Mr. Kurtz, he dead.
With some misgivings I have a little more to share on the subject of Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. The Hirsh Piece that appeared in Newsweek despite seeming superficially critical was clearly a puff piece. It had two quotes from the man's sister. I don't she would have given Newsweek the time of day if she hadn't thought it was all right. The reporter also let the strangely worded assertion that Wolfowitz is not actually a neo conservative go with out much comment. A master piece of vagueness, it's impossible to tell if it is a claim Wolfowitz makeson himself, others make of him, or the reporters own observation. It's beside the point. Perhaps Wolfowitz is the most thoughtful of the lot, and he sees the handwriting on the wall or Karl Rove sees it for him.
There was one passage in particular that caught my attention, a college friend relating Wolfowitz encountering Livy:
Later, at the University of Chicago grad school, a haven for right-wing thinkers, Wolfowitz was smitten with the grandeur of great empires, says Charles Fairbanks, a fellow Chicago grad and friend. Fairbanks remembers a long drive back from Chicago to New York with Wolfowitz. "He had just been reading Livy[base ']s history of Rome. He was obviously somehow in love with political greatness, I think in the same way as the young Lincoln was. He talked for hours at a time about the ancient Romans, about what kind of men they were and what they achieved."
I thought about my own reaction to reading Livy. Alone among the Roman historians, Livy tried to tell the entire history of Rome. It was deliberately cast in epic proportions, synthisized out of annals and collected traditions. Thucydides, whom i had read previously, kept a narrower focus for his similar ambition to reveal the hellenic heart. The story of Rome he was telling was about his present moment - the dawn of the new era. What laws and rulers they kept and which they discarded would tell them how they came to that moment, who they were as a people. He was aware that as he moved to the earliest periods he was relating fables more than fact. Livy shows the process by which real figures and situations are transformed slowly into archetypes. This will occur through the period of written annals as well as the indistinct periods prior. I thought of the reality that underlay Livy's history. The Republic as empire was in trouble almost from from the start. It's vast expansion from the Punic and greek wars, incorporation of Italy through the Social wars left it a divided polity with an unbalanced economic foundation. The unfulfilled Gracchi reforms were a real turning point for Romans. Following that the weight of conquest, honors, and exploitation as its own cause and reward, the gradual shift of campaign armies, into standing and private armies, led Rome inextricably to its end in bloody civil wars and fears of exparaxis . Only out of this was the imperium born.
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