http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=…
RHINEBECK, N.Y. – Chelsea Clinton’s wedding along the Hudson River will be under a no-fly zone.
The Federal Aviation Administration says local airspace will be restricted from 3 p.m. (1900 GMT) Saturday to 3:30 a.m. (0730 GMT) Sunday.
I put this in a bit with the special deployment of the US Navy to search for JFK Junior’s remains after he crashed his plane.
That bin is labelled “things that don’t sound that bad but actually trouble me far more than most government spending”.
I find Roman history fascinating. The Founders very self-consciously modelled much of the US government on Roman government …and yet, in other ways, our society is the direct antithesis of Roman society.
One of the most interesting distillations of modern Christian / enlightenment values as compared with Roman values was this:
Romans had all the same feelings that we had – pity, equality, forgiveness – except there was an inversion. Those that we see as strengths, they saw as weaknesses, and vice versa.
(I’d like to say that that came from Kagan, or Gibbon or Strauss, or one of my undergrad Roman History textbooks … but it actually came from a bit of director’s commentary on the HBO miniseries Rome.)
This quote overstates things a bit, but it does make a good point: we have a ton in common with the Romans – our language, many foodstuffs, our Senate, our foreign policy, our infrastructure spending, our preeminent world position, our politics, and more.
…but it’s a mistake to not pay attention to the drastic skew between our two ethical systems.
One aspect of the difference in ethical systems is this: Romans took it as utterly given and not worth debate that
(a) different people were born into different social classes;
(b) social class did – and should pervade all aspects of life;
(c) it was legitimate for government to acknowledge, reinforce, and be co-opted for the purpose of enforcing these distinctions.
(and spare me what you learned from an after-school special about manumitted Roman slaves – it’s true, and it was a much better form of slavery than we had here in the US, but while economic mobility was nearly unlimited, and slaves could be freed and thus jump one social class , beyond that there was very little social / political mobility.
Social and economic reform in Rome had its heyday around 150 BC and it didn’t go very well. Despite one of them being a hero of the third (and final) Punic War, the Gracchus brothers failed in their attempt to reform the land laws so as to treat members of the senatorial class and the plebeian class equally (that is, if you consider “the senators had 300 of your followers clubbed to death just outside the senate doors, spilling blood there for the first time ever” to be a failure).
The Roman State was deeply in bed with the roman social elite. It was not scandalous when the Roman state spent money or exerted its power for the personal social benefit of a social elite – this was seen as legitimate and part of the natural order of things.
This is why I am deeply troubled by the casual use of the FAA to shut down airspace for a Clinton wedding, or the casual redeployment of the US Navy to go looking for the corpse of some media fop.
When Barnie Frank or some other politician uses stolen tax dollars to reward his political allies with pet projects, that’s the normal mode of government operation, and if people find out about it, there’s the normal outrage.
That’s bad enough.
…but what I really dislike the destruction of the social compact that says that government at least has to pretend to be about the common good, and that the machinery of governance is distinct from the social strata of lawyers, trust fund kids, recipients of inherited wealth, those who married married rich, etc.
I’m OK with Bill Clinton, when in office, flying in Air Force One.
I’m OK with Bill Clinton, when out of office, being a multi-multi-millionaire from his speech giving and his book deals and flying around in Air !@#$ One.
…but I’m deeply unhappy when Chelsey Clinton’s $5 million wedding, doesn’t merely put lots of politicians on the guest list, but calls in “favors” from the government that are entirely unavailable to ordinary US citizens at any price.
Forget my complaints about the size and scope of government – I can imagine living in a culture where all citizens agree on the rules of government, and merely disagree with how well funded it is.
…but I find it deeply troubling to contemplate a society where people thing that it is legitimate that the upper classes have a legitimate draw on government power for social purposes like this.
