same as it ever was
Sitting on a fire escape in the Bronx, four stories above the surface of the planet, in the two hundred thirtieth year of the republic, waiting for rain. My street is quiet, but in the distance, firecrackers: wars and rumors of wars, celebrations and mockeries of celebrations. Aren't we supposed to be protesting something?
In the six hundred twenty-first year of the Republic, the fifty-third year of the Empire, Publius Aelius Traianus Hadrianus, third of the five good emperors, built a wall to separate the British frontier of Rome from my Scottish and Irish ancestors. Hadrian's Wall was eighty miles long and up to ten feet high, and it was built in ten years by the soldiers of Legio Hispana of York, Legio Valeria Victrix of Chester, and Legio Augusta of Caerleon. This is a great feat of engineering, and may be seen as evidence of Roman power – but it's also evidence of Roman fear. What terror leads to the construction of an eighty-mile wall in ten years? What does this terror look like? What accent does it carry in its mouth? Does it carry torches, spears, swords, truncheons, guns? Does it fly planes?
Hadrian didn't live long enough to comprehend the Roman precursor to the second law of thermodynamics: even the best walls crumble. Rome would impose its way of life upon every last yard of the known world, would come to rely on mercenary armies to fight its wars, and would eventually break apart, piece by piece, region by region, until the fifteenth century and the coming of the Ottoman Turks. In a few decades, Columbus would damn the people of Hispanola to smallpox and slavery, and the half of the world the Romans could never have imagined would take on Christian names. And you know the rest – Jamestown, the Iroquios, the Revolution, the fall of the South, panics and riots, Jim Crow, the bomb, television, civil rights, wars of ideology, the middle class, the internet, signals and transmissions, the planes. A history of mobs as told by observers, or terror as told by the terrified.
But the Bronx goes on. This street goes on, utterly indifferent to Hadrian or history or whatever tribulation hangs on the horizon for our United States. My street goes on. Right now, four stories below me, a girl in a floral dress teases her dog. The dog yelps, she shrieks. The dog is small and black, and she is small and black, and together they're luminous and large. This could be a scene from the villages of Germania, or the outposts of Constantinople, or the tenements of the Bowery, or the ghettoes of Selma. Blessings on girls and their dogs. May our gods learn from their example. May they never visit us and discover what terror and tyranny we make. May they never raise their hands to us and say, enough.