1987: THE WHIPPING BOY by Sid Fleischman with illustrations by Peter Sis
The young prince was known here and there (and just about everywhere else) as Prince Brat.
“So I just wanted to get the gang together, early in my tenure, to say…yo.”
-Kendall Roy, interim Chief Executive Officer of Waystar-Royco
I used to work for this company, which I don't work for anymore and I'm not going to name. Thousands and thousands of people worked for this company around the world, I was not special. The Chief Financial Officer was thirty-two years old, which is a few years younger than I was, at the time I worked there. One Sunday night, the CFO of this company got very drunk at a local bar, and instead of calling an Uber to get home - and, as you're about to learn, he could have easily afforded that Uber - he decided to walk to his sister's house to crash for the night. But because he was, again, very drunk, he screwed up and accidentally went to the house next door to his sister's house, which was not owned by his sister but was in fact owned by a complete stranger who did not know his family at all. He went into this house - the stranger was not there - and fell asleep in the stranger's bed. When the stranger got home and saw a strangr drunk man in her bed, she called the police, who then came to her house, tried to rouse the CFO - who, relatably, woke up, saw the cops, and then, still drunk, said "guys I'm going to go back to sleep" - dragged him out of his house in his underwear, and booked him downtown. Like I said, I'm not going to name the company or this guy, but I will say that all of this made the news, as did security camera footage from the lockup where our CFO spent the night, as did the body cam footage from the arresting officers, so you can figure this all out if you really want to.
If you figure it out, you'll see other news stories from around the same time about how this company decided to close several plants and corporate offices, resulting in hundreds of people losing their jobs. And then a few months later, they announced further plant closures and corporate layoffs totalling, again, hundreds of people who wouldn't have income or health insurance for their families. They're still doing this, they’re continuing to announce closures and layoffs. They're also currently being investigated by the Department of Labor for possible violations of child labor laws, so some of the people that are still working there with some bare-bones level of job security might, in fact, be children.
Here's something that didn't make the news: two days after the CFO's arrest, this company actually had its - unbelievably terribly-timed - national sales meeting. I was there. The CFO, who had a court date set for his public drunkenness arrest, gave a keynote that day, as if nothing had happened. He was in several of the hype videos, which obviously were shot before his arrest. The sales meeting was a big celebration of him and the rest of the executives, who were about to spend the next few months deciding how many of us they could get rid of to make the stock price tick up a little higher. Again, it was like nothing bad had happened. And in a way, nothing really had happened. The CFO, who is younger than I am, is still CFO today. The board has full confidence in him.
The other thing you should probably know about the CFO is that his last name happens to be the same as the company name. His father happens to be the chairman of the company's board. His great-grandfather happened to found this multi-billion dollar company. The CFO is a billionaire who could probably have afforded to call an Uber that Sunday night, even an Uber XL if he had five drunk friends with him. Around the time I left the company - and I did point to the arrest specifically in my exit interview as a reason I left1 - hundreds of people were losing their jobs. Hundreds more have lost their jobs since I left. The CFO was on the team that made that decision to axe those jobs. But the CFO himself, well, his job is very safe no matter what he does.
Rich people are stupid. I mean this very literally. If you are a person who is very, very rich, if you have more money than you could ever spend across multiple lifetimes, if you are a capitalist in the true Marxist sense of the word and only make your money by owning things instead of doing things, if you are a billionaire and if you want people to know you are a billionaire and Good at Business and Being Rich, you are stupid. Stupid academically, stupid emotionally, whatever version of stupid you can think of, you are it. Howard Schultz is stupid. Marc Andreesen is stupid. Jamie Dimon is stupid. Elon Musk is stupid, although I think we’ve all figured that one out by now.
I’m not just saying this because I’ve finally caught up on Succession2. I’m saying it for a simple reason: there is a long historical record of what happened to people who had too much money and too much power and wanted everyone to know they had too much money and too much power. In an era of high inflation (caused almost entirely by corporate greed) and mass layoffs (also caused almost entirely by corporate greed) and a right-wing media ecosystem pushing heartless libertarianism and white nationalism (which brings us back to the corporate greed thing again), it feels like we've got a few too many people saying "fuck you I got mine" and "let them eat cake" without remembering what happened to the first person that said the cake thing.
If you're rich enough that people are coming for you but not smart enough to know that people are coming for you, you're in trouble.
The Whipping Boy, the medalist from the year I was born, is, if nothing else, tight. It’s 90 pages including illustrations, and the word count on this essay might actually come in higher than the one in the book. It’s the story of two lads in medieval Europe: one is rich and stupid, and one is neither of those things, and guess which one life has been kinder to.
Prince Horace is known throughout the kingdom as Prince Brat because he is an asshole. He is arrogant, ignorant, lazy, and cruel. And he can be all of those things without any consequences, of course, because any consequences he would deserve are instead delivered to his literal whipping boy, a rat-catcher from the streets named Jemmy. As Fleischman3 notes in an afterword, “some royal households of past centuries did keep whipping boys to suffer the punishments due a misbehaving prince. History is alive with lunacies and injustices”. Jemmy has to sit in all of Prince Brat’s lessons, and follow every direction given to Prince Brat, and if Prince Brat does anything wrong, Jemmy is paraded out in front of everyone at court and whipped. And Prince Brat revels in his freedom and the pain inflicted on a poor person, and changes nothing.
But Prince Brat is also enough of an asshole not to realize how good he has things, and he gets bored living at the castle and being waited on hand and foot, and decides to run away and bring Jemmy with him for fun. When the two of them get captured by highwaymen very quickly after leaving the castle grounds, they can only be saved by quick thinking. Which Prince Brat is completely incapable of. But it turns out that his whipping boy was actually paying attention during all of those lessons so he can read and write, and it turns out that a “thoroughbred of the streets” who grew up without a home, catching rats in the sewers, has had to do a lot of things to keep himself alive. It turns out that rich people are dumb and Jemmy, who has nothing, had to get smart in a hurry. He might be able to save himself and the prince if he can talk his way around these two not-especially-bright criminals who just found a crown in the prince’s bag - “The empty-headed prince! Jemmy thought. Why had he brought along his crown? To cock it on his head and expect vagabonds and cutthroats to fall to their knees?” - and realize they are sitting on a gold mine. There is one additional wrinkle in this situation, though: while both children are being held prisoner, it’s very clear to everyone that Jemmy is the smarter of the two and Prince Brat is kind of a bonehead. So who seems more like a prince to the two bandits?
Rich people are stupid, but apparently not everybody knows that, and the two bandits didn’t, and Jemmy and Horace are very quickly shoved into a classic “involuntary The Prince and the Pauper” situation where Jemmy has to negotiate “his” ransom, write “his” note back to “his” father as proof of life, and be the brains of the outfit while Prince Brat keeps messing everything up, sometimes intentionally out of spite.
But things reach a turning point about two-thirds through the novel, when Jemmy and Brat escape to a festival. Jemmy runs into an old friend and fellow street urchin and promises to return to rat-catching soon, but:
“Even as he said it, Jemmy felt a bleak discomfort. He would miss the shelves of books he’d left behind in the castle. In the sewers, he hadn’t been aware of his own ignorance. He saw no choice now but to return. But he realized that he’d lost his taste for ignorance.”
I love the image of “losing his taste for ignorance”, but the bigger issue here is that someone else is losing his taste for ignorance as well, as he talks to another woman at the festival who doesn’t recognize him:
“‘Have you heard the earful?’ she asked. ‘Our prince has been abducticated. Imagine!...Our darlin’ poor king!’ she went on. ‘Weepin’ his royal eyes out, no doubt. Though why he’d spring a tear for the little toad, I don’t know. A mighty terror, they say, is Prince Brat. Pity us the day he becomes king, eh?’ She handed over the pair of mugs. Jemmy drank the warm milk down in unbroken gulps. But then he noticed the prince standing motionless, a vague, unseeing look in his eyes. For certain he knew everyone called him Prince Brat behind his back, didn’t he?”
If you're rich enough that people are coming for you but not smart enough to know that people are coming for you, you're in trouble. Prince Brat - Horace - has been ignorant of how much people hate him, of how his haughtiness has colored the opinions of everyone around him. But he’s starting to lose his taste for ignorance, and will be key in saving himself and Jemmy and returning them to the castle.
The Whipping Boy is a nice little book, and hey, I appreciate anything written for children that starts to hint at ideas of class conflict. But this story is closer to fantasy than historical fiction. Not because there weren’t bratty princes or whipping boys - there absolutely were - but because there aren’t a lot of rich people who figure out that everyone hates them, and why. So they’ll keep getting drunk and burning their money on exploding rockets and poisoning the Earth and laying people off, and maybe, just maybe, one or two of them will get a wakeup call. Fleischman wrote that history is alive with lunacies and injustices, but so is the present.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1935 medalist, Dobry by Monica Shannon.
You know, exit interviews, those meetings which definitely matter and are a great use of everyone's time.
Have you guys seen it? It's good!
Sid Fleischman is the son of Paul Fleischman, who would win his own Newbery two years later with Joyful Noise: Poems For Two Voices.