Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
SplendorQuest: How to be a Roman of the Romans...

My best-treasured treasure from my Christmas cache is The October Horse by Colleen McCollough. This is the latest and last in The First Man in Rome historical novel series. These books are a guilty pleasure for me; they're no substitute for the original historical material, especially Caesar's Commentaria, but they're fun, and they make a lively milieu out of a vast quantity of lifeless historical details emerging from a vast array of lifeless historical sources.

The first book concerns the early careers of Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and book-by-book, McCollough introduces us to Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Junius Brutus, Marcus Antonius and the still-very-young Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, later Caesar Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. Remarkably, all of these remarkable people were alive at the same time, along with every artist in the Golden Age of Roman Literature: Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, Seneca and Catullus. It would be a challenge to name a dozen Romans born before Marius or after Octavian. In the span of time McCullough covers, from 110 B.C to 44 B.C., virtually everything we think of as 'Roman history' happened. She manages to encapsulate these incredible events, not briefly but thoroughly.

McCullough is a feminist revisionist in the sense that she gives women things to do, which the histories rarely do. In particular, Caesar's mother, aunts, wives, mistresses and daughter are beautifully motivated. Gossipy events, such as the antics of Clodius and his sister Clodia--memorialized by Catullus as 'Lesbia'--are detailed in detail. Cleopatra gets the respect she was denied by Shakespeare and Shaw. And while McCollough is clearly on the side of Marius, Caesar and the other populares, her treatment of the optimates--most notably Cicero and Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis (the 'Cato the Younger' behind the Cato Letters, which are behind the Cato Institute)--is not completely tendentious.

I think that every serious thinker should resolve to learn Latin this New Year. Latin is the keystone of the arch that upholds Western Civilization, connecting the modern world to the ancient. But if you don't, won't, couldn't-ever-possibly, McCollough's First Man in Rome series is an excellent Cliff's Notes treatment of Rome. Plus which, she'll stick you with a lot of Latin, anyway, like it or not.
posted by Greg Swann at 10:12 AM

 
And that's enough of that...

Christmas and family and goofy new gadgets are fun for a while, but there are worlds left to conquer. For example, Rob Robertson offers a precise, detailed and fail-safe method by which unsightly naked people can prevent war, or at least eliminate lust.

The latter might actually work. As I intimated elsewhere with respect to cross-burning, nothing exceeds like excess. American males might not be quite so desperate to catch sight of a naked tit if they could never escape them, sightly or otherwise. The same sort of strategy seems to have worked for homosexuality. We might once have been shocked by 'the love that dare not speak its name.' Who can spare a gasp for the love that won't shut the hell up?

Robertson speaks of "a conscript's arm sticking out of the Iraqi sands," and this of course is an error. Ours is an all-volunteer Army, and it is the commonest path to upward mobility of our black brethren. That by itself is beautiful, like something out of Kipling. More like something out of the never-written auto-biography of Gaius Marius, though, and that much is scary.

Marius, uncle to Gaius Julius Caesar, was the inventor of the modern Army. Where Rome had defended herself in the manner of the Greek polis, with citizen-soldiers who were land-holders first and soldiers only briefly, Marius hit upon the idea of recruiting from the penniless denizens of Rome, paying them wages for their ten-year enlistments, then conferring upon them grants of land when they mustered out. Sound familiar? Two or four years instead of ten, and tuition money instead of land, but it's the same principle. Marius turned Rome from a city-state that had accidentally conquered Carthage into an unapologetic empire, and the land he granted to his vetereans was--ahem--conquered territory. His plan was that his retired legionnaires would spread Roman culture among the vanquished, and this worked as envisioned for a long, long time. And again, this is analagous to the modern American military, the upward-mobilizing mechanism of which is the transmission of middle-class values and virtues to volunteers who had been deprived in youth of these excellent survival tools. Kipling again, "Don't get into doin' things rather-more-or-less."

The scary part is that Rome came to depend on hired volunteers and didn't care too much where they came from. The troopers who fought the dreaded Germans were often themselves Germans, and not-too-terribly-Romanized Germans. This had unhappy consequences in the end. I mention this in the context of a certain scrupulous Muslim FBI agent who would not scruple to tape another Muslim.

May god help me if I am wrong to fear Muslims in the ranks of our all-volunteer military. I fear that not even the unsightliest of naked women can help us if I am right...
posted by Greg Swann at 9:51 AM

 
Christmas at Costco...

It's A Costco family Christmas, a brand new Christmas story just in time for Christmas:

"Your son wants to know why you're always giving things comical names."

"I never do that."

"Dad!"

"I never do that. I'm very serious about names. I want for everything to have the perfect name. Take you, for instance. I wanted to call you Anaximander."

"Anaximander...?"

"Either that or Anaxagoras. Or both. Just think of all the junk mail lists you would have been left off of, had you been denominated Anaximander Anaxagoras."

"What's 'denominated' mean?"

"It means to be plastered numerically on currency. I'd much rather be drunk on love."

"Huh?"

"It means to be stuck with the lower berth in a fraction."

"What?"

"It means to be named, honey." The Mom said that.

Nothing but very American fun in a very American place.

Merry Christmas!
posted by Greg Swann at 1:36 AM

 
A Muslim doesn't record another Muslim...

This was reported Thursday on ABC's Primetime. This version of the story comes from ABCNEWS.com:

Perhaps most astounding of the many mistakes, according to [federal prosecutor Mark] Flessner and an affidavit filed by [FBI agent Robert] Wright, is how an FBI agent named Gamal Abdel-Hafiz seriously damaged the investigation. Wright says Abdel-Hafiz, who is Muslim, refused to secretly record one of [Saudi Arabian businessman and suspected terrorism financier Yassin] al-Kadi's suspected associates, who was also Muslim. Wright says Abdel-Hafiz told him, [FBI agent John] Vincent and other agents that "a Muslim doesn't record another Muslim."

"He wouldn't have any problems interviewing or recording somebody who wasn't a Muslim, but he could never record another Muslim," said Vincent.

Wright said he "was floored" by Abdel-Hafiz's refusal and immediately called the FBI headquarters. Their reaction surprised him even more: "The supervisor from headquarters says, 'Well, you have to understand where he's coming from, Bob.' I said no, no, no, no, no. I understand where I'm coming from," said Wright. "We both took the same damn oath to defend this country against all enemies foreign and domestic, and he just said no? No way in hell."

Far from being reprimanded, Abdel-Hafiz was promoted to one of the FBI's most important anti-terrorism posts, the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia, to handle investigations for the FBI in that Muslim country.

The FBI said it was unaware of the allegations against the Muslim agent when he was sent to Saudi Arabia or of two similar incidents described to ABCNEWS by agents in New York and Tampa, Fla. They said Abdel-Hafiz contributed significantly to many successful terror investigations.

In a statement to ABCNEWS, the FBI also defended the agent, saying he had a right to refuse because the undercover recording was supposed to take place in a mosque.

But former prosecutor Flessner said that was a lie and the mosque was never part of the plan.

"What he [Abdel-Hafiz] said was, it was against his religion to record another Muslim. I was dumbfounded by that response," said Flessner. "And I had perfectly appropriate conversations with the supervisors of his home office and nothing came of it."

It's hard to decide which is more shocking, that an FBI agent would have a scruple, or that a government agency that employs snipers to kill unarmed women would not only suffer but promote an FBI agent who has a scruple.

What is frightening about this is that we are about to fight a war against Muslims with some significant percentage of our weaponry controlled by Muslims. I don't want to impugn their loyalty in advance, but Gamal Abdel-Hafiz raises some scary questions, and the excuses made for him are lame. If you think the cops investigating priests in the Archdiocese of Boston are anything other than Catholic, you've never been to Boston. Islam seeks a universal Caliphate, a one-world theocratic government. This has not existed in practice for a millennium, but the objective has never been renounced. If I'm wrong in my suspicions, I would welcome being told how and why. My fear is that we're going to find out the hard way that there is a very big difference between a multi-ethnic Army and a multi-cultural Army...
posted by Greg Swann at 8:04 AM

 
Cardinal Law at the speed of life

George Weigel has a sweet Christmas story about Cardinal Bernard Law, recently resigned from the Archdiocese of Boston, in today's Boston Globe:

As the [Cuban] security goons watched with jaws agape, the archbishop of Boston took these 20 kids up to one of the hotel's posh restaurants, stood them all to a dinner the likes of which they had never seen before, and walked them up and down the buffet, explaining in fluent Spanish to these wonderful, impoverished youngsters what the various dishes were. The cardinal then encouraged them to sing again, sitting discretely nearby so that the goons wouldn't interfere. Everything simply stopped in its tracks. Guests, restaurant staff, and goons were serenaded for perhaps 20 minutes by songs about the love of Christ and the recently completed Christmas season.

There exists a logical error that we might call the Storyteller's Fallacy. It consists of the affected belief that a person or a place or a phenomenon can be encapsulated by a single story, and that, having digested that capsule, we are absolved of all further thought. Bernard Law is not contained entirely within this charming story, nor within the other one, the one that has been drummed into our brains for months. The story of Cardinal Law that interests me today, three days before Christmas, is the story of an ambitious man who has lost everything all at once. We might spitefully insist that he deserves his fate. Even so, there is a story, great and tragic and beautiful, in how he is meeting that fate. But--whether the storyteller is great of heart or small--however factual a recounting of that story may be, still it must be a conceit and a deceit by dint of overwhelming omission.

I pointed one by one at all the houses on the top of the hill. "There's a story in every one of those houses. A story you've never heard before, except you know it by heart. And every one of those stories is tragic, and every one of them is comical, and every one of them is universal. Every one of those stories is different, and every one of them is the same. And every one of them is about nobody but you. You're presented with the choice to live or die, and the story is which you chose and why."

That's me, from Courtney at the speed of life. That Bernard Law helped rob innocents of their innocence is a true and tragic and enduring story. That he taught a different song to a choir of Cuban children is also true. And his story today--at the end, at the beginning, at that moment of high drama when all the truth we can ever sight stands out in stark relief--that story is also true. True for him, true for me, true for you, true for all of us. We can't be just-one-thing because each one of is everything.
posted by Greg Swann at 6:42 AM

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