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January 20, 2005
Billmon: When in Rome…
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Good call. Of course, it’s particularly interesting to see how it all ended with Caligula:
To make a long story short, vast sums of money, including the 2,700,000,000 sesterces which Tiberius Caesar had amassed, were squandered by him in less than the revolution of a year.
And, logically:
He levied new and unheard of taxes, at first through the publicans and then, because their profit was so great, through the centurions and tribunes of the praetorian guard; and there was no class of commodities or men on which he did not impose some form of tariff. On all eatables sold in any part of the city he levied a fixed and definite charge; on lawsuits and legal processes begun anywhere, a fortieth part of the sum involved, providing a penalty in case anyone was found guilty of compromising or abandoning a suit; on the daily wages of porters, an eighth; on the earnings of prostitutes, as much as each received for one embrace; and a clause was added to this chapter of the law, providing that those who had ever been prostitutes or acted as panders should be liable to this public tax, and that even matrimony should not be exempt.
When taxes of this kind had been proclaimed, but not published in writing, inasmuch as many offences were committed through ignorance of the letter of the law, he at last, on the urgent demand of the people, had the law posted up, but in a very narrow place and in excessively small letters, to prevent the making of a copy.
Posted by: Clueless Joe | Jan 21 2005 0:42 utc | 1
clueless joe
i too thought caligula was more appropriate & his admin a herd of horses ready to be fucked & become queens
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 21 2005 1:21 utc | 2
I saw Gladiator the other night. I felt more relevant now then when I saw it the first time in 2000.
The emperor declaring
“A vision. Do you not see, Lucilla? I will give the people a vision and they will love me for it. They will soon forget the tedious sermonizing of a few dry old men. I will give them the greatest vision of their lives.”
I started thinking of faith-based reality.
Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jan 21 2005 2:57 utc | 3
Oh, just to stop any misunderstandings: I think it is a silly film. But silly films can still be relevant.
Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jan 21 2005 2:58 utc | 4
The Burning Bush speech
James Meeks, at The Guardian, has aptly called the Bush inaugural address “The Burning Bush” speech.
…the key fire passage in the Burning Bush speech – “We have lit a fire as well; a fire in the minds of men” – actually has its origins in a novel by the 19th century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils, about a group of terrorists’ ineffectual struggle to bring down the tyrannical Tsarist regime.
…and so, Bush identifies himself as a tyrant, since he labels everyone who is “not with him” a terrorist?
Posted by: fauxreal | Jan 21 2005 3:47 utc | 5
Speaking of squanderous tyrants, here are two pieces on the Social Security boondoggle. Both speak to topics raised earlier: the revanchism of the neocons, harking back 60+ years to before the New Deal; their inherited hatred of FDR; and the “golden age” they dream of restoring.
Grumpy Old Men by Gary Hart, marred imho by a clunky attempt at diplomacy in the final sentence.
Regime Change that could Destroy our Homeland by Sidney Blumenthal.
One part of his strategy is to pack the federal bench with judges pledged to restore what conservatives call the “Constitution in exile” – the Constitution before the New Deal. Bush has renominated for judgeships “those” already rejected by the Senate, including William Haynes, who as the Pentagon’s general counsel advised on the policy that the president isn’t bound by laws governing torture, and Janice Brown, who has denounced the New Deal as a “socialist revolution” and is opposed to the incorporation of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. [Blumenthal]
Privatisation of the social security system is a tribute to human persistence. For decades, it was possible to find cartoons in the New Yorker magazine and elsewhere of grumpy old men in deep leather chairs in private clubs damning Franklin D Roosevelt for anything that went wrong in the world. It was amusing, at least until one began to realise, in the age of Reagan (and Thatcher), that those grumpy old men had progeny, and those progeny had progeny that were still damning Roosevelt for insinuating socialism into America’s capitalist fabric. Entitlement programmes, including basic public retirement plans, sapped the entrepreneurial spirit and made people wards of the state. This put us on the path to ruinand would eventually, by god, lead to communism.
The great-grandchildren of those grumpy old men now see the chance to restore America to the 1920s when any rising tide would lift the gilded yachts of inherited wealth and to hell with the leaky skiffs of the working stiffs. Privatisation of the social security system will signal the end of any kind of entitlement, so they hope, and restore us to the good old hairy-chested days of every man for himself and devil take the hindmost. [Hart]
“leaky skiffs of the working stiffs” is rather a nice flourish — I wonder if Hart wrote that himself?
The Burning Bush Speech Hmmmmm, the Burning Man Festival Could get Verrrryyy Interesting starting this summer, combining Art & Politics & Catharsis in a most refreshing & possibly transformative way…..
Posted by: jj | Jan 22 2005 9:44 utc | 8
“… But a review of the cost for past inaugurations shows Mr. Bush’s will cost less than President Clinton’s second inauguration in 1997, which cost about $42 million. When the cost is adjusted for inflation, Mr. Clinton’s second-term celebration exceeds Mr. Bush’s by about 25 percent.”
(no idea if this is correct, but inaugurations just cost a lot, and so?)
WashTimes
Posted by: Blackie | Jan 22 2005 21:10 utc | 9