Saint Bernard of
Clairvaux (1090-1153) (1) in a letter to his disciple Eugenius had this to say
about the vices and Tumults of Rome:
“Who is
ignorant”, says the monk of Clairvaux, “of the vanity and the arrogance of the
Romans? A nation nursed in sedition, cruel, untractable, and scorning to obey,
unless they are too feeble to resist.
When they promise to serve, they aspire to reign; if they swear
allegiance, they watch the opportunity of revolt; yet they vent their
discontent in loud clamors, if your doors or your counsels are shut against
them. Dexterous in mischief, they have
never learned the science of doing good.
Odious to earth and heaven, impious to God, seditious among themselves,
jealous of their neighbours, inhuman to strangers, they love no one, by no one
are they loved; and while they wish to inspire fear, they live in base and
continual apprehension. They will not
submit; they know not how to govern; faithless to their superiors, intolerable
to their equals, ungrateful to their benefactors, and alike impudent in their
demands and their refusals. Lofty in
promise, poor in execution: adulation and calumny, perfidy and treason, are
familiar arts of their policy.” (2)
This account of the
sorry state into which the once proud Romans had degenerated by the 12th
century could easily describe contemporary America and the malaise currently
gripping the American psyche. Nothing,
better describes attitudes and behaviors of the contemporary United States
currently in the grip of the narcissistic Boomers, the ‘Generation of Swine”;
and nowhere is this malignancy more manifest than in the mischief presently
perpetrated by the knuckle-dragging conservative movement which releasing itself
from the bonds of reason has proceeded to make a mockery of not only public
policy but the very legitimacy of governance itself. History, it appears, has run its course on
the American Empire as the cancer that is the American Conservative movement
works its way through the body politic.
Across this land one
hears a constant chorus of ‘it can’t be done’.
We can’t afford health insurance; we can’t afford to invest in
infrastructure; we can’t afford to invest in our people and our labor force; we
can’t afford the new technologies necessary to save ourselves, and perhaps the
planet, from the devastating demands being imposed upon mother nature by modern
civilization. This has become the Mantra
of the Swine.
This isn’t a recent
development. It began precisely at that
junction when the “Boomers” came, politically speaking, ‘of age’. Just as the ‘Can-Do’ attitudes of our fathers
put a man on the moon the “Boomers”, having chased a President from office and
about to vote for the first time, added to their critique of war and peace the
questioning of our investments in the space program. The argument, so it went, was that we couldn’t
afford the program. And so Nixon, always
with his ear to the ground, cut the funding for NASA eliminating at least two
more moon missions and relegating the space program for decades to the
continual circling of the earth in low space orbit. The era of “Can’t-Do” had arrived.
And so began the
not-so-slow downward spiral as one program after another suffered budget cuts and
America began a serial disinvestment in its future and in itself. The “Boomers”, embracing a conservative and
libertarian creed, have by degrees hollowed out not only the industrial economy
of a once great nation but it’s very soul; to the very point where we now “know
not how to govern” and, indeed question the very legitimacy of governance
itself.
______
(2).
Gibbon, Edward “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. Methuen & Co
London 1914. Volume VII, page 228
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