Historical Analogies

I have just finished the gargantuan tome, Roma by Steven Saylor, which I blogged about when I first started reading a little over a week ago.  At the very end of the book, Saylor discusses the sources he used to write the novel and reminds his readers that so many of the larger issues from the book are historical fact, even if many of the details are fiction.

For example, one of the overriding elements in Rome’s history is the centuries long struggle between the patricians (the wealthy, old families with money and power) and the plebians (everyone else).  Over time, plebians gained substantially more political clout than they had in the early days of the Roman Kingdom (rougly 753 BC to the 400s BC), but the patricians remained the true stakeholders.

One of the ways in which patricians maintained the illusion of power was by reminding the populace that the gods had favored the Romans for centuries, had allowed her to become the greatest power in the world.  If the patricians yielded too much power to the plebians, power that had not been tested or approved of by the gods, who is to say how the gods would react.  Perhaps they would approve, but more likely they would prefer to see things stay the same.

I think we can all agree that this was an ingenius and shifty way of allowing the already rich and powerful to maintain their stature.  As long as the plebians feared angering the gods and thereby ruining Rome, the patricians could abstractly make such a claim.

I thought of this as I was reading Yglesias’s blog on a completely unrelated topic: the confirmation of Eric Holder as Obama’s Attorney General.  If you hadn’t heard, James Comey, a deputy AG under Bush, has endorsed Holder’s appointment and said he should be forgiven for any role he played in the pardon of Marc Rich (an issue that Senate Republicans have decided is going to be the center their inane opposition to Holder’s confirmation).

Replacement Rumors

Via the Huffington Post, ABC News is reporting that David Paterson, the Governor of New York, has spoken to Caroline Kennedy about potentially replacing Hillary Clinton in the Senate.

What an intriguing idea.  For the Kennedy legacy aspect, I like it.  Caroline Kennedy is a pretty accomplished lawyer and scholar in her own right, and certainly earned herself a kickback of some sort for her timely and emotional endorsement of Obama during the primaries.  Her NYT op-ed was spot on, at moment that the Obama campaign really needed the Kennedy mystique on board.

I suppose some people will also point out that she’s a woman (just like Hillary!) and that should count for something.  Eh.

I’m excited to see where this goes.

Coincidence is a Funny Thing

As a result of reading Coates tonight I happened upon a blog called Postbourgie, and from there I found myself reading this 2004 New Yorker piece about Barack Obama, the candidate for the United States Senate for Illinois.  This was before the Democratic National Convention vaulted him to widespread fame.

It’s illuminating.  Read it if you can.  But what is coincidental is author William Finnegan’s discussion of Obama’s chats with supporters in Hyde Park:

Every few minutes, our conversation was interrupted by passersby congratulating Obama on his primary victory. The people who stopped to shake his hand were black and white, old and young, professors and car mechanics. Some Obama obviously knew. Others seemed to be strangers. He was affable with everyone, smiling warmly, but in exchanges that lasted more than a few seconds it was possible to see him slipping subtly into the idiom of his interlocutor—the blushing, polysyllabic grad student, the hefty black church-pillar lady, the hip-hop autoshop guy. Black activists sometimes say that African-American kids need to become “bi-dialectic”—to speak both black English and standard English—to succeed. Obama, the biracial kid from Hawaii, speaks a full range of American vernaculars.

Bold mine.  How odd that I had just written about that.  But the article goes on to essentially describe Obama’s “drink the kool aid” appeal, which was evident in 2004 and is now kind of a national joke after the presidential election.

We hear again and again that folks who met Obama during his rise to fame were pretty attuned to the idea that he would hit it big one day.  That he was going somewhere.  And yet he hit some rough patches (notably his failed attempt in 2000 to gain entry into the DNC and his loss in the congressional race).  Obviously his charisma and his appeal had particular resonance in this particular age, amidst the horrors of the Bush years.  Life must be a mixture of fate and coincidence.