Circular Logic

The Circles of October

October is my favorite month. It begins with our wedding anniversary and ends with Halloween. A perfect cycle.

Actually, the entire fall season is great in my book. It is something about the weather, the crisp leading edge of winter. Fall gets your attention and makes you want to live every moment to the fullest before the darkness comes.

In the business world, Fall is the season of conferences. Here in San Francisco, the tech world is gushing over the recent Web 2.0 conference. Elsewhere you have gatherings of a less "frothy" nature -- to paraphrase Alan Greenspan. You have, for example, gatherings of teachers, quality gurus, accident investigators, collection attorneys, fluid power manufacturers, ecologists, cardiologists, and analysts, just to name a few.

The conference culture is a Brobdingnagian landscape -- something that might get some attention among those who like those kinds of words, or those who specialize in studying such vastness.

Elections in the U.S. occur in the fall, too. Here in California we've got a thick ballot bursting with initiatives. Advertising is crowding the airwaves, full of froth and fury, signifying...well, signifying that it is Fall, and the weather's getting cold, and the darkness is just around the corner so you'd better stoke the fires of moral outrage and pull up a chair.

Joyce explored this sentiment in his favorite of the Dubliner's stories: "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." As the men huddle close to the fire, drinking and complaining about the candidates for office, the only candidate on which they can all agree -- Parnell -- is the one who can never be elected.

Perhaps that is why Fall is so wonderful. It is the golden present pushing up against a sublime wall of darkness. It is a time when people congregate, as if to reassure each other that the sun will shine again once we get through the winter. It is a time of ceremony, of hotel conference rooms, of baseball stadiums, of things "political."

And to my mind, the embodiment of Fall is October, the only month starting with a circle ("O"). A beginning, and an end.

Circular. Logical.

Spartacus and Legal Absolutism

After reading Spartacus (the Lewis Grassic Gibbon version, not the more melodramatic Howard Fast version that formed the basis of the movie), and watching the Kubrik movie (thanks Netflix!), I'm mulling the troubling ideas raised by both.

Spartacus was a Roman slave, a gladiator, who led a criminal uprising against the state. A terrorist, if you will. Same story with a host of other famous rebels, including Martin Luther, George Washington, Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and many others throughout history.

Fighting the status quo doesn't sit well with a rigid legal view of the world. Perhaps this is because the status quo is usually the force that established the laws in the first place. You'd be hard pressed to find a better advocate for a status quo point of view than U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. His recent remarks at Texas A&M University seem to come straight out of the ancient Roman senate:

“I’m what you call an ‘originalist,’ one who believes the Constitution should be interpreted exactly as it was adopted.”

...and elsewhere:

The Constitution, he added, does exactly what it’s supposed to do: “It provides stability,” he said.

It isn't hard to imagine arrogant Roman senators rebuking the idea of "free slaves" in exactly the same way.

Unfortunately, absolutist views such as Scalia's have a way of distorting any issue by forcing a black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us context on every discussion. Was Spartacus a rebel slave undermining the "intelligent design" of the Gods and the laws of the Roman Senate, or was he a hero fighting for basic human equality?

History, as they say, gets written by the winners. But while Rome won in the traditional sense -- they put down the rebellion, crucifying 6,000 men (and women) along the Appian Way as a warning to other believers in a more equitable society -- they lost in the long run. In the story of Spartacus, the Romans are the bad guys. I would even guess that the Scalias of the world find themselves siding with the rebel slave (as played by Kirk Douglas) when the lights go down.

Of course, when the lights come up, these same people go back to denying equality to significant segments of our population (gays, illegal immigrants), playing "God" when it suits them (okay for the death penalty, not okay for stem cells), and spreading freedom by torturing helpless men in Iraq, Guantanamo, and God knows where else.

Not that much different than the hypocrisy of a "free" republic crushing a rebellion of slaves in the name of liberty.

Traveling with Caesar

Normally when I travel on business, as I have been doing this past week, I try to bring a book that has absolutely nothing to do with work. This time, during an extended cross-country trip, I brought along a very readable overview of the last days of the Roman Republic. Basically the 100 or so years leading up to Julius Caesar's dictatorship.

Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland, is a reminder of how fragile any system of government can be. As political intrigue and civic unrest intensified during the late Roman Republic, self-appointed guardians of the true moral values of the time never ceased to appear. The era had enough rule bending corruption to make even Tom DeLay blush, yet it also contained the seeds of idealism that survive in most governments today.

When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River on the frontier of the Italian peninsula, he set in motion events that led to the end of the Roman Republic. The times were eerily familiar:

• Widespread dissatisfaction with gridlock in the Senate
• Voter intimidation and fraud
• Outrage at judges who had the audacity to rule against what key demographics wanted
• Sex scandals among the celebrity elite
• Unreliable media reports
• A recently-completed "war on terror" to rid the Mediterranean of pirates

The book and the endless TV coverage of the Pope's funeral this week are pulling my thoughts toward Rome. Millions of travelers are converging on the Eternal City to pay their last respects. Millions more watch and wonder what will happen next. It isn't often that Rome commands the world's attention anymore, but when it does it harbors (to me, at least) an echo of something great and ominous.

Yeats identified this subtle dread in his famous "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" line. Ours appears to be a time when...

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

...and it makes me wonder if another military (or religious?) leader with a gleam in his eye isn't heading toward another Rubicon somewhere on our frontier.

The Danger of Brevity

Now that I'm a few weeks into this blogging thing, I can see that the challenge is to keep it short, and to post more frequently. That, at least, seems to be the advice coming from the "bloggerati" I browse (Rubel, Hobson, O'Keefe, Scoble, etc.). Not that I've even scratched the surface of the blog universe just yet, but I'm getting the general idea.

Cicero, the great Roman orator, knew this. "Brevity is a great charm of eloquence," he said (in Latin, of course). Then again, he was decapitated in 43 BC. His head and hands were displayed in the Roman Forum -- a physical sort of brevity, and much less hassle than displaying the entire body.

In a story attributed to Plutarch, Antony's wife Fulvia took Cicero's head and pulled out his tongue, jabbing the tongue repeatedly with her hatpin in order to take a final revenge against Cicero's power of speech.

I guess brevity doesn't always do the trick.