King for a Day
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Occasionally, you hear a word or phrase that sounds so idiomatic or proverb-like that you assume it is one. In 1995 punk band Faith No More's released an album whose title felt that way to me: King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime.
Turns out, I was half right.
King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime came out when I was in my late teens and I thought it was the coolest album name I had ever heard. I liked the way it played with the conventional idiom, king for a day, by adding the counter-weight of fool. But it was just a title. The album itself, with its - for Faith No More - standard mix of rock, punk, jazz, funk, and everything else, made no explicit reference to either kings or fools. Much as the previous album’s title, Angel Dust, had been comprised of two words that were innocent enough when separate became something horribly different when combined, King… took two contrasting ideas and combined them to make a statement about something terribly true.
King for a day, as an idiom, is a very popular concept. ( Wikipedia's disambiguation page has several dozen pieces of media that share that title with little thematically to tie them altogether beyond said title.) By itself, it is usually used to mean someone who has gotten absolute power, through luck, connivance, or circumstance, for just a short period of time. Other times, it is combined with the conditional “if I were” or “if you were” to create a space for hypothetical flights of fancy, e.g., if I were king for a day, I’d make everyone wear silly hats.
But the full phrase, “king for a day, fool for a lifetime” seems to have been coined by the band and doesn’t exist as a separate idiom or proverb at all, much to my surprise.
Which is a bit of a shame.
I like the idea behind "king for a day." I like the idea of taking a person from a position with little relative power and giving them all the power, just to explain, viscerally, what it would be like. For example, I tend to think CEOs are overpaid, but would I still think so if I spent a day in their shoes? For that matter, what would it be like to be president or prime minister for a day?
Now pair it with “fool for a lifetime.” It implies that even someone who has been at the top, no matter how briefly, is unable to learn from the experience and is no wiser than they were before. That might be true. I hope it isn't. And yet, so much of who becomes king (or CEO or President or General) seems to be based on factors that have little to do with wisdom ranging from DNA to connections to right-place, right-time. Even still, surely these lucky few understand where they're coming from and have the capacity to learn from it, right? One can only hope.
So, if I were king for a day, what would I do? I’m not really sure. Lofty ideals and the constraints of time and space notwithstanding, I’d try to do some good in the world and hope that the experience would leave me somewhat less foolish, even if only temporarily.
Thanks for reading!
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