Wednesday, October 29, 2003
America the Clothes Horse
I stamp my foot and shake my tiny fist and cry, “This is America.”
We’ve always been an unhealthy nation, with periods of excessive binging followed by equally excessive purging. If you listen, you can hear the retching sound emanating from the National Toilet now… we’re ridding ourselves of the beautiful feast we consumed during the 90’s.
America’s getting skinny again, shedding the pounds she put on under our former McPresident. America can fit into all her old clothes from the 1950’s… but she’s got dementia from lack of nutrition, and her teeth are rotting. Never mind, she’ll just keep quiet and smile with her lips closed.
This cycle isn’t unique to America. Rome glutted itself on the known world, consuming every race and country it could reach with its greasy fingers. When things got bad, and the Empire’s bloated, fat clouded heart burst from all the excess weight, the Romans did the exact same things we’re doing now: turned to Christianity and made war. After a strict diet of Vandals and Visigoths, Rome split itself in to two sexy new empires: the Byzantine and the Holy Roman.
“I lost half the known world in just two centuries, thanks Vandals!”
Grave historical inaccuracies aside, I want to point out some of the disturbing parallels between Roma and the United States.
I had a history teacher. He was a small, repressed little Italian man who could never reconcile his own estimation of his talent and intellect with the fact that he was teaching freshman history in a mediocre California high school. He loved the Greeks, maintained that civilization peaked in the Hellenistic period and that those darn Romans had ruined the sanctity of man/boy love forever (he didn’t say that directly, but the subtext was pretty clear if you knew him). To him, Americans were the new Romans. He called us a bunch of little Romans with a sneer on his lips. Damn his petty soul, but he was right.
Since I learned nothing from his class, everything I know about Roman history I got from I, Claudius.
Julius Caesar (hereafter referred to as Jules) was nothing more or less than a highly popular politician with military successes behind his name. He came, he saw, he conquered… he even got as far north as England and kicked their blue faced asses. Sure, they revolted and kicked him back across the Channel in a matter of months, but it still looked good on his resume.
Back at home, the Senate was falling apart. Militias were springing up in the Southern territories, complaining about states rights and heavy handed government interference. There were threats of civil war and all was chaos, meanwhile, an apathetic Roman public’s only concern was attending the gladiatorial games and finding out who was going to be the next Survivor.
Jules returned home. He had bought the unswerving loyalty of his great legions by dramatically increasing the defense budget, then he went to the Middle East and stamped out Mark Antony’s terrorist network, cementing his hold on the hearts and minds of the Senate and the public. Claiming to be a ‘uniter’, Jules consolidated his power. Using the threat of military force for leverage, he gently convinced the Senate to declare him Emperor, and later, a god.
Like a senile grandmother, history repeats herself.
If the parallels aren’t already obvious, then allow me to further illuminate them: as the only superpower, the United States exerts unilateral political, military and cultural control over most of the world; in the name of stability and safety, the supreme military commander is waging a series of wars across the world, resulting in occupations which give him and his allies access to money and resources that he then funnels back to the military industrial complex that supports him; the Senate is weak, polarized and unable to legislate, willingly ceding power to the president without demanding any accountability; the populace is uninformed about politics, both national and international, cowed by fear of an unseeable, unknowable enemy and clinging to the skirts of the leader who promises to keep them safe through overwhelming military force.
That said, I think it is unlikely that Bush will change his name to George W. Augustus and declare himself Caesar. There are still too many Brutuses (Bruti?) in positions of power and wealth to allow something so ludicrous. As much as I deride the American public, I think at least a solid quarter of them might have issues with an Emperor. I think the danger is a great deal more subtle. Whatever happens in the next election, whether the shrub is re-elected or not, we are all witnesses to the end of the American Republic. The system has become too dysfunctional to sustain itself much longer. We engage in Dadaist political revolutions like the 2000 recount and the California recall election, and as a result, representative democracy becomes increasingly irrelevant. Power will shift almost exclusively to the executive, who will be able to force ideologically like-minded judges through the rubber stamp Senate and into the courts, thereby reducing the autonomy of the other two governmental branches. The only counter to presidential power will lie in the States, which while financially cut off from the Federal coffers, will still be subject to Federal law. Unable to affect change at the national level, desperate voters will vent their frustration on their local politicians, electing smiling charlatans and libertarian chest beaters over true reformers and strong political voices, further reducing the power of the grass roots. The presidency will become imperial in practice, if not in name, because it is the only branch of government that can still effect change. If this trend continues, then it is simply a matter of waiting a generation before a president can safely claim to be the uncontested and supreme leader for life.
This is all just theory of course.
