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

on lacrosse – America's native game

Long have we Yankees watched, celebrated, and played non-native, imported sports. Baseball and ice hockey come originally from Canada; American football derives from British rugby; and tennis, let alone soccer, are European sports dreamed up by tards in the Old Country. (Basketball, as a makeshift sport created in America during the middle of the 20^th century, may well have been invented here, but, compared to lacrosse, too recently to be truly and exclusively American – it is a game for the modern world.) With invasive sports taking over our airways and poisoning our hearts, we ask, Where does it stop? What native-born game shall henceforth entertainment us? To the amateur patriot seeking to wring from his republic every last drop of terrible beauty; to the action lover yearning for the speed of soccer mixed with the crash of football; to the sadist lusting after the sight of blood spurting from well-bruised, moving flesh; to all these people, the game of choice is the game that thrived here long before the white man arrived to rape, to pillage, and to defile the good dark soil with his asphalt and concrete.

Lacrosse – brutal, quick, stunning lacrosse – was played on this continent well before the first paleface made landfall. For centuries prior to the arrival of European settlers, for generations before the white man lied and cheated and murdered his shameful way into the country's vast interior, this harsh sport blossomed amongst the democratic, resource-conscious First People nations in the Chesapeake Bay watershed area, and beyond. What better way to celebrate life than to try to bash one's opponent to death?! What better way to display one's vigor and fortitude than to take one's licks and to charge at the enemy with gentle, heedless rage?! Lacrosse requires hand-eye coordination and upper-body strength similar to that of tennis or baseball, stamina and agility similar to that of soccer, and bodily contact such as that felt in football, with an wholly unusual element: net-topped poles with which a player bashes and strikes at his opposing (ball-handling) player, hitting him anywhere about the upper body (excepting the neck and head area) even when he has fallen and is lying on the ground. (Lacrosse is played by both males and females, from the middle-school level onward.) Lacrosse is not a sport for persons with weak bones, inferior blood-clotting facilities, or a penchant for weeping – it is a sport for hardened operators for whom injury, pain, and deprivation are a way of life.

To the extent that each is a honorable, rugged, unflinching, team-oriented, and hard-hitting individual, the lacrosse player resembles the self-sufficient, resource-conscious American patriot. Watching lacrosse is akin to peering back in time to the days when our problems were solved quickly and according to clearly defined rules, to a time in which decision-makers hashed things out by bashing each other nicely over the head while attempting to pluck from the sky a small, rock-hard, fast-moving round object. Oh, if only the long-silent war-whoops would once again sound from the throats of proud and self-less warriors.

場黑麥 ioanni elymucampus fecit

encylopediamericanifesto: phaltweariness - dehydration

  Among the many serious dangers the smog rider faces daily is the risk of dehydration. A condition easy to overlook but deadly if ignored, the body's dehydration distress call resembles closely the distress call it makes to signal hunger; additional telltale signs of dehydration are crankiness and fatigue. A few reports say that within smog rider packs it is common for the incessantly whining and inexplicably binge-eating member to be forced to hydrate by the IPM (the Instant & Perpetual Militia, i.e. the smog-packs' ubiquitous, fully meritocratic agents of enforcement), however our trust in the source for these reports is shaken.

  Multiple trustworthy sources report that when cycling in desert climates the smog rider adjusts his body to the local variances for temperature and humidity, a somewhat risky process in which he trains his body to need less water than it needs in more northern-lying areas. The first step he takes in this process is to eat of the local soil, and to pledge his fealty to the spirits of the land, and to praise the things growing in it, and to celebrate the things scampering across its face (a curious custom akin to the practices of First People tribes). Once he has ingested of the local earth, he cuts back on water gradually until he needs only a liter of it a day, and perhaps a few ounces more if he should exercise vigorously.

  An active person and avid reader alike, the smog rider learned some of the eternal lessons of the desert by reading tales about Rommel and Lawrence of Arabia, tales of Westerners surviving in the desert on minimal amounts of water using methods they learned from the Bedouin people. (In fact, he considers himself deep down an adjunct member of the hard-scrabble group of desert dwelling bad-asses know as the Fremen, from in Frank Herbert's book Dune.)

  But he is not Fremen, and he is not Bedouin – he is a smog-riding street-art vagabond, a man free of scorn and haste whose heart is pure, and in whom there is no room for death.

  Spes Mea In Ratio Est - 場黑麥 John Paul Roggenkamp