on leaving Kuta

I hold fast till the last day, refusing kids who beg and pray and badger me both day and night to buy a bracelet – brown, black, white? Then comes Mary, eight years young, whose pitch is crass, incessant, fun, who won't believe I'll buy one soon, whose mushrooms, “Take you to the moon”. I give her less than she asks for, I claim that I am very poor, I take her small and flimsy thing, she says “OK, better than nothing”. We leave fair Kuta before nine, our engines haul and buck and whine and drag us through the darkened hills, we take much care and do not spill. A storm has slicked our moon-lit path – great burst of light, a booming wrath – but now the night is calm and cool, a taxi driver hits his brights, can't seem to pass us on the right, we slow way down, give up the fight, I curse and yell that he's a fool. Great mounds of dirt cover the lanes, force us to slow way down again, as if from nowhere they appear, with naught to warn that they are near. Then I spy a red barrow whose owner causes me much fright, who interrupts our steady flow, out in the street – no warning light. We get waylaid by crafty men; they sneak us past the ticket pen; they bribe police and harbor boss; ours is not sting or pang or loss, for they defraud their government to feed their kids and pay the rent. No berth awaits us once aboard, no slightly bowing deck steward, we settle down right on the deck, avoiding many sticky flecks. Bali greets us pleasantly when something drops down from a tree and hits me square upon the head; I don't complain for I'm not dead. We make good time and maintain speed, for hurry there is never need, a road-side cop tells us to slow, I speak his tongue – he lets us go. I climb in through the side window, where only weeds and gravel grow, I have no keys for the front door, we settle down upon the floor, sleep for one hour, then awake, as violent screams the walls do shake. There's spitting blood, hurled accusations, this has been a strange vacation, full of laughs but violence too, oh fair Indo – I love you.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on Sallust

I have recently finished reading a Latin-to-English translation from 1920 of the War with Catiline, by Sallust. (I had purchased the book for one dollar during a visit to my alma mater's library.) Beyond the fact that the actual war which this work purports to cover consumed no more than the last few pages of the text (which is scores of pages long), the tale deals primarily with such political corruption, societal decay, and moral downfall as that seems to have set the stage for Catiline's failed rebellion. Moreover, the situations Sallust describes in this book – situations which Catiline appears to have tried to exploit to his own benefit – struck me as eerily similar to situations we face in America, today.

Sallust speaks of the founding of Rome, how the city came to wealth and great fortune, becoming the mother of an empire. But, soon enough, the principles upon which it was founded – industriousness, thriftiness, valor – were supplanted by avarice, sloth, and self-aggrandizement. And, soon enough, in its primary political body, the Senate, “instead of modesty, incorruptibility, and honesty, shamelessness, bribery, and rapacity held sway.” This, I believe, is the trap into which our own Congress and Senate have fallen. The politicians who fill these bodies, while campaigning for election or reelection, champion themselves as honest persons of incorruptible and modest moral fiber only to revert, once they have gained office, to shamelessly selling their time and influence to the highest bidder and to writing such laws as rape the very people they have sworn to protect of their Lives, Liberty, and Property. Sallust speaks that when Rome had grown “great through toil and the practice of justice… savage tribes and mighty people subdued by force of arms… and all the seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs.” This text almost perfectly describes the course America charted from its founding until now, in that this nation was born in perilous circumstances, becoming soon a country dedicated to the preservation of the rule of law, then wiping out whole populations of First People tribes, and finally conquering Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia to leave land and sea our disposal, only to discover, as if we had but recently come to our senses, that our internal affairs were seriously – and perhaps irrevocably – out of alignment.

I am not the first to draw comparisons between the Roman and the American empires, and I am not the first to suggest the inevitability of an empire such as our own to fail, but I am delighted to have found an ancient work that so well supports these points. While there is much solid wisdom to be learned from past writers (I should like to suggest to persons in the Occupy and the Indignados movements to read the aforementioned book, and to prepare for a total lack of positive change), the primary lessons I gleaned from this interesting and worthwhile text are that life seems to follow certain paths inexorably, that politics are intolerably messy and best left alone, that money and influence always corrupt, that people should be trusted about as far as they can be thrown, and that elected officials will only reluctantly and with much kicking and screaming give up such power as to which they have become accustomed. So please, dear reader, fellow Second Sons of Liberty, comrades of the New Guards for our Future Security, please do not despair, for no matter how dark our times may seem, they are sure to get worse before they get better. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri manufactorem fecit

work cited: Sallust, page 14, J. C. Rolfe, London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam's Sons, 1920