The First Moral Majority

 

Denarius from 44 B.C.E., the year of Julius Caesar's death, showing Julius on the obverse and his claimed ancestor (and Aeneas's mother), the goddess Venus. Image by Classical Numismatic Group via Wikipedia.

Religion played a curious role in the beginning of the Pax Romana starting around 30 B.C.E. with the final victory of the person we think of as Octavian—though that's just an adjective, apparently, meaning "guy from the Octavius family"; he'd been going through a lot of names since the assassination of the great-uncle and adoptive father Julius Caesar in 44 left him heir to two thirds of Julius's vast fortune and most of his political following, starting with Gaius Caesar and then, after the deification of Julius in 42, Divi Filius, "Son of the God"), and then Imperator Caesar, "General Caesar" without any forename, like a Star Wars character, and for a while Romulus, after the city's mythical founder and first king, another deified character. And finally in 27 got the Senate to grant him, alongside the political title Princeps ("First" in the Senate), a religious name, Augustus ("consecrated, sacred, reverend" according to Lewis and Short, reverendus being of course a Latin gerundive or future passive participle, "to be revered in the future"), which I take to be an announcement that he, like his great-uncle, would be a god when he died. As subsequently happened. 

Augustus was a political genius, without any doubt, and his aim to secure internal peace after a good 60 years of constant civil war in Rome and all across its enormous territories in Europe, Asia, and Africa, seems like a worthy one—especially since it really worked for 200 years, through unimaginably bad emperors and reasonably good ones, the institutions he created as a legacy being more durable than his frail human heirs. But there's something spookily familiar about the way he did it, putting a permanent end to the tradition of representative government in the Republic to take absolute power for himself, but selling that to the public as a conservative policy, a return to the good old, virile Republican virtues, the representation of a Moral Majority to replace a political one.

For the Record: January 6

 On the 12th night of Christmas the White House gave to me... A pretty good speech suggesting he's still interested in putting some of those masterminds in jail. 

Who copyrighted "Stop the Steal"... in 2016? Photo via CNN.

Startled to learn that the January 6 Committee may have started investigating the "1st Amendment Praetorians", a paramilitary organization consisting "entirely of veterans of the military, law enforcement, and the intelligence community" that has provided security at rallies for the Q folks, Allen West, and ex-General Mike Flynn, led by Robert Patrick Lewis, a wingnuttery entrepreneur who also warns YouTube audiences about the threat of an "antifa Tet Offensive" and "syndicate" of liberals allied to Chinese special forces units. No, I'm not startled. Maybe reassured, because I'd hate to think they weren't being investigated.

Named after the old palace guard that used to do all the work of regime change, assassinating the old emperor and picking out a replacement, so the Senatus Populusque didn't have to trouble themselves.

How appropriate. https://t.co/uJczpv1ayf

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) January 7, 2022

Conservatives (including Republicans at least since World War I) are by definition opposed to democracy ("not a democracy but a constitutional republic" also refers to Rome, which retained the republican institutions-- senate, consuls, tribunes--after it became an empire)...

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) January 7, 2022

If You Can Keep It

Via Ars Technica, "That time Benjamin Franklin tried (and failed) to electrocute a turkey".

Maybe I need to apologize for being so ill-tempered in the comments yesterday. I really am feeling angry at the Sanders forces for exploiting Elizabeth Warren's honesty, as I see it, to sink her candidacy, if it is in fact sunk, when she acknowledged that the achievement of universal health care would be difficult (showing how to do it) and they continued to pretend it wouldn't until just around now.

Also I'm not sure everybody understood that's what I was saying, or that my concern isn't with relative leftness or rightness but presidential effectiveness; which is frustrating, because I really didn't want to say it twice. I really wanted to be ready to move on and support Sanders as hard as I can, if necessary, as seems likely at the moment, against Biden, against Bloomberg, against Trump if we get that far.

I'm really upset about Bloomberg, not because of how many inches on the "right" he is situated with respect to his rivals, distressing as that may be, but because of the money, which is just horrifying to me, and I don't think people are getting that at all. If he's spending a billion dollars before he's even in a primary (I don't know if it's that much, but $344 million on ad buys alone in the last three months, plus 150 field offices with 2400 full-time staff members), if he's staging rallies the way you stage an album launch, with alcohol and hors d'oeuvres and light shows, if he's paying operatives $6,000 a month, he is entirely changing the way politics is conducted in this country. Especially that last point, because nobody else is going to be able to hire skilled operatives. The best campaign people are going to start feeling they can't afford to work for less. He's putting presidential campaigns out of the reach of anybody who isn't more or less as rich as he is. President Bloomberg, meet President Bezos. President Zuckerberg. I am not down with this.

Brooks on Trafficking

No, not that kind of trafficking, that would be too controversial.

Image via YoungInRome.

We may or may not have skirted the danger of war on the Korean peninsula, the situations in Yemen, Ukraine, Myanmar, and other places continue to degenerate, President Macron is trying to take over the Middle East peace process, Congress is about to attempt to provide a real appropriations process for the first time in well over a year of living from continuing resolution to continuing resolution, news is out that Donald Trump tried to shut down the Russia investigation about eight separate times, fearless federalist attorney general Jefferson Beauregard is declaring war on the 29 states where some kind of marijuana use is legal, and a new book is out (four days ahead of schedule after Trump's advance denunciation of it increased demand to an irresistable level) providing credible evidence of the president's diminished cognitive capacity, so naturally David F. Brooks ("How Would Jesus Drive?") is writing about how grateful we should all be that some people have good traffic manners.

Moreover, Pope Francis agrees with him on that, in his homily for the New Year's Eve Vesper service at the Basilica of Saint Peter: