Cinderella Liberty
“Life isn’t knights riding around on horseback. It’s a fight for a knife. In the mud.”
–Logan Roy, Succession
Now that the President of the United States, Joseph R. Biden, has solemnly declared a winter of death and severe illness, I thought I’d take a moment to publicly demand more bread and circuses. Certainly, after two years of pumping terror and suspicion into the atmosphere we are owed something better than a four team college football playoff, or the Abysmal Bears vs the Piss Poor Vikings on that creaking legacy piece known as MNF. And so to elevate the power of distractions to actually distract, I’m calling for a televised duel: Herr Fauci vs. Rand Paul with smoothbore pistols at dawn. I’d like this to happen in Las Vegas, and I want it live on all of the streaming platforms, with strict adherence to the ancient Code Duello. Harry Dean Stanton is no longer with us, so I’ll settle for Peter Dinklage as referee.
I realized last week that scrolling through Facebook is exactly like walking through a jail and listening to inmates arguing between their cells. If you’ve never been in a jail and enjoyed that distinct pleasure, I’d recommend arranging a tour. Perhaps nowhere outside of social media are more armchair experts, pure innocents, and retired generals gathered in the same place, endlessly and pointlessly screeching at each other in the bad lighting, bad smells, and block-wall echo chambers.
Of course, imprisonment and forms of punishment have come a long way over the years. In old Rome precipitation (throwing people off a cliff) was always a crowd pleaser, clubbing to death was the punishment for “writing scurrilous songs about a citizen”, and culleus (confining the offender in a sack with an ape, a dog, and a serpent, then throwing the whole sack into the ocean) was a fun judicial remedy. First century historian Diodorus Siculus wrote a nice passage about the prison where Perseus, king of Macedonia, found himself:
“The prison is a deep underground dungeon, no larger than (a dining-room that could hold nine people), dark and noisome from the large numbers committed to the place, who were men under condemnation on capital charges, for most in this category were incarcerated there at this period. With so many shut up in such close quarters, the poor wretches were reduced to the appearance of brutes, and since their food and everything pertaining to their other needs was all so foully commingled, a stench so terrible assailed anyone who drew near it that it could scarcely be endured.”
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