Funny how nobody's unverifiable family tree ever takes root in the village drunk or Earl the insurance adjuster. Of course we're royalty. It has an irresistible appeal. Even if you commoners long ago stopped believing we were anointed by God to lord over you, there's still the money and the fancy clothes and a nice place to live. For most of recorded history, the corridors of power offered about the only lives that weren't nasty, brutish, and short. (Yes, the clergy did too, but it isn't exactly known for the things that keep a young man alive, as Rod Stewart sang. A sentiment oft contradicted by popular account, be it The Canterbury Tales or a grand jury indictment. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.)
Yet, take away the trappings of power and the people running the show aren't exactly BFF material. Sure, Cleopatra was a hoot, and Aurelius seemed like a decent guy (although he writes like a Rubik's cube. Marcus should have meditated on hiring an editor), but a lifetime of privilege ferments a stink attitude more often than not. When you're born on third base, every free throw looks like a touchdown. If Downton Abbey were a documentary, Lord Grantham would be rogering the help in every episode. They'd have to run it on HBO.
As with most troubles in life, I blame Octavian.
Once upon a time, leaders were expected to actually do stuff. Stuff like wade into the enemy ranks on the battlefield and cudgel them. Think: Ragnar Lodbrok or Leonidas. Such tradition fell into decline with the Romans. For all of the barbarity on display in Rome, big biceps ceased to be a job prerequisite for top dog when Octavian (Augustus to his friends) took over. Brain and brawn would still duel for supremacy from time to time, but the die was cast. Getting your hands dirty became déclassé. Instead, leaders sent henchmen to do their evil bidding while they hung out in silk togas and drank spiced wine.
I can kill you with my brain, River Tam warned. And Octavian did. In spades. His little garter snake arms and fancy book lernin' took him all the way to the top of the Roman Senate while the ghosts of beeftots like Uncle Julius and Felix Sulla just shook their heads. It did, however, create a problem. You can bulk up by doing more squat thrusts. A buff brain is a trickier business.
Octavian gets to the end of his reign and starts shopping for a successor. Under his leadership the Republic had become an Empire, and a rather successful one at that. Egypt pacified, Carthage long since delenda-ed, the barbarians still north of the Danube. There were roads and law and order and the aqueduct. The beginning of Rome's Golden Age.
We almost got Agrippa. How different history might have been. Alas, the emperor's besty and heir apparent shuffled off to the Elysian Fields forever just as Octavian was picking out a nice retirement villa. So he casts about and instead picks the son of his first wife from her previous marriage.
Tiberius.
The look on Marc Anthony's face must have been priceless. Hey, Marcus. Remember how Octavian killed your army and sunk your fleet and made you commit suicide? Guess what. In the end, he handed everything over to some random weird dude.
Not exactly the most level-headed fella, Tiberius. A good general, apparently, but he never wanted to be boss. Tiberius retreated to Sperlonga in short order and left some hangers-on to run things in Rome. Tacitus has him sexting little boys. I suppose it was the style at the time, but the larger question remains: Octavian couldn't have found someone competent to take the reigns? In the entire Roman administration? Bob from accounting, for example? He was handing over the keys to the Roman Empire. It was kind of a big deal, as Snorg girl used to beam.
But no. Some tenuous connection to your genes is more important than undoing your life's work. Just because dad lobbed some sperm at a watery tart, you get to be king. I would point out Octavian shared almost as much DNA with a chimpanzee as he did with Tiberius. And he had a daughter, you know. An offspring with real actual Caesar midichlorians and everything. I guess the legions wouldn't follow you unless you had a penis. To point at things? Who knows.
It was the beginning of the end. Tiberius begat Caligula begat Claudius begat Nero. Many begats that followed eventually produced the last emperor in Rome -- Romulus Augustulus. The original little big man. Sure, their depravities have likely been exaggerated for dramatic effect. Nobody wants to hear about Caligula's school lunch program. But Octavian had set a bad precedent. And what is law, if not precedent?
It became acceptable for the people in charge to be incompetent.
Octavian's legacy leads in a branching line all the way from Tiberius to this morning. The occasional capable Roman administration was dashed against the rocks by petulant seas until the Empire fractured. In the east, family squabbling produced Byzantium dynasties with a half life you could measure using a sundial. In the west, Charlemagne's spoiled brats pissed away the Frankish kingdom dad built in a single generation. Eventually, a tangled web of primogeniture stretched all the way from Calais to St. Petersburg.
It took the Enlightenment, and a few million corpses, to put an end to this nonsense. The Divine Right of Kings was no more. For a time. In America, there was probably a full decade when leadership answered to popular consensus (i.e., white male landowners). But the quality of executive timber thinned pretty quickly. We only made it to #6 before the rough beast lineage slouched towards new Bethlehem to be reborn. John Quincy Adams. It wouldn't be the last time a presidential blood succession ended in catastrophe.
Adams the Younger's administration was not entirely terrible, and he stepped up at Ghant to negotiate a favorable settlement after James Madison managed to refight the Revolutionary War and lose. However, Quincy begat Andrew Jackson, who was as nutty as anything the Julio-Claudians produced. Duels, peculation, assassination attempts, Big Block of Cheese Day. A return to imperial weirdness.
It wasn't the cliff, but you could see it from there. The great experiment begun in Athens and renewed in Philadelphia sputtered and lurched for another 150 years until television killed it dead once and for all. With the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate, democracy became entertainment. It became more important to look competent than to be competent. Esse quam videre, they used to say. Not anymore. Neil Postman identified the disease, but died having no idea what to do about it.
So it goes. Who cares if a vice-presidential candidate can't find Russia on a map, or if the Mayor of DC smokes crack. Who cares if a congressman thinks evolution is a lie from the pit of hell or if the head of the Senate Committee on Climate Change thinks climate change is impossible. If our Princeps Senatus is more interested in making the president look bad than he is in legislating, why fuss? It's okay for the people in charge to be incompetent. What could possibly go wrong?
Which brings us to Donald Trump. A majority of Americans, or what passes for one these days, stepped into the booth on November 8th and pulled the lever for the maverick. The loose cannon. The rebel rebelling against the Beltway establishment with his rebelling rebellion.
But not really. Donald Trump is a maverick like a weed whacker is a neurosurgeon. That's something his supporters still don't seem to understand. Beyond the spectacle, beyond the pageantry, beyond State dinners and Air Force One, government has job responsibilities. Everyday mundane wheels that must turn to keep the lights on and arsenic out of the well. President Trump doesn't connect those dots.
Yee-haw isn't a foreign policy, bumper stickers once took W to task. Well, Trump supporters, "Woo I'm a centipede!" isn't any policy at all. It's not personal, mind you. This isn't elitist educated snobbery mocking blue collar chumps who don't know the difference between a shiraz and a syrah or a Laplace transform and a Fourier transform. It's Trump's complete lack of any political experience whatsoever and any coherent platform beyond "Donald Trump doesn't suck and everyone who isn't does." That is the issue; that is what troubles your opposition. I suspect it will trouble you too. It will just take a little longer.
But these are conversations for another day. Today, we can only watch the icebergs looming on the horizon from our catbird seat and wonder what disaster incompetence will bring this time. Mohamed Farrah Aidid once thought our executive incompetent and 18 US servicemen died in Mogadishu as a result. Ayatollah Khomeini once thought our executive incompetent and 52 Americans spent 444 days in captivity. Nikita Khrushchev once thought our executive incompetent and the world almost got thermonuclear war.
What could possibly go wrong? A great many things.
Thanks, Octavian.
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