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By now most of us feel it, know it. That metal tang in the mouth. That ache in the gut each morning. The whole game is falling apart.
Wars and rumours of war may be an ever present human folly, a harbinger in the heart warning of hell around the corner. But this is different, is it not? Our dirty little misbehaviours used to shred our world one ecosystem at a time. But we know, we know there is no coming back from the Big One. We know by intuition, reason, and animal sense that we have reached too far too fast. We are brats with nuclear toys and Heaven has saved our bacon from more close shaves than we deserve.
And unlike a particular human infant, we collectively haven’t learnt to ween off our Mother’s teat. Rather our hunger grew monstrous with our eternally retarded infancy as we have eaten our Mother: breast, arm, and thigh. We are down to her marrow now and even that is not enough. 300 pound infants, all of us.
We have a compass, somehow, and know all of this is wrong. We know what is right, if not how to instantiate it. If that weren’t true, those of us who bury or lose this compass wouldn’t be so senselessly monstrous. What we really lack is spine to hold ourselves accountable.
It’s now a banal commonplace, finally, to understand the American Empire as reincarnation of the Roman. And the story goes that the Roman Empire held a blessed, innocent kernel of republican wisdom ruined by hubris; so too the American. True enough for engineering, this tale.
But what escapes most of our reflection is that moment, a long moment, when the *res publica* existed within the Roman Empire on terms of bad faith. Parasitic, the empire, on the body politick, and yet also indispensable to it. Indispensable socially, logistically, perhaps even morally.
Here, take the very terms of empire. The Latin which now seems so inevitably to invoke the arbitrary rule of venal men are all originally terms of the body politick. And this is no mere corruption, but was so understood by the late Romans:
Princeps, prince, meant first among equals, the “fair play” of political games between gentlemen.
Duke, ducat, meant an office holder given powers for securing the national interest.
Emperor, imperator, meant a president.
By these etymologies we may glimpse how the Roman game went down, how it justified itself until it finally had to look in the 3rd century mirror. And that is when the torture porn flowed and the crisis of conscience and the apocalypse ran riot in the street.
The Left today and a good many others raise as much as a warning. But they too often blithely administer phony nostrums of historical inevitability to salve our fears. “Late” capitalism, say the marxists; salvation by proletariat is just around the corner.
But if Rome is model, we should be aware the limits to the imagination of such a society will demand a more dire mutation. Collapse is bad enough. But apocalyptic collapse can happen even amidst a worthless survival. Rome looked in the mirror one morning, shaved its philosophical beard, and settled into being an anointed thug. And this lasted long, very long, a very long time indeed. Rome looked and found itself monstrous in its innocence. Rome even gave up Rome, moved away to the “exotic” East and gave itself to petty Germanic satraps, to falsely salve that ache inside. For all the philosophers and fools, Rome never found a way out of the dilemma, to part commonwealth from empire.
So they became moral zombies. So do we.
And the centuries churned, and the generations toiled in ignorance under the yoke of cruelty. The light simply went out. The “hopey changey” became a joke for which all suffered. Apocalypse of daily flesh goes deeper than any state, demands salve more efficacious than any ideology. It’s a human thing, intimate and sorrowful. Upon the marble legs of misericordia and virtus do we hobble yet.
It would be a comfort to be an anarchist, I reckon. To hold to faith that we can have our communal cake and eat it too, if we only just burn the village. And there are a hundred other such gospels to wave in the air. Whatever gets us through the day. I know. I know…
And I don’t wish to simply hold the death mask aloft and give over to mourning fatalism. There is no life there. Perhaps we need our illusions born of innocence. Maybe in such alchemy we will finally find a new, better, kinder game.
Yet here we are. It is worth, I think, bowing to our shared funeral with a simple gentility. Here we are again. And this may actually, finally, be the last apocalypse for humans, anyway. The questions really don’t change from that, but maybe gather poignancy in relief. How should we live out these days? Who and what do we love? How do we love? How do we live? How do we hold ourselves kindly, the great manic babes that we are, having eaten our mother? How do we come back from that monstrous insanity, that horror of horrrors, if only to say another day, here we are?
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