A Roman Holiday at the White House

 Trump's UFC face-smashing party on the White House lawn last night catered to a long-running sadistic interest of his in blood sports. I was reminded of an earlier news cycle in which he mused about segregating martial arts leagues by immigration status and pitting undocumented people against U.S. citizens to fight each other for his amusement. 

In short, this is a man who gets off on the idea of other men bloodying their faces, while he looks on from a position of safety—like the Roman emperors of old watching a gladiatorial game. 

And so—even if the men hitting each other and drawing blood on the octagon at the White House yesterday in some way signed up for the treatment—they were nonetheless "butchered to make a Roman holiday" as surely as the men who were thrown to the lions in the ancient Coliseum (as Byron put it in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage). 

I am reminded of the scene in Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, in which the protagonist realizes that there must be something deeply wrong with the Stoicism he had previously embraced—indeed, with the whole public culture of ancient Rome—if it could tolerate or even delight in such cruelty and the suffering of others. 

The best thing about culture, Bertrand Russell once observed, is that it gives people something to take an interest in—some way to feel pride and self-esteem and self-satisfaction—other than the assertion of mere physical dominance over others through causing them pain and lording it over their helpless suffering. 

The ancient Roman citizenry by and large hadn't yet discovered such higher pleasures. And so, they made a show of pointless violence. In a Roman circus of the Stoic era, Pater writes, "mere cruelty to animals, their useless suffering and death, formed the main point of interest. People watched their destruction, batch after batch, in a not particularly inventive fashion."

And before it was animals, it had been human beings treated in similar fashion, Pater notes. 

That long chapter of the cruelty of the Roman public shows may, perhaps, leave with the children of the modern world a feeling of self-complacency. Yet it might seem well to ask ourselves—it is always well to do so, when we read of the slave-trade, for instance, or of great religious persecutions on this side or on that [...] what germs of feeling we may entertain which, under fitting circumstances, would induce us to the like [...]

Those cruel amusements were, certainly, the sin of blindness, of deadness and stupidity, in the age of Marius, Pater writes. 

So too—that disgraceful spectacle on the White House lawn last night—live-streamed for the delectation of the guffawing masses by Paramount, once-proud media conglomerate now reduced to a mouthpiece for state propaganda—should perhaps challenge our own "self-complacency" about our era. 

We have not evolved to such cultural heights as we may think. We are not so different from the sadistic Romans of the ancient world, who could think of nothing to amuse themselves with other than publicly-funded shows of cruelty and violence. 

The sins of moral "blindness, deafness, and stupidity" are still very much with us.