While We Fiddled

Back in Old Rome, you know, the eternal empire that lasted a long time, but not eternally. . .alas.

Bet the citizens thought they were quite the thing, with their opulent lives (as long as you weren't a slave), advanced, philosophical (lots of gods), and oh so sure of their all knowingness about past and future.

Of course, Rome fell, hard. And today, we look back at what we perceive to be their historic quaintness and congratulate ourselves that we are so much advanced. We understand the past, and we are taking all manner of wonderful steps for the future, like banning smoking outside, and mercury filled lightbulbs, and limiting the population so well that entire countries have so few births that they must import workers from places that hate them and others forbid girl children (killing them before and after they leave the womb as a national priority; we haven't quite gotten there yet. It is still a crime to kill them after they happen to survive the journey through the birth canal, no longer axiomatically a safe place as once it was, in this country, although a few teenagers don't really see the difference and toss a child here and there in trash bins.

We insist so much on diversity that the idea of one out of many that is one essence (appropriate attribution to Dennis Prager here) is a bit of a laugh borne of the fuzzy ideas of old white European transplants like Jefferson, Adams, Paine. Where is today's diatribe coming from?

From hearing this morning a bit about Egypt's transitionary situation. There once were all these disparate groups united in their hate (legitimacy of that attitude is not the subject as it is now moot) of Mubarak. They spoke together and rioted together and then he was gone. And now, the disparate groups are acting disparately again, as was entirely predictable with just a passing glance at history. The cauldron is brewing again, that apocalyptic cauldron. And we here, in what used to be another safe place, a womb of the democratic republic, pretend it cannot touch us with our ipods and iphones and our oh so glitzy how to improve yourself modules on TV and net and magazine. And one day, as we fiddle, our version of Rome will burn and we will somehow be surprised.