines for the most part. What's interesting to me is that nobody does that anymore. Can you imagine what that would look like should we present our esteemed leaders with new monikers? Something tells me a good portion of them would have the same name: '__(blank)__ the Crappy'.
No, what with the greed, butality, abuses of power and sex scandals rocking the political landscape, it's a frickin' miracle there hasn't already been a world wide revolution. Call it, say, WR1 or something equally catchy. Now, don't get me wrong... those old dudes and dudettes had their share of scandals (ie: Henry VIII) and villains (ie: Vlad the Impaller aka: Dracula) but theirs wasn't outed on Twitter and TMZ for the entire global population to access ... with pictures! Yet as disgruntled as we have the right to be, we are somewhat immune to it now, since it has been going on since time immemorial. There is so, SO much more I have to say on that subject that I am leaving it for another day.
All I can say in closing is that 'absolute power corrupts absolutely, and we are seeing it daily, on widescreens and full color, in all it's glory.
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