CP (#17) / Let's Fire Everyone! The Self-Sacking of the American Empire
We know Donald Trump likes nothing more than to fire (or sack) people. However, we’ve never before witnessed a government intentionally sacking itself as part of an effort to sack the entire world!
Some random observations.
Some Banned Words from the Department of Agriculture
In a dematerialized world, words are all we have (apparently). So if we don’t like something, we can simply ban people from using the words describing that something.
We’ve already seen this with the banning of the term climate change from our public lexicon. And with the banning of books about deviant forms of sexuality or gender identity.
Problem solved!
But here’s a new twist on this strategy. We learn this morning from the estimable rural news publication, Barn Raiser, that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has banned the use of 110 terms in internal and external communications.
Beyond the elimination of DEI terms such as “black,” “lesbian,” “gay,” and “transgender” with which we are already familiar, the list of banned words now includes “climate,” “solar power,” “wind power,” “electric vehicle,” “safe drinking water,” “water conservation,” “microplastics,” “pollution,” and “affordable housing.”
Public Service
We also might as well ban the term “public service,” as we no longer have any notion of a “public” or of “service.” The Trump people do like the idea of “servants,” however. So we may soon see a rebranding, in which the government refers to all of us among the public as “public servants.” Or perhaps, as we begin to privatize everything, we shall be known going forward as “private servants.”
Dude, Let’s Have a Righteous Medieval Sacking!
During the 5th century, successive waves of barbarian invaders—Visigoths, Vandals, and Goths—“sacked” the city of Rome, exploiting Rome’s deepening economic, military, and cultural crises to effectively bring an end to the Roman Empire.
Later examples of “sacking” during the Middle Ages included the sacking of Milan by the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1162 CE), the sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade (1204 CE), the Jacquerie peasant uprising in France in 1358, the peasants’ revolt in England in 1381, and the sacking of Rome by mutinous troops of Emperor Charles V in 1527.
We already know that Donald Trump likes nothing more than to fire (or “sack”) people. However, there has been, until today, no example from history of an established, legitimate government intentionally “sacking” itself as part of an effort to “sack” the entire world!
But there is another way to interpret what the MAGA maniacs are actually doing, and how we can think about the origins of this epic sacking we are now experiencing, a sacking that makes all previous sackings puny and contemptible by comparison.
We tend to think about “sackings” of all sort as events taking place in geographic space. The Visigoths, Vandals, and Goths all invaded—literally, violently coming “inside” from the “outside.”
But in the spirit of my own project about the Catholic “medievalizaton” of American politics post-World War II, I like to think about our chaotic times as an “irruption” quite literally from the Middle Ages, in terms of its philosophical basis, its inquisitiorial intent, and its savage—if not apocalpytic—consequences.
We think about time travel from the present to prior ages. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a good example. But what we’re witnessing right now might more properly be akin on a global scale to the anti-clerical, anti-Jewish Shepherd’s Crusade of 1251. Or resembling the early years of the Spanish Inquisition, which led, notably, to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. Or appreciated as a global “bonfire of the vanities” of the sort Girolamo Savonarola inspired in Renaissance Florence in 1497.