Nam Gloriam

Officers and common solders gloried in single combat, taking heads and despoiling their enemies.--For the Glory of Rome, caption snippet, Ross Cowan

The Walking Dead reminds us how easy we actually have it in our modern cities: filtrated water, processed food increasingly depleted into mono-staples like corn, potatoes, but nonetheless plentiful, relative ease of travel where we kill ourselves off in macro-evolutionary fashion through vehicular homicide, but most progressives are astute enough not to call for bans on automobiles, only keeping an eye out for regulating Uber. Within the substructure of its serial wanderers punctuated by periodic post-apocalyptic community integration, Britannia's David Morrissey gives a decent approximation of a mendacious and intense tyrant as the governor, whose climatic moment culminated in the termination of Michael Rooker's character arc. He brings the same set of skills to Aulus Plautius under Claudian rule of the Empire, which, if we wish to quibble with Amazon, relies a little too much on the modern style of situation comedy for its interludes of domestic levity. In Ben Hur, Roman rule juxtaposed against the zealousness of faith is actually a code for the rise of the United States as it was viewed under Eisenhower: federated civilian supremacy imposing egalitarianism on all its subjects at the point of a bayonet-- the bayonet being the mightiest legion in the world. The English, being the irritable Victorians that they are, chime in with not so fast. The legionnaires could be out-maneuvered through the indigenous manipulation of the Druids. The writers take this manifest future superiority of Anglican globalism too seriously. The Roman Empire, under Augustan lineage and beyond, wasn't the first super power of its kind out of happenstance. When Morrissey bellows to his troops beset with the rainy weather of the British Isles, "We are Roman!" It is this to which civilization owns its homage, stirring the fervor in my own Roman blood, what articulated itself when I struggled with the door while none of the students came to my aid, and a naive little spastic set eyes on a Tassoni in army fatigues and heavy black boots, Sylvester Stalllone gloves on his hands, me and my doomed, precocious, invalid heart. I undoubtedly fell for the man instantly, merely to be otherwise signed and sealed and delivered when he wrapped his arms around me in the dormitory hallway. Though reconnected to me due to an overenthusiastic care giver, this same man, perhaps wisely, did not respond to my tentative thank you on Messenger, and do those wounds of my first true desire still have that much of a hold, more properly suffered in silence? If it matters that much, remove his account? You may laugh, and deride it. Intelligent the dowager may be, adept, mature for 56, may be adjudicated on the merits of whatsoever was wrong with being his friend? He was innocent of anything but living his life choice in 2002 when I tracked him down; he is innocent now, while I ride this metaphysical plane of passionate restoration, for the glory that was Rome. We are beholden to it in a fundamental diachronic tie much more so than Xi's presidency can be transliterated back to the formation of the Middle Kingdom, or the implied contract between the US and its lone true satellite in the East, modern Israel. This is why I had to reluctantly vacillate about removal of Hallel from my feed. I do not believe in the legitimacy of Resolution 181, and wrestle the Zionist imperative which authenticates Israel as a divine right.
What is glory in the modern world? How do we take its measure? Would my life had been different had love been reciprocated, truly?

The Destruction of Pompe, Interdicted Sclerosis

"We thought we could change the world."-- Mario Vargas Llosa, post goat mortem

During the 2016 primary season, I tried to build a case, perhaps somewhat unsuccessfully, that Trump's hostility toward Serge Kovaleski, driven by his media antagonism, if we tally the number of fake news tweets into his presidency, did the collective social conscience a favor. That the president then flipped a coin in his first address to Congress to usher in Megan Crowley as a time honored, privileged, diminutive token doesn't contravene his credibility so much as expose a divided American psyche, and I'd say the ratio is at least 1 in 50 on the conservative side. For every extraordinarily privileged persons like Megan, or fully matriculated individuals like Governor Abbott, there are then ten marginalized wheelchair residents in a public housing facility with zoophytic lives, attributable to how badly Medicaid Waiver systems are administered. Though budget allocation is a factor, the number of dollars spent on regulating the poor to death isn't the only problem. Socialized medicine is a regulatory nightmare that hasn't changed in the 35 years in which I began making my living at it, unless the change is that of even more stricture through centralization, and this represents the failure of inclusion since Helen Keller became the apostle of being in the world despite the severity of her deprivation. My life was in jeopardy from 10/17 through 3/18 only to be placed in jeopardy once back in the system by a provider's attendants being a no show, which goes to the heart of why I took myself off of waiver services in 07. At this level of poverty in the Philadelphia region, the digital economy has a subzero impact. Case managers are like Bill Murray repeating Groundhog's Day with no outlet to wake up, and it represents Erik's failure beyond his current end of life mental decline. He forced this section 202 housing contractor to "renovate" the building, putting every single resident in here through unimaginable hell for well over a year, only to have the city's housing authority strike back by prohibiting disabled tenant access to senior living facilities unless they meet the age requirement, and ADAPT's defiance against medical model authority has also cratered in IL, since they now have nursing coordinators, and if we have a class of 30 autistic students blowing bubbles in a park, this is featured in a local news segment like a Gnostic gospel for savants, taking victories in the acknowledgement of our still precious limitations. If you'd like an example of how my pessimism could be assuaged, the Amazon series Britannia, though it vibes like Masterpiece theatre on steroids, presents its maimed with a live and let live aspect. There are no phalanx of visiting nurses doing absolutely nothing, certainly not with effective treatments, simply adaptation and aid by and whom is at hand. In the life of Emperor Claudius, which coincides briefly with the harsh rabbinical life of Jesus, there were no overzealous fathers who created found wealth for 24 hour nursing care, no persistent vegetative states used for dramatic purposes to portend malignancy. You were butchered, or tortured, wounded, survived or not. This is more beneficial for bipedal primates than blood thinners allowing a 94 year old to catapult into thinking her care givers and relatives are demons boring holes in her skull. If some of you would like me to cease hating the devoid lives of so many invalids I've lived through in this bariatric driven Commonwealth, stop elevating Megan for her stoic coping, and for those of developmental birth who can, let us hope too, like the slim minority of paraplegics and amputees in the mainstream, that we can earn establishment prominence. That's real inclusion, not government contracts with religious organizations and state civil servant intake that can't tall it's asshole from its dung heap.