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Humanity can’t seem to shake its habit of turning ordinary people into deities, from Haile Selassie to General MacArthur
He was a prince of Greece – but he wasn’t Greek. He was a man of Danish, German and Russian blood, but he sprang from none of those places. Who was he? Prince Philip, of blessed memory, consort of Queen Elizabeth II? Or was he – as a handful of her subjects, half a world away, would have it – the son of Vanuatu’s volcano god Kalbaben?
Essayist Anna Della Subin wants you to understand why you might mistake a man for a god; why this happens more often than you’d think; and what this says about power, and identity, and about colonialism in particular. An early proof of Accidental Gods arrived on my doormat on Tuesday, November 2, the same day QAnon believers gathered in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza to await the resurrection of JFK’s son John (dead these 20 years). So: don’t sneer. This kind of thing can happen to anyone. It can happen now. It can happen here.
Men have been made divine by all manner of people, all over the world. Ranging widely across time and space, Accidental Gods is a treat for the adventurous armchair traveller, though a disconcerting one. We are reminded, with some force, that even the most sophisticated-seeming culture exists, by and large, to contain ordinary human panic in the face of an uncaring cosmos.
After the Second World War, during the Allied occupation, ordinary Japanese folk plied American General Douglas MacArthur with lotus roots and dried persimmons, red beans, rice...