Political Memes

It was dumber than you think. There was an emperor who reacted to 'rome falling' with thinking his pet pigeon, whom he called Rome, had died. When he learned the city had fallen he was actually relieved and didn't give a fuck.

I’m sure it did they just didn’t have social media and cell phones to document the fall in 4k.

I'm pretty sure it had equally stupid moments, like the still today infamous moment where Nero played whilst Rome burned.

Whilst when it come to History decades blur into a handful of stories and us non-Historians just learn it like that with explanations about why it happened, living in the actual thing moment by moment without the benefit of hindsight and an overview of the whole thing to put all pieces together is a very different experience.

I wouldn't at all be surprised if in the fullness of time all of what's going on now will be pieced together with what came before and what comes next, with some nice explanation about, say, how the the neoliberal political experiment of the late XX century with it's heavy emphasis on weakening Governmental oversight of the Economy re-enacted in the early XXI century many of the same problems with the Economic structure and the Political capture by the Merchant class of the early XX century causing a similar resurgence in Fascism and the fall of Democracy in several nations. (Certainly History seems to rhyming again).

Future generations will mainly see it as bunch of high level descriptions of the main events knowing fully what the outcome was, without the fear and anxiety of experiencing it as it develops without knowing what comes next.

It's both sad and funny how even in our own downfall, we're still comparing ourselves to fucking Rome. An empire that 1) Was actually nothing like ours 2) No nation state should ever be emulating because it was awful 3) Lasted a thousand+ years and 4) Literally murdered the god and prophet of our primary religion.

We are not the heirs of that ancient Mediterranean hierarchy, nothing existing today is or will be. The god damn Rome mind virus. Let go of it.

The late empire was a pretty silly place. That's what happens when the elite has to pretend a failing system works.

In fact Nero's reign was this stupid. All the John's revelation mythology that informs Christian eschatology is (biblical academic consensus submits) about Rome under Nero. Nero was notoriously as vein as Trump and is probably the same sociological phenomenon.

King Heron is once again eating all the frogs.

The fall of the Roman Republic certainly was. One of the biggest forces driving it was malignant social inequality. The wealthy patrician class, buoyed by hoards of slave labor seized from the conquered provinces, was dispossessing the Roman citizens who had fought and died to conquer those lands.

Reformers had a variety of ideas on how to solve this. One of the most popular ones was to simply buy land up and give it to Roman citizens that found themselves destitute. An expensive program, but you know what the real stupid thing was?

The money was there. The Roman state had overflowing coffers, vast amounts of gold and other riches taken from those conquered provinces. The reformers didn't even want to raise taxes on the rich to pay for their social redistribution programs. They just wanted to take some of this vast pile of gold the state had won and use some of it to benefit the people who actually did the fighting and dying to win that gold.

But, the elites refused to share. They wanted it all for themselves. And eventually they lost all their power to the Caesars as a consequence.