Ancient Rome As Object Lesson

     I took a day off yesterday. The reasons were manifold.

     I'm in the final stretch of a new novel, I'm about to shoulder the responsibility of editing and rewriting my roommate's book and, frankly, I just needed a break. I suppose my biggest reason for my brief sabbatical was the distaste I feel toward my fellow humans in the wake of Charlie Kirk's tragic death.

     The virulent, misdirected fury and threats from the right wing are part of it. Then there was the conspiracy theories. "They got the wrong guy." "Look, Kirk's tee shirt went up!" "That guy signaled with his white hat!" The rhetoric, as it always is, is overwrought. Plus, even though I've been getting an obscene number of hits this summer (Google analytics says I'm getting 12,000 to 17000+ hits every day but I doubt many of them are legitimate), I cannot escape this crippling sense that nothing I say makes a difference. As Archibald MacLeish once described it to me, it's "like shouting down an empty well."

     So, is silence the answer? Putting a bushel over our light so as not to run afoul of hypersensitive sensibilities? Of course not. But when something within you tells you to step back, you step back, especially when it seems to assume the force of an urgent imperative.

     Today, all I can do is reiterate my belief that Charlie Kirk's murder was a senseless act. A family lost its husband and father and all the assassin did was inflame an already angry and illogical nation of fools, making them spiral into a bottomless vortex of conspiracy theories and rape and death threats.

     I would also caution you to remember ancient Rome. Not the late Roman empire when it was sacked by the barbarians in AD 476 but Rome when it was at the height of its power.

     Rome was, obviously, one of the greatest global empires the world had ever seen. There was much about ancient Rome that is at once familiar and alien and repugnant to us. Ancient Rome, a city of one million people, was a beehive of deception and intrigue. Virtually every senator had a spy network and assassination was virtually common from the time of Caesar.

     The intrigue, of course, reached the highest levels of Roman society in which emperors were assassinated even in broad daylight. But the tendency to deify dead emperors was one of the aspects of ancient Roman society that we may find repugnant.

     The statue above is of Emperor Titus, the second figure in the 27 year-long Flavian dynasty. In his all-too-brief reign of just over two years, Titus was known for completing and opening the Flavian Amphitheater, now known as the Colosseum. He was, by all accounts, a benevolent ruler, who got rid of show trials and assisted in the relief efforts after the eruption of Vesuvius.

      And after his death on this very date in AD 81 (he reportedly died in the same farmhouse where his father, Vespasian, had in AD 79), his brother, Domitian, on assuming the throne, decided to deify his brother (despite having been caught openly plotting against him). This was a common tradition in ancient Rome. 

     Nowadays, we tend to look at such transformations with a hint of disgust or even ridicule. No man, after all, is a god no matter how great of an emperor he was. It automatically elevated flesh and blood, fallible men to a place at the right hand of Zeus, beyond reproach, impeachment or even criticism. 

     Americans have never divested themselves of the occasional urge to deify, in our own way, a fallen figure. We name airports and towns after them, streets and highways and so forth. And we tend to put these people on a mile-high plinth, as if their ideology, no matter how cynical, hateful and self-serving, alone makes them worthy of being put in the pantheon of the gods.

     This is what I've been seeing and hearing since Charlie Kirk was shot and killed last Wednesday in Orem, Utah. Trump ordered flags flown at half mast, even though Kirk wasn't an elected official. The NFL had a moment of silence for him last Thursday, the European Union had their own (even though it was broken up). It's all so disproportionate.

     America, in its nearly 250 year-long history, had tried to emulate Rome in all its glory and yet all we can seem to to do is emulate its worst features. Assassination in Rome was almost common and, while it isn't as common in the United States, it's getting to be that way. July last year, someone took a shot at Trump and another suspected gunman was stalking him at his golf club in West Palm Beach. Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed in their home in Minnesota just two months ago and, that same day, another lawmaker and his wife were shot and injured. Then Wednesday, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed.

     We keep saying violence has no place in our society yet it rings increasingly hollow as the bodies stack up like cord wood. While we piously repudiate violence, none of us seem to have the will to do anything meaningful about it. And saying this culture of violence needs to stop does not mean it will happen, not now, not tomorrow, not for a long time, if ever. And opportunistic individuals, and we know who they are, are even now using Kirk's death as the right wing's Reichstag moment. They want to use his murder as a pretext to murder their perceived enemies on "the radical left."

     This is the moment they've been waiting for and the moment the rest of us have dreaded.

     Yes, assassination should have no place in our society but it falls on deafened and boxed ears. Even though he may have said some horrible things in the past, including about gun violence, one has to give Charlie Kirk credit for one thing: He was famous for being willing to debate his critics and detractors in a civilized setting. We need to get back to that. But I'm not holding my breath. 

     What perhaps sickens me most of all is how disingenuous it all is. Look at the video below and tell me how serious Trump really is about Charlie Kirk's death. When asked how he was holding up, he couldn't wait to start bragging about his ballroom

 

     Deification in ancient Rome was always meant to be permanent but history plainly shows us it never was. When a Republic or an empire falls, its gods fall with them. Rome's policies and beliefs may have sustained it for nearly 1000 years. But, as Yeats once famously wrote, "the center cannot hold." This, too, shall pass. But before it does, will it prove to be the ignition point that sets this nation ablaze until it no longer exists?

     I refuse to speculate because the possibilities are too horrifying.