Crossing the Rubicon

In 50 BCE, the Roman Senate, led by Pompey, ordered Julius Caesar to return to Rome and disband his personal army which had become an increasing threat to the Roman Republic. Caesar refused, and in 49 BCE he led his troops across the Rubicon River (the northern boundary of Italy at the time), sparking civil war. A year later, Caesar defeated Pompey and was appointed dictator, then “dictator for life.” His assassination four years later and the installation of his grand nephew Octavian Ceasar as emperor verified what everyone knew: the Roman Republic had ceased to exist.

One hundred years later, the poet Juvenal talked about the fall of the republic:
“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions – everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things:
bread and circuses. . . ”

Juvenal’s point was that the Romans had given up their freedoms in favor of cheap palliatives. While it was Caesar’s ambition that made it possible for him to cross the Rubicon, it was the appetite of the Roman citizenry for mass spectacle and its disavowal of republican duty which made the crossing inevitable.

We face a parallel threat in the increasingly defunct American Republic. Americans don’t want better working conditions, more time off, cleaner air, less government power, or even more happiness in their lives. Instead, they have grown accustomed to a lifestyle of nonstop TV, music, and movies — and this lifestyle and its products are now all they want. It is this reality which explains why 5 percent of the human population has no problem plundering 25% of the world’s resources, producing 25% of the world’s greenhouse gases, and ignoring the fact that their way of life — their so called “liberty” — is now killing hundreds of thousands in Iraq and set to murder hundreds of thousands more in neighboring Iran.

Such apathy and superficiality is matched only by the profound levels of greed that now circulate throughout American society. For every 20 or 30 year old with thinning hair and an expanding waistline still listening to MTV or going to Coachella there is another young man or woman singularly obsessed with the accumulation of wealth and property. The dollar bill is the only God in America — this is why it says “In God We Trust” on every singe piece of currency printed by the United States Federal Reserve, because each precious cent is considered more glorious than any forsaken shred of virtue. I know of no religion that would place God on its currency except a religion of insanity that finds greed as it source.

How proud we must make the freed African slave, the native American fighting for some last bits of ancestral land, the immigrant family toiling in the strawberry fields of California, or any last believer in the rule of law and nobility of the American experiment. I am sure that even in their greatest delusions of the promise inherent in this continent, in their obviously ridiculous hopes that this nation might stand for something more noble and just than a collection of people taking advantage of one another, they could never have imagined the Bablyon that sits on the graves of those sacrificed in the name of Western progress and “manifest” destiny.

Liberty has long left these shores. My freedom of speech allows me to say what I want on this blog, but there are few who pay attention, fewer who would agree with what I write. My freedom to associate allows me to join political parties of my choice, but there is no political group or movement that I know of which stands simply for freedom, brotherhood, and peace. My freedom to worship the god of my choice and not be constrained by a religious government is subsumed by a small minority of religious hardliners who would insist, among other things, that 10 commandments followed by an ancient tribe be placed in every secular courthouse.

I am supposedly guaranteed a right to privacy but with bank and health records routinely kept and lost on the internet, with personal information floating around as accessible as pornography, and with people eager to write and depict themselves — on TV, on MySpace, and on YouTube — in ways exclusively designed to win attention, I have discovered that there is no such thing as privacy left. I am supposedly guaranteed certain procedures under the law if confronted with imprisonment by the government, except that such procedures do not apply if I am deemed an enemy of the people and given the label of a terrorist (and would never apply anyway if I were poor and could not afford adequate justice).

These freedoms, so critical to the cultivation of personality and the protection of democracy, are the same ones that have been so carelessly discarded by a population more concerned with media stimulation and material wealth. Without freedom of speech, there can be no clash of assumptions and no discovery of Truth, but merely a meandering allegiance to ancient falsehoods. Without freedom of association, there is no hope for concerted action that might conquer injustice and tyranny. Without freedom of worship, the grandiosity of the universe and of existence is confined to a single narrative, cheapening the glory of the almighty and reducing the seeker of spiritualism to a conformed unit of religious indulgence.

When people throw away their privacy for a cheap buck or to grab attention, they remove that precious bulwark against social and government intrusion so critical to the cultivation of the personality and individual experimentation. Yet today there is no commodity that has become more quickly exchanged. Combined with the stripping of due process that has taken place because of the War on Terror (and before that, the War on Drugs), we have entered a dangerous social arena where one misunderstood statement or action becomes the pen which will one day sign one’s own death warrant.

The laws and values of a society are as only good as the people who follow them. If we are bereft of the blessings of liberty and of genuine democracy, it is because we have little care for them. They provide no easy stimulation, no distraction from the harsh reality of everyday life — so they are done away with.

If and when the president of the United States extends the War on Terror into Iran, he will have crossed his own Rubicon and converted this republic into an empire, in the same manner that Caesar did to Rome more than 2,000 years ago.

But if he is able to cross the Rubicon, it is because the American people were happy to build him his bridge across its waters. In inaction, waste, and conformity, a great people can make themselves the willing agents of tyranny. Whether they watch a chariot race at the Coliseum or a contestant on a reality show makes no difference — they will have chosen to look the other way as murder is committed in their names and oppression made heavy around their throats.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Fear and Tyranny, Government Accountability, Imperial Decline, Social Alienation, Structure and System. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.