Much talk in the public presses here about Mr Biden's ancestry! God bless him on this auspicious day!
Apparently, he has a narrative that he is descended from a Captain George Biden of the Honble East India Company who went to India (surprise surprise) and married (how very politically correct) an Indian woman. The problem is that the achives of the Company know nothing of any such person, There was a Captain Christopher Biden, but he had an English wife. Of course, he may have been into bigamy, but would that not turn him into a colonial predator and imperialist exploiter of defenceless indigenous womanhood? Wrong message.
The passion of North American presidents for genealogy reminds me of our own Tudor period ... once described by Dom Gregory Dix as the closest England ever came to the rule of the Gestapo. Tudor England was awash with New Men; and many of them were not averse to coming to an arrangement with members of the College of Heralds to ... er ... demonstrate their descent from great but by then extinct medieval families. Take the Spencers ... most famous modern member: the widely-loved Diana. As they gradually ascended the social and financial ladder, the Tudor Spencers were granted a first Coat of Arms ... which made no explicit or implicit assertion of nobility. But when they had ascended even further, they persuaded Clarenceux King of Arms to 'demonstrate' their descent from the mighty medieval Despencer family ... and to grant them a a new Coat implying their 'rediscovered' identity as a cadet branch of that familiy.
Genealogists and antiquaries, I fear, were in Tudor (and Stuart) days no less corruptible than ordinary, common men. Next time you find yourself at a party where a member of the College of Heralds is also present, try creeping up behind him and gently murmuring "Garter Dethick". You will find it makes him go all limp and twitchy. And one Tudor antiquary (Leland) went round Cornwall hoovering up nice books from suppressed monastic houses, and gathering local historical information. Medieval Catholic Cornish legend had had a fair bit to say about an immensely tyrannous and odious King Tudor. Happily, Leland's more profound and balanced researches showed Tudor to have been a pious and benevolent monarch. Even in murderous Tudor England, Leland, unlike others, lived long enough to go mad.
The genealogical ambitions of American presidents lack, in my view, any real imagination. Why doesn't this nice old gentleman employ someone to establish his descent from the Emperor Montezuma? This would give him an enviable First Nation family history ... and it would enable him to explain that his attitude towards the killing of babies is a cultural reflection of the simple, uncontaminated, indigenous North America which existed before the colonising Spaniards and their pro-life clergy spoiled all the fun.
I believe Montezuma once sacrificed some 80,000 human beings in one single day. I know this falls short of today's Abortion statistics (in Britain as well as in America), but it indicates a striking combination of logistical skills and ideological determination which even the purposive Kamala might envy.
Biden will not wish to fail the tests set before him by History.
What would be the Aztec for "Long Live the President"?
