THE VIRAL LIBRARY DEPT./
THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT.

Another great thrift-store find. It must have been a timely publication (1952) for Queen Elizabeth II’s accession and coronation. It’s just all kinds of fun. History doesn’t have to be in prose to be informative. Heraldry is right-brain history; one of those common arts (like popular songs, or recipes) that left-brain social and economic historians do well to consider, for it helps people intuitively grasp complex and opaque social rules.

The getting, securing, and enhancement of a Coat of Arms has been the driving impetus of almost all individual activity in European and world civilization since the Fall of Rome.

The blood and sex-drenched quest of rich and poor, man and woman, mounted knight and mounted knave and mountebank alike, for these chivalric distinctions, earned in the courts of Venus and the groves of Apollo as well as on the field of Mars, gave them and their children the right to bear arms in a violent society. Heraldry illuminated the Middle Ages, inspired the Crusades, marched through gunpowder smoke with the rise of royal and republican nation-states; it recruited the colonial conquests of the Americas; it fluttered above the extinction and enslavement of native nations; and it illustrates the nineteenth-century Theory of the Leisure Class.

(Another word for heraldry is patriarchy. Another is branding; another is breeding. Another is racism. Another is privilege. Nevertheless heraldry represented a strong force for order and against violence; for law and ceremony against ordeal and bloodshed; for inclusion as well as exclusion of stakeholders; and thank the monks, for individual accountability of those bearing weapons in the marketplace, or those daring to date your daughter. It evolved to protect wives from being discarded, and to prevent civic victims from enduring random attacks by faceless slaughterers should a town find themselves, that moment, “in the wars.”)

The founding fathers all bore arms. Even the bastard son of a Scotsman and a whore, Alexander Hamilton, bore arms; and as the musical ‘Hamilton’ makes clear, the circumstances of his birth had much to do with his career as soldier and statesman, and financier. Remember, the poor West Indian immigrant waif, alone in his socks on the docks of Manhattan, who made money by making good, and made good by making money, and founded America by founding Wall Street. Armae virumque cano...

However, apart from the colorful and admirable character of the individual man, Hamilton’s birth and breeding provide a Viewpoint to stand a while, and gaze on a vista back to the Middle Ages, and forwards to our time. Hamilton’s arms are a jumping-off point, where any wise man might comprehend the long curvature of the Earth; that is, the history of economics, ancient and modern; which is the history of life and mankind and Nature herself, in panorama. The main feature of the View, of course, is the ominous rise of the dazzling, hypnotic, gasp-inducing, paralyzing, scintillating, roaring, cresting, unstoppable tsunami of what folks call capitalism.