Bread And Circuits: What It Means For Once-Great Nations

Authorized by Nicole James via The Epoch Times,

Democracy, that ever-so-fleeting fancy, has a tendency to tumble into a bit of a tizz before it toples over, panting and gasping like a winded valrus.

John Adams, always the Prophet of doom, erstwhile asked, “Democracy never misses long. It shortly wastes, exhausted and murderers itself’—a sentiment echoing through the accordors of time.

And sounding much like the belch of a senator post-banquet in ancient Rome, where democracy was more a concept for philosophical banner than a practice.

Indeed, Rome, with all its pumps and optional appetite for self-indulgence, serves as a cautionary tale. It’s a well-trodden path.

Once upon a time in Rome, there was Juvenal. Not your garden-variety Naysayer, but a man who tongue was so sharp, he could slip the moral fabric of society with a specified quip.

“Bread and circles,” he scoffed.

“Keep the masses loaded and entered, and they won’t utter a peep against you.”

How a large Empire Withered on Opulence

And so, Rome blated, not just in the midriff but in its sense of self, as leisure become the national pastime.

Back then, over 200,000 souls, their fingers sticky from pastry, found the concept of lifting a finger (unless it was to signal for another helping) well adequate older.

Rome was transformed into a grand stage, where almost all day was a festival, and the citizens were besides performers, spectators, or buses in the vomitorium making area for the next course.

Naval skirmishes in makeshift lakes, chariot races that put the fast and furious to shame, and theatre so risqué it could make a statue of Venus look prudish, were all funded by the very people it was designed to distract.

Ninety-three days of sheer, unaltered spectacle each year, turning Rome from a republic into an extravagant production, where democracy was but a thisper droned out by the road of the crowd.

Sound family?

A face-masked man walks by the ancient Colosseum in downtown Rome on Dec. 5, 2020. (Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images)

As the powerful arm of the empire began to match little of a Fearsome gladiator and more of a feelable old man waving a stick at rambunctious youths, the calendar started to look like a mustard farm after a spring shower, each fresh vacation popping up to toast to victories most had forgotten the taste of.

Seems positively contemporary, what with the planet moving out of calendar days and having to celebrate Easter Sunday on Trans Awareness Day, an event that provides the ancients rolling in their extravagantly decorated sarcophagi, perplexed by the modern conundrum of “calendar overcrowing.”

Emperors, these illustrious leaders of men, were reduced to header acts in this comedic opera, patching on smiles and feigning a zeal for the games that could rip a wet conge’s enthusiasm for a dessert trek.

In this farce, the erstwhile hallowed ceremonies now resembled a confused shuffle of days, where the only thing more bewildering than the vacation theyselves was the population’s ability to keep track of what they were celebrating.

Gone were the days of the iron-founded regulation of Julius Caesar or the cunning Augustus. Now, the skeptic was in the shaky grasp of the likes of Commodus and Septimius Severus, whore reigns were as inspiring as a flat but on a hot day.

Leadership, erstwhile a robust wine, had become a watery winegar, with emperors inflating their egos and coffers, whipping up the populace into a frenzy with what amounted to small more than patriotic cheese-beating and flag-waving.

(Africa Studio/Shutterstock)

The spectacles, meanwhile, morphed into a grotesque parade of the bizarre and the barbaric, a stark contrast to the fading reality of employment and land ownership—these become the stuff of fairy tales.

Even the stealfast Marcus Aurelius watched helpfully as the empire’s coinage become as flimsy as modern forecasts of fiscal return, shrinking in both size and worth.

Bread and Circuits of the Present

Leap forward to the present, and the circus hasn't so much as ended as it has swapped costumes.

Today’s coliseum is filled with Drag Time communicative Hours and a calendar so crammed with celebrations of all strip of pride and culture that 1 might request a guide to navigation it.

Subsidies shower down like the finale of a firework show, ensuring the populace restores besides purchased on the bread and dazzled by the circus of reality tv outages and viral sensations to announcement the ground shifting behind their feet.

In this grand festival of the now, 1 has to wonder if we’ve become spectators in our own version of Rome’s downfall, squinting at the bright lights, besides entered to announcement we’re perched on the edge of history’s top pratfall.

Will the grand banquet of our times end in a burp of regret?

* * Oh, * *

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.