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Americans, Prepare to Be Bought
We’ve already got the circus, might as well take the bread
Panem et circenses — bread and circuses. Sound familiar? Attributed to a Roman poet and satirist, Juvenal (circa 100 A.D.), it denotes the trick of pacifying the masses with garish entertainments and enough food to keep them quiet.
Keep the little people distracted with spectacles and toss ’em some loaves, and they’re unlikely to notice their republic being turned into an autocracy. Juvenal wrote, in part:
… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.
Of course, he wrote it in Latin, but I’m not that fancy.
If those words ring uncomfortably close to home, no wonder. We’ve got a president who likes to gin up AI images of himself as a king or the Pope and whose disregard for the Constitution he took an oath to uphold is only exceeded by his admitted ignorance of what it says.
