I am not invested in the cultural wars of today but I do worry about our democracy. I do worry about governments that silence opposition, threaten media, cover more and more of their functions with unnecessary secrecy, eliminate checks and balances, stuff courts with their own hacks and then refuse to abide by court decisions anyway, arrest people without warrant or due process. There is no cause holy enough to justify this.
I was thinking about this recently as I reread my translation of Jacek Bocheński’s Roman Trilogy. It is a superb work of literature–structure, style, character, voice; and I can only hope my translation does it at least a little justice; but it is also a profound work of political insight. It portrays how by a combination of underhanded means, Caesar overthrew the Roman Republic with the permission of the large part of the Roman elites; and how state terror followed almost immediately. Followed and stayed: the Republican system, once lost, did not return for another two thousand years.
The author, of course, was one of the leading figures of Polish opposition in the 1970s and 80s and knew exactly what he was writing about. His Roman Trilogy–banned by the communists for exactly this reason–distilled what people around us were feeling and thinking during the Solidarity days.
I was thinking about this when I designed this ad. It had a nice run. I’ll post it here just so that you know why I am keeping Tiberius Caesar on sale at $0.99: