“Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch
Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space.”
(Antony and Cleopatra, act 1, sc. 1)
Comment. When assessing empires it pays to compare the Roman with the American Empire. The Roman Empire subdued other nations, in particular Greece. But the Romans had almost a reverential respect for Greece and Greek Culture. As Horace said, “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio.” That is, “Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium.” Greek culture was literally permeating Roman life. To the point that Juvenal in his sixth satire complains that Roman girls speak Greek instead of Latin when making love.
The American Empire’s motto is “Search and Destroy” (well known name for one of the disgusting operations, in Vietnam and in many other places).
Furthermore, American imperialism is imbued to the bone with machismo of the grosser kind – the kind leading to soldiers urinating over the corpses of the slain so-called enemy combatants, who with minimal armament give their life in defense of their independence.
Furthermore….. Here is a transcript of one of the impromptu of the late George Carlin, from years ago, indirectly supporting the point…
“There’s a reason that education sucks, and it’s the same reason it will never ever ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it. Be happy with what you’ve got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the big, wealthy, business interests that control all things and make the big decisions.
Forget the politicians, they’re irrelevant.
Politicians are put there to give you that idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.
They’ve got you by the balls.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking.
They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
They don’t want that, you know what they want?
They want obedient workers, obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
And now they’re coming for your social security money.
They want your fucking retirement money; they want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.
And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later because they own this fucking place.
It’s a big club and you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the Big Club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you in the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to believe, what to think and what to buy.
The table is tilted folks, the game is rigged.
Nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard working people, white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about…give a fuck about you! They don’t care about you at all, at all, at all.
And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.
That’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans are and will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white, and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday.
Because the owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
Now think about what he said years ago and how much has come true….. social security? Pensions? Attacks on Education? Media Control?
And here is the original video,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWsM8-Ve2yA&feature=play…
Suggestion for use. She insists that you to stay even if you have good reasons to leave, at least temporarily, for a business trip, or an important meeting etc. …and you relent.
In the poem. Antony reassures Cleopatra that he has little to do with Rome and everything with Egypt.