Are You Not Entertained?
Emperor Donald's Gladiator Spectacle
The weekend’s UFC fight in honor of the Emperor Donald’s birthday is about more than his obsessive love for big, powerful men, men with tears in their eyes saying, “Mr. President, sir, would you like to touch my rock-solid abs?”
It’s about the fall of Rome, and that of America.
The decline of Rome didn’t begin when the Goths crossed the frontier or rival nations nibbled the edges of the Empire. It began when the Republic died, and Emperors with boundless self-regard and poor impulse control adopted theatrical personas and were told they were gods, not men.
The great crisis of Rome wasn’t merely military weakness, economic collapse, or political corruption. Those were symptoms of a deeper and more pernicious disease. The ruling class lost faith in the institutions that had built the Republic and discovered something far more intoxicating: spectacle and corruption.
