"No country was ever saved by good men,” Horace Walpole observed “because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary.”
CNN is like a pool of sharks when there is blood in the water. They are pouring over old tapes of radio Shock Jock Howard Stern, one of the biggest pervs in the business, (that IS his business), when Stern had Trump on, and then taking snips out of context, and exploiting those clips to pile on to the feeding frenzy over Trump's bad reputation with women. Trump brought it on himself, and as they say, "turnabout is fair play, " because it is fair for one to suffer whatever one has caused others to suffer.
Look, we get it. Trump's a vulgar misogynists, and even more so a narcissist. And even though what CNN is doing still strikes me as foul, I think there is justice in what is happening to Trump. But what interests me more is that where there is justice we often find irony.
Trump "lived by the sword," the swords being social media and being a bully. Now he is "dying by the sword." One of the most obvious morals, of this no morals story, is that what makes for a good story is a great example of Karma at its finest. That is what we have with Trump's demise. So to Trump I say, "Ain't payback a BITCH." (Pun intended.) If Trump could chime in now to my post he might quip, "It ain't over till the fat lady sings." (Pun intended, and queue up Rosie O'Donnell.)
The greater irony may be how analogous all this is to the most famous assassination in history. The murder of Julius Caesar. The take down of Donald Trump looks faintly like the stabbing and killing of Julius Caesar by many Senators. And in the end, we may find that the political death of Trump may not save the Republic.
To make my point I will quote from a book about the death of Caesar, "The Moral of Caesar" by Roger Kimball.
"One of the great ironies surrounding the assassination of Julius Caesar is that, for all of the upheaval it occasioned, it failed utterly in its stated purpose. The conspirators sought to overthrow a dictator and restore the Republic. “The Republic,” “the Republic,” “the Republic”: that was the phrase they uttered ad nauseam. But the Roman Republic, devised to govern a city state, was overwhelmed by the cosmopolitan responsibilities of empire. By Caesar’s day, the Republic was a tottering and deeply corrupt edifice. As Caesar himself put it, cynically but not inaccurately, “The Republic is nothing, merely a name without body or shape.” By killing Caesar, the conspirators merely hastened the Republic’s collapse."
If you think i am streching it to compare Trump to Caesar, maybe so. But if I have intrigued you, then maybe i can amuze you further with an excerpt from "The Death of Caesar" by Barry Strauss, one of those rare academic historians. Strauss quotes Emerson (who wasn’t wrong about everything): “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.” The assassins thought that by killing Caesar they had killed tyranny. They hadn’t. Removing Caesar did nothing to remove Caesarism, i.e., absolute rule by one man, which, as Strauss points out, emerged from the bloodbath of the Ides of March unscathed. “The world without Caesar,” he notes, “was still a world about Caesar.”"
I ask you, am I the only one who sees a few strange parallels to Trump in these next words in which Strauss describes Caesar?
"By all accounts, he was a brilliant orator, deft politician, witty companion, insatiable womanizer, and passionate champion of the common man against the entrenched interests of the oligarchical senatorial class. “To the urban plebs,” Strauss writes, “he brought handouts, entertainment, and debt relief—but not enough to hurt the wealthy. To his supporters in the provinces he brought Roman citizenship. To leading Roman knights he opened up public offices and seats in the Senate.” Above all, perhaps, Caesar was an unstoppable egotist whose charm made him the busy point around which the world turned."
Surely this is a different place and time than Rome in February 44. But it is not a different world. Consider how Strauss describes the atmosphere in Rome at the time. "Caesar had many supporters, but his increasingly cavalier, not to say disdainful, behavior provoked irritation and worse. Some say that Caesar was weary. Physically, his long years on the campaign trail had taken a toll."
Caesar’s assassination took place over 2000 years ago, but as Roger Kimball said, "... their significance continues to resonate, if only we have ears to listen."
To sum up my point in this post I again turn to Roger Kimball and words he chose in "The Moral of Caesar." Kimball quotes his favorite line from Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard: “If we want things to stay the same, a lot of things are going to have to change.” to make the following key point. "The Roman Republic had to change if it was going to endure. That insight escaped the wit of the conspirators and their allies. A look at the world today suggests that this is a paradox we neglect at our peril."
As I have said, repeatedly, if the vision that our great Nation was founded upon is to endure, things are going to have to change. We must head the warnings, especially those regarding partisanship, that George Washington offered our fledgling Nation in his Farewell Letter.
To conclude my post, i must pun. Trump, beware of the Ides of October. And so I ask, what must we do to save the Republic? If you think the answer is Clinton. I would say to you, Hillary is just another Caesar for a different set of Senators to deal with. You know my answer! Vote for #GaryJohnson #JohnsonandWeld. YOU IN?
