There’s a lot of loose talk around now about how all
great civilizations descend into madness and end up with rulers that are
narcissists, insane, demented or merely perverted. Those pundits are hinting
that our current Grand Poobah is a sign of the End Times for America. That is
presented as the progression: great rulers, then good, then okay, then poor, and finally perverted/demented/insane narcissists. Like most processes, this one is not
linear. It is actually a one step forward, one or two steps backward kind of
thing.
Take Commodus, please. He became emperor of Rome in 177
AD. You may remember a fictionalized Commodus from the movie "the Gladiator," staring Russell Crowe as Maximus (the gladiator) and Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus. “Fictionalized,” yes, the real Commodus
was a combination of slightly better and much, much worse than Mr. Phoenix’s
Commodus.
Perhaps all you need to know about the real Commodus is
that he was Emperor from 177 to 192 AD; he was finally assassinated when people
just got totally sick of his bullshit; and for all of that time, and
particularly towards the end of his reign, he kept adding honorifics to his
name and getting more and more annoying. The man’s ego was out of control. By
191 AD his name was:
Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Augustus Herculeus
Romanus Exsuperatorius Amazonius Invictus Felix Pius.
That’s a mouthful. In the last year of his life he
added two more titles, Pacator Orbis (pacifier of the world) and Dominus Noster
(our Lord).
Commodus in real life was even much more annoying than
Commodus in the movie. But before you start to believe that he was a product of
the final stages of a decadent Roman Empire, bear in mind that he had succeeded
his father Marcus Aurelius to the throne. Marcus was a great Emperor, really
one of the greats of all time. Marcus was a genuinely intelligent man of
moderate personal habits, who left the empire in much better shape than he
found it, a great general and philosopher, very careful with money and good to
his people. He was a man seemingly without vice, loved by all. Marcus was a
late-empire ruler, too. So they weren’t all bad.
The lesson is that we cannot now believe, as some
pundits would have us believe, that Donald Trump is a sign of the end times for
the American ascendency. Sure, Trump is
an annoying egomaniac, an ignorant bull-in-a-china-shop, but Donald is an aberration.
He will pass from the scene like a meal of undercooked shrimp. There will be
some discomfort, but finally it will all sleep with the fishes.
Take heart, America! There is at least a thirty percent
chance that things will begin to get better within ten or fifteen years! I don’t
think that it could get better any faster than that, that’s about as good as we
can do, I’m afraid. It’ll take some time to get out of this hole. But it could
have been worse! We might, if we are lucky, be able to avoid a new Dark Age of
one or two hundred years.
Or not, who knows? See what you can do to push it all
in the right direction.
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