The Sack of Rome
Saturday, February 14, 2009 11:03 AM
In the year 410 of the Christian Era, the barbarian Goths, led by the one-time Roman general Alaric, looted the Eternal City. On Friday the 13th of February, 2009, the Progressive Caucus of the Congress of the United States, riding under the banner of a one-time professor of Constitutional Law, looted the United States Treasury. Rome survived the Sack of 410, and the United States will survive the Sack 0f 2009, but for me, and hopefully for you, it necessary to understand what happened, and what must be done.
Yesterday, while the shrieks of the looters echoed through the Senate Chamber, I was filled with rage. I wrote a blogpost about it, which I decided not to publish. Then I went out with a friend, saw a moving, sentimental stage play about love (today is Valentine's Day, remember?) and the rage lifted from my soul. I realized that it was not enough to weep, wail, and gnash my teeth. What I needed to do was understand what happened in the light of history. It was not enough to go back to Jimmy Carter, to the New Deal, to the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers. I had to go back all the way to the year 410 CE. Barbarians are barbarians, and Rome is Rome. Now it all makes sense.
In 410 AD, the barbarians had no website, but the barbarians of 2009 do. You can explore it here. They lay it all out for you. There is no need for conspiracy theories or innuendoes about Marxist infiltration spoken in hushed tones to avoid Republican embarrassment. They even provide a PDF file giving the details of their agenda. They promise the moon (the PDF is called the "Progressive Promise") and their promise is as much of a promise as the Soviet-ruled German Democratic Republic ("East Germany") was German, or democratic, or a republic. For you folks in Rio Linda, that means don't believe a word that "progressives" write or say: they are lying.
Alaric I, King of the Goths, was a Christian, and for that reason when his men looted Rome in August of 410, there was not a lot of raping or murdering. Just looting and pillaging. Not $787 billion dollars worth, to be sure, but lots of looting. What they did was actually quite interesting. The first Emperor of Rome had been Augustus, whose ashes had been held in a sacred mausoleum on the Field of Mars. The ashes of a later Emperor, Hadrian, had been held in another mausoleum. Hadrian had built a wall in Great Britain, much of which is still there, to keep out the barbarians. Alaric's men looted these mausoleums and scattered the imperial ashes.
It was a calculated spiritual attack on the Roman Empire. Alaric did not loot the ashes of the emperors because he was a Christian, but because he was a barbarian. The Romans in later years made barbarians generals, as they were ineligible to become emperors. Alaric has spent decades in Roman service. If he couldn't be an emperor, than to hell with emperors.
On Friday the 13th, 2009, the barbarians of the Progressive Caucus attempted to destroy something that was even more precious to Americans than emperors were to Romans, something so precious that many around the world, not only Americans, worship it as a god. I am referring to the Almighty Dollar. The greenback. The soundest paper currency in the history of the world, or at least it once was. On the back side of the dollar, where George Washington's likeness is shown in the front, is the inscription,"In God We Trust." To its left is the Great Seal, with a pyramid, the symbol of long-term stability, and the Eye of God, under which is printed, novus ordo seclorum, the New Order of the Ages.
If "progressives" can't make money by producing goods and services, but can only loot it, then to hell with money.
Has the Progressive Caucus destroyed the greenback? They tried. But the battle has only begun: as I wrote, the Mother of All Battles. Either the barbarians won, or they have stirred up a hornet's nest, as Japan did with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. My money, such as it is now worth, is on the hornet's nest.