Graffiti on the seawall at Bolinas, California. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair

She had asked the older women: “What is that fire?”

And they had replied: “It is we who are burning.”

― Primo Levi, If This is Man

While contemplating the incipient collapse of our Republic from an inside job, I dipped back into the six-volume edition of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that Alexander Cockburn gave me as a Christmas present years ago. Gibbon’s prose style is ornate, featuring wide-ranging and winding sentences that often end abruptly, like a dagger plunging. It takes some pages–and there are entire mountain ranges of them–to get used to his baroque rhetorical rhythm. Still, once you do, the book really picks up steam and roars along through decade after decade of unrivaled imperial villainy, personal cupidity and political turpitude.

Like a historical geologist, Gibbon pinpoints the first major seismic fault triggering the fall of the Empire during the reign of Commodus, the sadistic son of the stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Mediations are much promoted (though little practiced) by today’s TechBros. Through much of Commodus’s reign, the man by his side was the conniving Cleander, who became chamberlain of the Empire and commander of Commodius personal death squad, the Praetorian Guard. Here’s Gibbon’s acute (and very timely for our own perilous predicament) assessment of how the Commodus/Cleander partnership worked:

[Cleander] entered the palace, rendered himself useful to his master’s passions, and rapidly ascended to the most exalted station which a subject could enjoy. His influence over the mind of Commodus was much greater than that of his predecessor [Perennis, who Cleander had killed], for Cleander was devoid of any ability or virtue which could inspire the emperor with envy or distrust. Avarice was the reigning passion of his soul, and the great principle of his administration. The rank of consul, of patrician, of senator, was exposed to public sale, and it would have been considered as disaffection if anyone had refused to purchase these empty and disgraceful honors with the greatest part of his fortune. In the lucrative provincial employments the minister shared with the governor the spoils of the people. The execution of the laws was venal and arbitrary. A wealthy criminal might obtain not only the reversal of the sentence by which he was justly condemned, but might likewise inflict whatever punishment he pleased on the accuser, the witnesses and the judge.”

Sound familiar?

Cleander, like Elon Musk, was not a natural-born citizen of the Empire. He came to Rome from Phyrgia, orchestrated hundreds of killings to demonstrate his loyalty, and made a bundle as the hatchet man and chief extortionist for the Emperor until he briefly eclipsed Commodus’s glittering raiment and lost his head for this hubristic transgression.

It was comforting to learn that I’m not the only former punk who found solace in Gibbon’s sprawling work. So did Iggy Pop, who wrote a piece for Classics Ireland about why he spent so many nights on the road reading the Decline and Fall:

In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saunders, Penguin). The grandeur of the subject appealed to me, as did the cameo illustration of Edward Gibbon, the author, on the front cover. He looked like a heavy dude.

Being in a political business, I had long made a habit of reading biographies of wilful characters – Hitler, Churchill, MacArthur, Brando – with large profiles, and I also enjoyed books on war and political intrigue, as I could relate the action to my own situation in the music business, which is not about music at all, but is a kind of religion-rental. I would read with pleasure around 4 am, with my drugs and whisky in cheap motels, savouring the clash of beliefs, personalities, and values played out on antiquity’s stage by crowds of the vulgar, led by huge archetypal characters.

From “Caesar Lives,”’ Classics Ireland, Vol. 2 (1995)

Speaking of Caesar…

Is this the first time Trump has proclaimed himself as King? He waited a whole month into his reign. What patience he’s shown. How long before he deifies himself? Julius Caesar wasn’t deified until after his assassination. Augustus allowed temples to be built for his worship in Asia Minor, but not the capital, which would have induced a riot and perhaps a coup. His ingrate descendants Caligula and Nero both demanded to worshipped as gods during their abbreviated reigns (few did, except under threat of beheading) and the great imperial muckraker Suetonius quotes Vespasian, one of the better emperors, as saying, wryly on his deathbed: “Oh dear, it appears, I’m becoming a god.”

Sent out by the White House on your dime…

What is congestion pricing, your Royal Highness, but a tariff imposed on outsiders crossing the city line to exploit the services of NYC?

This sounds ominous…A new Trump executive order issued Wednesday night says the president “shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.”

The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General.

Where have we heard this before? (Though not in the fortune cookie syntax.)

Late Thursday afternoon, the Washington Post reported that Trump is preparing to dissolve the US Postal Service Board, an allegedly independent agency now under the leadership of Louis DeJoy, who Trump appointed five years ago and Biden refused to remove, and seize control of the Postal Service inside the administration, “potentially throwing the mail provider and trillions of dollars of e-commerce transactions into turmoil.”

The check is in the mail. Honest, I sent it months ago! Please don’t turn off the electricity! No, I’m not lying! I posted it with the Andrew Jackson stamp, thinking it would speed the delivery! What do you mean he’s into McKinley now? Which one was he? Damn. There go the lights. Oh, no, Mom’s dialysis machine just went off….

In the relationship between Musk and Trump, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ascertain which one’s Caligula and which one’s Incitatus…

So what have Elon and the Droogs been up to this week?

Even though the FDIC is funded by banks, not the federal tax dollars, Musk’s team of droogs raided its employee databases and ordered the mass firings of federal bank examiners. What could go wrong that didn’t already go wrong to bring the FDIC into existence? A lot in the crypto/meme-coin late-capitalist economy.

Consider Argentina, where the anarcho-capitalist and Trump acolyte Javier Milei is now under investigation for encouraging his followers to buy the LIBRA crypto, which soon collapsed by 96%, wiping out $4.4 billion of its market cap in just a few hours.

Here’s Yanis Varoufakis on Milei’s crypto scam:

On Friday 14th, Argentina’s President Milei tweeted about the $LIBRA coin, encouraging his followers to buy it on the grounds that it would “help fund small businesses and start-ups”. As if that weren’t enough, he shared a link for people to buy it online. Naturally, within a few hours, $LIBRA’s price shot up. Many more people, trying to escape the poverty that Millei’s policies have subjected them to, rushed in to buy. Alas, soon after the price of $LIBRA crashed and they lost their money.

This is a standard tactic by crypto scammers. It is known as a ‘rug pull’: draw in naïve buyers only to stop trading and run with their money. But when the President of the country does it, it is more than a scam, a scandal. It is a crime.

More broadly, this incident confirms how dangerous the illusion of apolitical, non-state, money is. Money can never be anything other than state-based. That we need to democratise our public money is, of course, crucial. But any attempt to privatise money, however well-meaning its adherent might be, is bound to end in tears and to empower an oligarchic circle. End of story.

Danny Nelson reports for Coinbase that months before the memecoin scandal Hayden Davis, a co-creator Libra, bragged of sending money to Javier Milei’s sister saying of the Argentine president in a December text message: “We can also have Milie tweet and meet in person and do promo. I control that nigger. I send $$ to his sister and he signs whatever I say and does what I........

© CounterPunch