The Athenian statesman, general and orator Pericles is generally regarded as presiding over the Golden Age of Greece, when Athens was the first among equals of the Greek city-states — ruling the seas in a series of wars; bestowing democracy on freemen; encouraging the arts and literature; and building a series of public works projects that are still with us today in the remnants of the buildings of the Acropolis that include the Parthenon, temple of the city’s patroness, Athena, goddess of wisdom and war in a just cause.
But after some 30 years it was all over in 629 B.C. when a plague — perhaps typhus — ripped through Athens, killing Pericles and several members of his family. It was the beginning of the end for Athens, too, which became involved in a long struggle with archrival Sparta.
People often ask me about my fascination with history and in particular the Greeks and Alexander the Great, the Greco-Macedonian conqueror who would come along 300 years later and avenge all the Greeks suffered at the hands of the Persians, their foreign rivals, including the burning of that Acropolis. Let’s be frank here, shall we? People find my fascination with history and the Greeks at best quaint and at worst out of touch. They don’t just ask me about it, they ridicule me about it.
But who’s laughing now? A knowledge of history — and by that I don’t mean just American history or World War II — is essential for adversity, because it helps you play the long game. You understand how others faced crises and either overcame them or succumbed to them. Most important, you see that triumph and disaster, Kpling’s famed imposters, are cyclical. Nothing good lasts forever, but neither does anything bad.
Unfortunately, as President George W. Bush noted, Americans are not adept at looking in the rearview mirror. That fact and a complacency born of our success and position as the sole superpower with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s has brought us to this moment when we are contracting rather than expanding. Instead of being emboldened by big ideas to combat the coronavirus we have a passive-aggressive, mean-spirited White House administration that refuses to coordinate states’ efforts in securing supplies and testing to combat the virus and reopen businesses; and is shutting out the very immigrants who will be needed to help us rebuild our society.
Of all the terrible things that have been wrought by COVID-19, led by the loss of life and livelihood, few are more heart-wrenching, though, than how low we have fallen. Every day is a new low anyway with President Donald J. Trump, the bottomless Lake Titicaca of presidents, but his searching remarks on ingesting disinfectants and shoving sunshine up the place where the sun doesn’t shine had a poignance I hadn’t expected. He doesn’t have a clue. But then, narcissists have no self-awareness. It’s not that they have too much ego. It’s that they have an abjectly damaged ego. They are miserable human beings who must inflict misery on others. Their lives have no meaning otherwise.
It’s true that brilliant, beautiful, talented narcissists — and I suspect we’ve all witnessed some in the entertainment and sports worlds — at least provide you with the benefits of their gifts. Someone’s making money with and off of them. But that’s not even the case here. For instance, if you are going to open up businesses, and you know people are out of work, why not revive the famed Infrastructure Week and put people to work on public works projects that require masks, gloves and social distancing anyway? Wouldn’t it make sense to get roads and bridges in shape while cars are off of them and airports, subways and bus terminals disinfected and revamped before crowds of people return? Why not invoke full use of the Defense Production Act so that hospitals will have what they need going forward and more people can have jobs?
Why not put artists to work on a PR campaign — in a kind of new New Deal — to keep masks and social distancing in place for as long as it takes, probably two years, to get enough of a vaccine to make this nightmare go the way of other highly communicable diseases?
Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s “Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to His Friends” (1868), oil on canvas. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England. Pericles is the bearded man facing the sculptor.. Standing next to Pericles is his mistress, Aspasia. In the foreground are the politician Alcibiades and his lover-mentor, the philosopher Socrates.
Why didn’t the government simply put money directly into the pockets of every American but the 1 percenters, no questions asked? Here’s something one wag posted that offers some truth in humor: The federal government could’ve given every American $1 million and only spent $325 million instead of trillions. Think of what a fraction of that money would mean to people now struggling to pay bills instead of some complicated formula by which big business got lots of money and small businesses, mmm, not so much if any..
The lack of logic, common sense, vision — in other words, sheer Periclean, Alexandrian leadership, from the front — is utterly astounding and it has made us the laughingstock of the world. Forget the idea of “American exceptionalism,” the idea that God ordained this country as a new Promised Land, that we are the beacon of light and hope to a world enslaved by colonialism and tyranny, that it’s the Reagan-esque “morning” on that “shining city on the hill.” I don’t know if most of that was ever true. But it was certainly an ideal. Now, however, by insisting on “America first,” all Trump has ensured is that we won’t be first among equals. We have absented ourselves from our leadership position in the world. We have brought ourselves down. Well, at least the backward isolationists who’ve always been a strain in — and on — the middle and Southern part of the country are happy, if not necessarily healthy, wealthy and wise.
The only good news in this is that our chief rival, China — the Sparta to our Athens — is not looking so good either, having originated the virus, “helped” other countries with substandard equipment and then acted indignant when the world was insufficiently grateful. China’s also been dealing in fake news about how the virus started — with us, of course — and gloating in the suffering of other nations. You have to remember that narcissists can’t abide the truth as it often contains criticism. Remember, too, though, that this is a country now suffering from a shortage of marriageable women, because of its arrogant one-child policy in the 1980s that selected for boy babies and that it has attached harsh eminent domain strings to its New Silk Road project across Asia and the Middle East.
We may be a laughingstock on the world stage thanks to our inept handling of the virus nationwide, but the family of nations is now on to China’s game and doesn’t necessarily like what it sees. China’s like a challenger for the number one ranking in tennis who keeps messing up at the Slams.
That means there’s still a void in world leadership, still time for America to get its act together and resume our rightful place as leader of the world. Our complacency made us think that we could afford to let anyone be president, even a failed game-show businessman. We’ve seen the catastrophic consequences of this. It’s time to recognize that we need experienced leaders at the helm, that we have to reach out, not shrink inside ourselves.
Forget about “making America great again.” We see where that sloganeering got us. It’s merely time to be great again.