finished Mary Beard's SPQR, struck by the passages about how the personality of any given ruler mattered little to the lives of most of Romans or even to imperial continuity; meanwhile, watching the President play golf, maskless, on TV, as the paper of record marks 100K dead
two things seem capable of being very true at once: that there is no one at the wheel of this car as it goes over a cliff it was going to go over anyways; and that having a monster who yells "no hands! no belts!" as he sits at the wheel compounds the nightmare w/ superadded evil
two other things, too: that comparatively powerless individuals acting out now bear moral responsibility for odious and self-indulgent choices, and that their doing so indicts an entire miserable system that make those choices thinkable and the powerful people who encourage them
like, would many USers set in their ways, terrified by change, and immiserated on many other fronts still be doing fucked up shit? yes. but living in conditions of deception, legitimacy crises, and disavowal from the top encourages a generalized condition of psychotic normalcy
