Imperium Americanum in Imperio
Jul 24th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
England is a little underwater. Floods come and go, but history repeats itself. Warnings and lessons of the past are ignored.
So far, the media have shown the prime minister saying the emergency services are doing a “magnificent job” and nobody has challenged him about the £16m reduction in annual funding for flood defences last year for which he was responsible. To his success in pre-empting that question, with his mantra-like recitation of the unpredictability of the weather, one can only say:
Heck of a job, Gord
Meanwhile, I have just finished Imperium by Robert Harris, a mate of Tony’s.
Harris, like C.J.Sansom, whose Sovereign I also recently enjoyed, is an author whose books I buy as soon as they’re published in paperback.
Imperium is Harris’s best novel yet and I found it a delight and hard to put down. I have a “Rome” shelf, with, inter alia, most of Stephen Saylor’s novels. Tom Holland’s Rubicon is next in the queue, and somewhere Mr.Gibbons’ scribbles lurk, unread still. When there is a virtual Ancient Rome I will subscribe and explore.
Imperium is a fictional biography of Cicero, as told by his slave, stenographer and amanuensis, Tiro. It’s a tale of high politics. In retelling the story of Pompey the “with us or against us” line is foreshadowed or, can I say, precapitulated? Later, when Cicero sees off a conspiracy to seize control of government and foreign policy, contemporary parallels are inescapable.
Unfortunately, we have no contemporary Cicero. It could have been Blair, a laywer politico like Cicero, with a gift of eloquence. According to David Owen, hubris was Blair’s downfall, and Bush’s. And, he added in a television interview last Sunday, the scuttlebut in Westminster is that Blair’s heart condition a few years ago may have been linked to his use of a hair restoration tonic! As a physician Owen is arguably more entitled to repeat such tittle-tattle, but he spoke with just a little too much patrician disdain.
This Canadian documentary about the neocon conspiracy in Washington doesn’t add much to what we have been told already, but I hadn’t seen the extent of the hubris of Fox TV. Nemesis should follow hubris. I wish he’d shake a leg.
Sometimes I feel the urge to leave the room when someone starts explaining their pet conspiracy theories (this may be useful if you face certain boredom and don’t mind lying to escape). It seems uncountable numbers of people have a need for conspiracies. We hear lots about rising levels of obesity from consuming junk food but nothing about rising levels of stupidity and credulity resulting from dysfunctional education and addiction to junk information channels.
At least one person I know could usefully read this debunking of 9/11 conspiracies — or this summary — but he wants to believe that George Bush did it and nothing will ever change his mind.
