The Center Cannot Hold

 

Imagine, if you can, the field of ruins stretching out from the Palatine Hill in Rome around the middle of the 7th century A.D. It was a city which had declined from over a million inhabitants to less than 30,000 persons in something like 150 years, maybe less.

The center, my friends, of the mighty Western Roman Empire most certainly didn't hold. Why? For many reasons, not least an increasing rottenness of currency manifesting in huge inflation and the ineluctable transfer of power to major landowners.

Put simply, a very few very wealthy people controlled everything and with that the state, Res Publica, was fractured. To put it another way, the center was bust. Fast forward to today. Here we are in the midst of American Imperium and guess what?

Our money's worthless, it's a note of debt at interest which can never be repaid, ever. And as it was in the days of ancient Rome, more and more power subsumes into the hands of a very few select men. You'll notice our ongoing presidential contest is an affair of wealthy plutocrats jousting for position. 

We have, if you care to step back and reflect, already Balkanized, and the process will continue; the center has not held and the Beast slouches towards Nazareth in all its degeneracy. Our task, gentle readers, is to stand steady and keep the Faith.

Your Old Friend,

LSP

Degenerate As Ancient Rome?!?

Some say the way we live now mirrors ancient Rome, that we've become a client or pawn society living under the patronage of a degenerate, power obsessed elite. But perhaps this is an exaggeration; here's Seneca describing the behavior of the Divine Augustus' daughter Julia:

The deified Augustus banished his daughter who was shameless beyond the indictment of shamelessness, and made public the scandals of the imperial house – that she had been accessible to scores of paramours, that in nocturnal revels she had roamed about the city, that the very forum and the rostrum, from which her father had proposed a law against adultery, had been chosen by the daughter for her debaucheries, that she had daily resorted to the statue of Marsyas, and, laying aside the role of adulteress, there sold her favours, and sought the right to every indulgence with even an unknown paramour.

Bad Julia, and you can picture her above-the-law antics in the heart of the imperial city. Getting it on on the rostrum itself, no less. She paid for her indiscretions with exile and eventual suicide. So did several of her paramours who were executed or suicided by a vastly irate Augustus.

Can you imagine anything like that going on today, degeneracy, execution and suiciding in the corridors of power? Of course not. After all, you wouldn't want to offend the Clintons would you, and anyway, it's all Trump's fault.

Carry on,

LSP

Detroit Comeback?

"That's not the Philippines that's Detroit you idiot," Spoiler 216

Are you in the music industry? It was 1997 and I was in a cab, fresh out of London and heading to the Town Pump in what passed for downtown Detroit. It was a neat evening and, long story short, I moved. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

But what a culture shock, London to Detroit. It's hard to describe even now and it was harder then. Miles of abandoned or half abandoned city blocks, criss crossed by highways and an unrelenting ghetto of decaying, abandoned, burned out, crack den dystopia. And I didn't see the half of all 138 square miles of it.

Is there anything like it in England? I don't think so and feel that friends in the Old Country thought my email reports were tall tales. No, they weren't. Then again, no city in England has lost a million plus inhabitants in the last 50 years and gone from being the automotive capital of the world to... not. So you can excuse incomprehension.

Fast forward to today. I visit the onetime Motor City when I can and always have fun; it's good to see the city's downtown and immediate neighborhoods looking less blighted and no wonder. The burned out crack houses have fallen down and reverted to nature, leaving what was once a city open to agrarian white hipsterdom. Hey, go for it kids. And the result?

A small island of central civility in the increasingly empty shell of a once major city. Not dissimilar, when you think of it, to ancient Rome following the breakdown of western imperial authority. But will America's Motor City grow wings and fly again? 

Sometimes a song is worth a thousand words.

Your Old Friend,

LSP