A courtier is a person who attends the court of a monarch or other powerful person. Historically the court was the centre of government as well as the residence of the monarch, and social and political life were often completely mixed together.
Monarchs very often expected the more important nobles to spend much of the year in attendance on them at court.
Courtiers were not all noble, as they included clergy, soldiers, clerks, secretaries, and agents and middlemen of all sorts with regular business at court. Promotion to important positions could be very rapid at court, and for the ambitious there was no better place to be.
As social divisions became more rigid, a divide, barely present in Antiquity or the Middle Ages, opened between menial servants and other classes at court, although Alexandre Bontemps, the head valet de chambre of Louis XIV was a late example of a "menial" who managed to establish his family in the nobility.
The key commodities for a courtier were access and information, and a large court operated at many levels - many successful careers at court involved no direct contact with the monarch himself.
The largest and most famous European court was that of the Chateau de Versailles in its heyday.
In modern literature, courtiers are often depicted as insincere, skilled at flattery and intrigue, ambitious and lacking regard for the national interest.
More positive representations of the stereotype might include the role played by the court in the development of politeness and the arts.
In modern English, the term is often used metaphorically for contemporary political favourites or hangers-on.
Washington has become Versailles. We are ruled, entertained and informed by courtiers. The popular media are courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are courtiers. Our pundits and experts are courtiers.
We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games. We are being had.
The past week was a good one if you were a courtier. We were instructed by the high priests on television over the past few days to mourn a Sunday morning talk show host.
He made $5 million a year and who gave a platform to the powerful and the famous so they could spin, equivocate and lie to the nation.
We were repeatedly told by these television courtiers, people like Tom Brokaw and Wolf Blitzer, that this talk show host was one of our nation’s greatest journalists, as if sitting in a studio, putting on makeup and chatting with Dick Cheney or George W. Bush have much to do with journalism.
No journalist makes $5 million a year. No journalist has a comfortable, cozy relationship with the powerful. No journalist believes that acting as a conduit, or a stenographer, for the powerful is a primary part of his or her calling.
Those in power fear and dislike real journalists. Ask Seymour Hersh and Amy Goodman how often Bush or Cheney has invited them to dinner at the White House or offered them an interview.
All governments lie, as I.F. Stone pointed out, and it is the job of the journalist to do the hard, tedious reporting to shine a light on these lies.
It is the job of courtiers, those on television playing the role of journalists, to feed off the scraps tossed to them by the powerful and never question the system. In the slang of the profession, these television courtiers are “throats.”
These courtiers, including the late Tim Russert, never gave a voice to credible critics in the buildup to the war against Iraq. They were too busy playing their roles as red-blooded American patriots.
They never fought back in their public forums against the steady erosion of our civil liberties and the trashing of our Constitution. These courtiers blindly accept the administration’s current propaganda to justify an attack on Iran.
They parrot this propaganda. They dare not defy the corporate state. The corporations that employ them make them famous and rich.
It is their Faustian pact. No class of courtiers, from the eunuchs behind Manchus in the 19th century to the Baghdad caliphs of the Abbasid caliphate, has ever transformed itself into a responsible elite. Courtiers are hedonists of power.
Our Versailles was busy this past week. The Democrats passed the FISA bill, which provides immunity for the telecoms that cooperated with the National Security Agency’s illegal surveillance over the past six years.
This bill, which when signed means we will never know the extent of the Bush White House’s violation of our civil liberties, is expected to be adopted by the Senate.
Barack Obama has promised to sign it in the name of national security. The bill gives the U.S. government a license to eavesdrop on our phone calls and e-mails.
It demolishes our right to privacy. It endangers the work of journalists, human rights workers, crusading lawyers and whistle-blowers who attempt to expose abuses the government seeks to hide.
These private communications can be stored indefinitely and disseminated, not just to the U.S. government but to other governments as well.
The bill, once signed into law, will make it possible for those in power to identify and silence anyone who dares to make public information that defies the official narrative.
Being a courtier, and Obama is one of the best, requires agility and eloquence. The most talented of them can be lauded as persuasive actors.
They entertain us. They make us feel good. They convince us they are our friends. We would like to have dinner with them. They are the smiley faces of a corporate state that has hijacked the government and is raping the nation.
When the corporations make their iron demands, these courtiers drop to their knees, whether to placate the telecommunications companies that fund their campaigns and want to be protected from lawsuits.
Or, to permit oil and gas companies to rake in obscene profits and keep in place the vast subsidies of corporate welfare doled out by the state.
We cannot differentiate between illusion and reality. We trust courtiers wearing face powder who deceive us in the name of journalism.
We trust courtiers in our political parties who promise to fight for our interests and then pass bill after bill to further corporate fraud and abuse.
We confuse how we feel about courtiers like Obama and Russert with real information, facts and knowledge.
We chant in unison with Obama that we want change, we yell “yes we can,” and then stand dumbly by as he coldly votes away our civil liberties. The Democratic Party, including Obama, continues to fund the war. It refuses to impeach Bush and Cheney.
It allows the government to spy on us without warrants or cause. And then it tells us it is our salvation. This is a form of collective domestic abuse.
And, as so often happens in the weird pathology of victim and victimizer, we keep coming back for more.