Post #196: The Emperor’s Birthday (and You)
14 June 2026
It’s a long way from Cincinnatus to Commodus. The former answered the call of the Republic, saved Rome, and retired to the farm—to become, over two thousand years later, a guiding inspiration for the American republican project, via a military fraternity named in his honor whose first presidents were George Washington and Alexander Hamilton.
The latter, Commodus, disgraced the imperial purple in heretofore unthinkable ways by not only frequenting the gladiatorial schools, as if doing so were respectable, but stepping into the arena himself (with suitable safeguards ensuring that he was never exposed to much danger himself while all manner of wild things were presented to him for easy slaughter). Like many an inner dwarf he was very fond of striking the pose of Hercules.
Then as now, the downward lurch came suddenly and unexpectedly. For more than eighty years, from the ignominious end of Domitian (in AD 96) to the death of the great philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius on the Eastern front in AD 180, a succession of five celebrated emperors by choice and adoption had governed the Empire so ably and admirably, on the whole, that Edward Gibbon later declared it, without hesitation, “the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.”
So precipitous was the fall from the squeaky-clean administrations of Antoninus Pius (watchword on the night of his death: equanimity) and his adoptive heir Marcus Aurelius, all the way down to the degenerate regime of Commodus, that a cruel rumor circulated to the effect that a son so very unlike his father must have been the “gift” of a gladiator. (The husband protested too much: the very urgency of his plea, in the opening chapter of his Meditations, that he had in Faustina an exemplary wife—”so obedient, so affectionate, and so simple”—suggests that the pleasing image was perhaps closer to what he wished for than what he got in fact.)
How many previous residents of the White House could bear comparison to the Antonines need not be resolved here. But we may note with astonishment that even during Mr Trump’s first romp through the Presidency, it would have been hard to imagine him celebrating his birthday with gladiatorial games, Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden paved over, the East Wing unceremoniously demolished, and gold-plate of various grades everywhere mocking the austere old republican shades of white.
All this within eyesight, as it were, of a rebellion against the British crown that was animated, along with plenty of tendentious nonsense, by a list of grievances against an allegedly mad king who looks a model of sobriety beside the maniac we have before us. What a way to round off a quarter-millennium of independence! Only in America, as they say… (Then again, the idea that one might live through the best and the worst of times all at once, originated in the old world, not the new.)
Come to think of it, which previous President would have dreamt of turning his own birthday into a public occasion at all, knowing full-well what a monarchical practice it is to do so? (Nor an objectionable one in its proper place, I hasten to add: I have fond memories about such celebrations in several kingdoms around the world. Needless to say, none involved gladiators.)
Even granting that the current circus-atmosphere will soon look a mere aberrant episode—when a modicum of sanity returns and the doors to a replay of such sordid scenes will be bolted shut in a housecleaning that will make the post-Watergate years look lighthearted—this is surely a day to pause, take stock, and reflect on just how far we have come, or rather sunk. Who knows how many millions will succumb and validate these disgraceful proceedings by the click of the mouse. I won’t be among them; I have seen less obscene and vulgar things bathed in red light.
One can only hope, for one’s sanity’s sake and the health of Western civilization, such as it appear at the moment, that what we are witnessing will prove no terminal condition, but a temporary backlash against the excesses of recent years in the other direction, or perhaps against prevailing civilizational currents more generally. Lean too hard on our wilder impulses, as Freud warned a century ago, and what to expect but rampant neurosis and stupendous levels of overcompensation (see no. 193).
To amuse oneself by watching men assailing each other with bare hands like beasts in a cage, or strutting about with steroid-nourished biceps bigger than their heads, while proudly tattooed like walking caricatures of savagery—just what is all this brutish reversion saying about the states of our minds and souls in these blessed 2020s? Can a more glaring and bizarre contrast be imagined than between these troglodytes prowling our streets, our screens, and even our presidential palaces, on the one hand, and the astounding facility with which we can get their doings transmitted to our screens at the speed of light, or exchange messages about them that may be received before they were sent (maybe even recognizing relativity theory at work, see no. 13). All this while possibly taking a coffee break from tracing quantum particles or building a global omni-brain whose ramifications are so mind-boggling that even its creators themselves are not quite sure what they have unleashed on the world. The very enormity of the gulf might supply an explanation of sorts: drive nature out the front with a pitchfork, as Horace observed, and she will return by the back door. With all the stink to be expected from such pathways.
Thus we arrive at the equally startling and disgusting conclusion—a neurotic complex really—that after eighty years of playing Colossus, bestriding the globe and often enough bullying others into submission, what truly ails Americans today is supposed to be that they have not been kicking enough ass (a formulation I owe to David Rothkopf). Go figure! Meanwhile even the most diminutive minds might have noticed that the miserable flailing around Iran has been the result of precisely this mindset, as are the forever wars waged by self-styled ass-kickers in the so-called Holy Land and the Kremlin—bloodier killing-fields still, but equally emblematic of the sad tendency not only to measure one’s manhood by the crudest and crassest indicators, which would be bad enough, but worse still, to see it largely through the lens of one’s power to hurt others. (No moral equivalencies implied here between offensive and defensive wars, only a creeping suspicion that beneath the rivers of blood, the banks and beds on both sides are not quite as dissimilar as one might think.)
How ample the manhoods in question might turn out to be is a question I have no desire to pursue. Suffice it to say that confident, reasonably well-put-together men who are at peace with themselves and the world do not need to remind themselves of their own size, strength, or stature every time they look into a mirror, a camera, or the eyes of another human being, to say nothing of forcing the dimensions at issue upon the attention of others at every turn.*
Clearly the rampant dysfunctions that are playing themselves out before us go far beyond any one unbalanced character, or any one presidency, however unhinged. Mr Trump is as much a symptom as the cause of the dystopian tides engulfing us: this is plainly where the misdirected-attention economy leads, to a presidency for which even the worst news is still good news inasmuch as it ensures at least one thing, and the most important: that the leading man stay at the center of attention (if for all the wrong reasons) and that he continue to succeed at his one abiding ambition in life—to become the most famous man on the planet, if also one of the most disliked. And indeed, by means fair and foul, he has managed to capture and hold more room in more minds, among friends and enemies alike, than perhaps any other human being ever before—an achievement of sorts that must gratify him greatly, even if it is by its very nature unsatisfiable, and if his other claims to historical greatness are the stuff of lowbrow comedy at best, or the padded cell at worst.
This, then, is what you get when you mix the most noxious elements of our globalized entertainment-and-celebrity pseudo-culture with brutish and banal ideas about what it means to be a man in full, with the worship of raw power, and with the idolatry of violence. Soldiers become stage props, gladiators are presented as heroes; presidents mount gilded thrones, public occasions become sleazy freak shows, and Planet Earth shades off visibly into the hell-realms. Monster Energy indeed (David Rothkopf again), though even so far as hells go, this one looks tawdry and shallow.
No doubt the perennial pendulum will swing the other way again, in line with the strange dialectics that seem to govern so much of our human affairs. Only we should not be too quick to get our hopes up that the result will yield a redeeming higher synthesis any time soon. Look no further than the sorry saga of dislocated sartorial tastes when it comes to something as trifling as trouser cuts. No great mysteries in making clothes fit, or bringing the best of designs to the masses at almost ludicrously low cost, if we had the sense to do so, on the producer and consumer side alike. But what happens instead? First, for years on end, trousers shrink inexplicably in all the wrong places, and creep ever higher on the waist, to devastating effect; and then, instead of getting into shape, they turn so grotesquely baggy that one cannot help marveling at how human beings evidently concerned with their appearances would freely and gladly make themselves look like sacks of potatoes left out on the rain for too long.
Nothing new under the sun? Maybe so, but how much judgment is needed to notice that clothes fit appallingly, or that the emperor’s new set amounts to very little beyond embarrassment, nay mortification? If even such smatterings of good sense are too much to expect in an age of wondrous plenty, not for want of capacity, but for want of trying, then what hope can there be for us?
However, before we let the darkening waters sweep us into the bog of despond, let us take heart that unlike the technological marvels unfolding before us (to such uneven effect), the wisdom of the ages requires no great discoveries and remains within reach of anyone ready to make a serious effort. It has ever counseled sobriety and moderation, from the Buddha’s middle way to the inscriptions at Delphi (Meden agan: nothing in excess) and Aristotle’s virtue ethics by the mean. This June 14th, looking to George Washington’s own city, we may seem very far from the bodhi tree, from Delphi, or from Athens—but it is always possible to make a return to better things. The world has been rebuilt many times from much more broken pieces.
If it looks to you as if the problem does not run much deeper than one man and his aberrant behavior, or one side of the political equation, you may trust to the next electoral swing to set things right again. But I am not so sure. The prime suspect returned to power, after all, with an indisputable majority the second time, even after he had shown his warts (and then some). And while the U.S. has been going through its convulsions, countries like Britain, France, and Germany (to name just three obvious points of comparison) offer no obviously brighter prospects, though with different configurations: the mother of parliaments keeps burning through prime ministers with a palpable sense of malaise, while across the Channel, France and Germany are showing signs of systemic cracking that their very structures of government were designed to forestall and rule out.
What we are seeing, in other words, is not just bad political spells in this or that country, for this or that specific reason: we are witnessing a moment of real civilizational crisis. It may not be as stark as earlier ones, during and after two world wars for example, but the winds and the waves are fierce enough. The Covid-plague was a bigger shock to the system, everywhere, than we have perhaps fully processed, and its after-effects linger; the tectonic plates of geopolitical power keep shifting; the relations of the sexes are in worldwide turmoil, and even procreation itself has been cast into doubt as never before.
Meanwhile digitalization, the internet, ubiquitous smart phones, and now the specter of AI, have not only been transforming the technological parameters of our lives, but key aspects of lived reality itself. It’s as if a parallel world has opened up that can seem as real, or more so, than what we take to be the physical one. And as a result, we are now not only living differently than we used to, we think differently to an unsettling degree. Thus we have torn ourselves loose from our moorings, nay from solid ground altogether, and where we might find ourselves in a year, let alone a decade or two from now, looks more unfathomable than ever.
I have no idea what it would take to calm the waters, or whether it can be done at all. Very possibly the elemental forces that we have been conjuring up are so powerful that we need to ride out the storm unabated, or even watch it intensify further. What we can and must do, quite apart from partisanship and politics, is to stabilize the boats we are traveling in, from the cruise-ships and the aircraft carriers down to the little nutshell that is every self alone. If we let our senses and faculties run unguarded and unguided, we will put ourselves at the mercy of the raging elements completely, and who knows where the storm-gales will blow us (no. 188). But we are homo sapiens, with an inestimably rich patrimony behind us and unprecedented resources to draw on; we can do better than to drift blindly, we can steer, even in the heaviest seas, and we have compasses to go by, if we care to heed them. On this last and most formidable human power, that of giving direction and discipline to our minds, if we are determined enough, everything depends, both individually and collectively.
Left or right, high or low, up or down, we are all called upon to do what we can for maintaining threatened standards, restoring them if necessary, and raising them wherever possible. This is not a task to be shouldered for us by others, but to be borne by each and all, one by one, not merely in and around politics, but from moment to moment in everyone’s life. Playing the tribal game and pointing fingers may be unavoidable at times; the much greater challenge before us is to become contrary examples ourselves. We owe nothing less to those who came before—those countless generations, all around the world, who by their incessant toil and back-breaking labors of every kind, and with much effusion of blood and tears, built the foundations of what we get to enjoy in such historic abundance and with such miraculous ease today.
Our predecessors would not ask the impossible, if they could watch us from the grave or the clouds; but they would surely be disappointed in their hopes for us, and bitterly, if all we could do with our extraordinary possibilities were to race, with distracted minds and senses, from one peak of gross vulgarity and sheer idiocy to another, as if it were natural, rather than perverse, for baseness rise so high on the tides of such incredible material progress and prosperity.
*Where have all the real men gone, the quietly strong types for whom America was once famous? And where the women who have ever been their matches, if not always in identical then in equivalent and complimentary ways? They cannot all have disappeared from the face of the earth, but surely they have lost much of their visibility on the surfaces of our flickering little screens. They must disdain to step into the ring with those whose conceit it has become to be “influencers” (read influenzas) of the fickle crowd. They will naturally lead by the power of example, or by force of the offices entrusted to them, but to chase attention in the manner of the day is anathema to them. This leaves them by no means impossible to find, if one goes looking—on the silver screen, in books, or even in more discerning corners of the web—but they will not force themselves on you, if they are true to their calling, nor will they be compelled to parade before you or perform monkey-tricks by the two-second flicks of your tik-toking wrist. There is dignity enough left in the world, to be sure, however endangered it may be; but if you will not seek it out, you cannot expect it to come to you, not because it would shun anyone, but because frequenting the usual muddy channels would deprive it precisely of that elusive quality which sets it apart and makes it dignified in the first place.
PS: As before, when wrestling with nos. 192 and 193 most recently, I find myself unable to reconcile properly two contrary but equally urgent imperatives: first, to repudiate with all my heart the anti-cultural calamity I see in Mr Trump; and second, not to demonize Donald the fellow human being, or to hit anyone below the belt. Given how much Trumpism revolves around the deformed personality of one man, the distinction is bound to blur, but perhaps it can still be illustrated at least in outline with two limiting considerations. First, that I would let anyone, though President, celebrate his eightieth birthday in as outlandish or trashy a manner as he wishes; but not on the White House lawn, please. (Ageing disgracefully, in default of the more noble alternatives, does not offend me unduly, so long as it is not done at the expense of the public.) And second, that all bedrooms, presidential or otherwise, should be off limits, within the parameters of the law, whether with regard to what happens or what doesn’t happen there. The Daily Beast, though often incisive when it gets Inside Trump’s Head with David Rothkopf and Michael Wolff, recently devoted a particularly jeering episode to his cold bed at the White House and his supposed incapacity for any kind of intimacy, along with sundry other remarkably nasty insinuations. Not that such explorations are irrelevant, given the program’s premise; but they don’t look right to me. Even with someone as difficult to like as Mr Trump, there are lines that should not be crossed, no matter how hard-hearted he may seem himself (or not: who could be sure of such a thing?). In our desperately voyeuristic and censorious age, the prurient interests and inquisitorial impulses need curbing, not further encouragement. Perhaps I have been guilty myself of not being charitable enough; I would not be proud of it; but to aim at the vital parts is too much. Happy birthday, then, Mr. President!