Damnatio Memoriae
A weekend of dragons, usurpers, and gladiators
America harkened back to the times of emperors and gladiators this weekend, in an insane bout of news.
The first is that we minted a trillionaire. On Friday, Elon Musk’s rocket company went public, a bell rang on the Nasdaq, and by the closing figure one man was worth more than a trillion dollars. He is now richer than the next several billionaires combined, and his personal hoard is larger than the annual output of Sweden. This had never happened before in recorded history. It happened on a Friday, between lunch and the evening news.
The second is that we took a man’s name off a building. Last December, a board of trustees stocked with the president’s allies voted to rename the Kennedy Center after him, so that the nation’s memorial to a murdered president, now also advertised a living one. A federal judge ruled that this was not theirs to do. So on Friday night a crew arrived, raised scaffolding against the marble, draped the scaffolding in tarp so no one could watch, and in the dark hours unscrewed the letters one at a time. A few thousand gathered in the night, while tens of thousands more watched a livestream. Not of the removal, which was hidden. Of the scaffolding.
The third is that tomorrow, for his eightieth birthday, the president is hosting a cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House. A temporary arena has gone up on the grass. Two men will fight for a championship belt while four thousand guests watch from the lawn where presidents have held state dinners and Easter egg rolls. The weigh-ins were at the Lincoln Memorial, where fighters were drunk and throwing up. George R. R. Martin couldn't have wrote this scene better.
The Romans had words for two of these.
The unnaming is called damnatio memoriae, the condemnation of memory. When an emperor disgraced himself past saving, the Senate could vote him out of the historical record, and stonemasons would go up to the arches and the triumphal columns and chisel his name out of the stone, leaving a clean blank where a god had been. It was not a riot. It was a procedure. It was proposed, it was voted, and then a man with a chisel made a Tuesday of it. History, indeed, repeats itself.
The birthday is called panem et circenses. Bread and circuses. The reliable old instinct that a population can be kept content with food and a show, and that there is no show more dependable than two men hurting each other in front of a crowd. The Romans staged theirs in a stadium. We are staging ours in the president’s yard. The bread is beer. And, unlike the Roman spectators of the time, Trump's attendees will have to pay for their fill.
For the trillionaire they had no word, because even Rome would have found it indecent for one man to privately hold more wealth than several of its provinces. That part is ours alone. How neat.
We will be told that the first fact has buried the other two. That the money has already won, that the courts are scenery, that the chisel is sentimental and the man with more money than Sweden is the only thing that is real. Maybe.
But notice what people actually did. Nobody stayed up until three in the morning to watch a man become a trillionaire. That took a single second and a bell. They stayed up, in the dark, refreshing a livestream of an empty tarp, to watch the slow and frequently useless machinery of a republic do the one boring thing it had been ordered to do, which was take the name of the usurper of the wall.
That is the whole country in one weekend. A man who cannot be touched, one crowd stayed awake all night to watch a name come down anyway, while another fiddles with beer and circuses to celebrate him. Let them eat cake.