In November 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter made a momentous discovery in Egypt's Valley of the Kings: the tomb of a little-known, largely-forgotten teenaged pharaoh named Tutankhamun, nearly intact and unplundered since ancient times. Tutankhamun reigned briefly between c. 1334 and 1325 B.C., during ancient Egypt's 18th Dynasty; he was crowned at the age of eight or nine and died in his late teens.
Both the tomb and the pharaoh himself had by modern times been largely lost to history, the former buried beneath the rubble from the excavation of a later tomb (that of 19th-Dynasty monarch Rameses VI), the latter essentially scrubbed from history by his successors due in large part to the heresy of his father and predecessor, the "heretic king" Akhenaten.
After ascending to the throne around 1351 B.C., and about five years into his reign, Amenhotep IV abolished Egypt's traditional pantheon of gods and goddesses and declared that the Aten (the sun-disk, until then a minor aspect of the sun god Ra-Horakhty) was the single and only true god of Egypt. Amenhotep changed his name to Akhenaten, moved the capital (and the royal family) from Thebes to a new city he named Akhetaten (now known as Tell el-Amarna, or Amarna for short), and began a cultural, religious and artistic revolution in Egypt that, needless to say, did not sit well with its traditionalists, particularly the military and the priesthood.
The so-called "Amarna period" was, perhaps, the ancient Egyptian equivalent of the '60s. It's a crass comparison, but apt in the sense that it was a period of cultural upheaval, of new ideas and new forms of expression that the country and its people were perhaps not ready for. The art of Amarna, including depictions of Akhenaten himself, is notable for being highly stylized and naturalistic, compared to the traditional staid, geometric depictions of earlier and later periods in Egyptian art.
Akhenaten's death and its immediate aftermath are, like much of the Amarna period, shrouded in mystery. By some accounts there was a brief co-regency and reign of someone called Smenkhkare for a year or two before Tutankhuaten, Akhenaten's only male heir, became pharaoh as a mere child. Being only eight or nine years old at the time of his ascension, the boy-king was likely guided in his "decisions" by his elders, including priests and military officials, and by the third year of his reign had restored the old religious order, abandoned Amarna, returned the capital to Thebes, and changed his name to Tutankhamun in a symbolic gesture to appease the old gods (and, of course, the old priesthood, as well as the other traditionalists).
Apparently this wasn't enough. Tutankhamun's successor-but-one, the military general Horemheb, did everything he could to "wipe the slate clean" of all the Amarna pharaohs, including Akhenaten, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Ay, and erase the memory of the "heretic king" and his shameful cultural progeny from Egypt's history. Their names were struck or usurped wherever they appeared on monuments and temples; Horemheb appropriated many statues of Tutankhamun, replacing the boy-king's name with his own, and had Akhenaten's own monuments demolished. By the early 19th Dynasty, and the lengthy reign of Rameses II, the Amarna period and its rulers were largely forgotten.
I will gladly defer to any expert Egyptologists who might correct my history here. I only bring this up because I've been reading a great deal recently about the apparent Republican and conservative media strategy to essentially do to President Barack Obama what the ancient Egyptian traditionalists did to Akhenaten. This Quinnipiac poll being flouted by the improv performers on Fox News and elsewhere declaring Obama to be "the worst President since World War II" is a symptom of the larger strategy, to essentially rewrite history and scrub any memory of this President and his accomplishments from the news media, the "history books," school curricula, and so forth.
Perhaps the most direct analogy I've seen comes from Charles M. Blow:
...the president is caught in the jaws of a legislative trap, unable to move the country forward because a fraction of it insists on holding him back.
...great presidencies require the cooperation of Congress, and on that measure, his presidency has been clipped. ... Congress can’t simply sit out a presidency and have the country sustain itself.
...all efforts are thwarted by a Congress committed to starving this president of any semblance of progress, committed to the erasure of his inhabitance of the office, as best it can be achieved.
As an excuse for their inexcusable inactions, Republicans insist that they refuse to act because they find this president perfidious ... They see him as the former constitutional law professor at war with the Constitution.
Whether their reasons for doing so are justified or not -- and in large part, they are not -- there can be little doubt or debate that Republicans, their media enablers and fans regard Barack Obama as a heretic, the "heretic president" in much the same fashion that Akhenaten was considered the "heretic king." The very fact and existence of his presidency, the election of not only a Democrat but a black Democrat, is heresy, the very antithesis of everything they know, believe, think, feel and desire about What America Is™. Never mind the reality that Obama is, politically speaking, a very conventional politician and a very conventional centrist Democrat, and personally seems to be a very conventional modern American family man with above-average intelligence and a good sense of humor. To them, Obama is a revolutionary in much the same sense that Akhenaten was, and his election/ascension constitutes a political, cultural, and in the minds of many, religious upheaval analogous to that of the Amarna period.
I've written many times about the improv act being performed on the right these days, the inhabitants of the paracosm acting out their own version of history in which all of their political and cultural prejudices are validated and reinforced by everything they see, hear and read. What is at issue here is whether and how the scrubbing of the Obama presidency and its many positive accomplishments will have effect outside the paracosm, and what the GOP and its allies can and will do to turn Obama into Akhenaten. To paraphrase Mr. Blow, how can "the erasure of his inhabitance of the office" best be achieved?
Will they literally try to scrub his name from the lists of presidents that appear in history books, textbooks, and on Fox News chyron, as Horemheb did to the ancient Egyptian record stelae and the temples and monuments of Tutankhamun and Ay? Will they do the same with his individual domestic and foreign policy accomplishments, viz., omit them from the history books, deny that they took place, or take the credit for themselves?
Will the next Republican president, whoever he may be, play the role of Horemheb, and promise to restore whatever they perceive Obama (and his Democratic successors) to have changed or "destroyed"? (Actually, we've seen this before; most of the Bush administration's first few months, if anyone recalls, were spent un-doing various Clinton administration initiatives, until something else intervened and shifted the focus.)
Might there even be a Tutankhamun in this scenario, viz., a Democrat elected to succeed Obama (whether directly or down the road) who can be manipulated and perhaps intimidated by corporate, military and religious leaders into disavowing and unraveling the Obama presidency?
There's no question that a large part of the GOP's constituency is frightened by modernity; by what is happening in America irrespective of who the President is but which they, naturally, associate with who the President is. There's no question they wish it wasn't happening, that Obama had never been elected, that he and his party didn't even exist, and that their fear and paranoia are being exacerbated by Republican politicians' and conservative commentators' relentless, over-the-top, hair-on-fire, unhinged freakouts over absolutely everything Obama does and says, which is invariably characterized as the Worst Thing Ever and as proof that he is evil incarnate. They think if we could just erase this "heretic president" from existence, history and memory, and un-do everything he has done, then everything will be allright again.
We'll never know exactly whether, how and why the general populace of ancient Egypt came to forget about Akhenaten and the Amarna era, or were made to forget about them by the Ramessid kings and their successors. We will see in the years to come how the GOP and its allies attempt to do the same.