A short observation, if I may, about this, the first pagan administration in American history. My text, ironically, is taken from the Book of the White House Twitter Account. (The irony is not just that the love of book-learnin’ grows scarcer the closer one gets to the top of the org chart of the current executive branch. It’s that a culture that reduces itself, stylistically, argumentatively, and in terms of time and resource allocation to a tweet adorned by an off-the-rack meme or AI-generated picture will erase more actual and potential books than a stadium full of Savonarolas. The charge of cultural and intellectual degeneracy hardly exempts academics and intellectuals, whose time allocation, online behavior, podcast promiscuity, and general revealed preferences suggest a relationship to the life of the mind roughly equivalent to Onan’s relationship to fatherhood.) The White House account has a tweet up, possibly marking the yearlong semidivine rites of the Trump Birthday Plus American Semiquincentennial. It reads:
The Revolution that began in 1776 has not ended—it still continues, because the flame of Liberty and Independence still burns in the hearts of EVERY American Patriot.
And our future will be bigger, better, brighter, bolder, and more glorious than ever before.
I don’t wish to pick on the fact that it’s kitschy, junky stuff, with pointless random capitalization. Of course, I refuse to ignore that fact. But so, minus the oddly Germanic capitalization practices, is most of the ceremonial or propagandistic language produced by all modern White Houses. (Viz., the white-bread staleness and vaguely desperate optimism–“Make no mistake, our best days still lie ahead”–of a Biden White House Independence Day tweet, chosen at random, from 2022.) Hackery is expected, if not obligatory.
What I want to suggest, in line with the paganism, is that it is so distinctly, if so very badly, ancient Roman in its approach, so second-string-court-poet-to-the-Emperor. One needn’t look very far to find many “intellectual” clients and beneficiaries of the Trump/Vance court drawing on and trumpeting a return to the works and values of ancient Greece and Rome. It’s thick on the ground. My personal favorite example, for sheer servility and gall, is this American Greatness column by famous trivia question Roger Kimball, in which he struggles, manfully but visibly, to justify the claim that Donald J. Trump embodies the Aristotelian virtues.
But what finally struck me, on reading the Ozymandian business above, is the conspicuous missing ingredient. It occurs to me that what is unique, uniquely fascinating, and bitingly hilarious about the particular Greco-Roman brand of paganism that characterizes the regime and its publicists is that it wants to recall the heights and glories of ancient Greek and Roman literature–minus Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, Juvenal, Plutarch, Livy, Cicero (if read honestly), Theophrastus, Hesiod, Homer except for the bloody bits, and every other classical writer who wrote about tragedy and the perils of hubris, arrogance, corruption, and vainglory.