Perhaps it was inevitable that, in the waning months of a failing presidency, the tell-all memoirs would surface, and multiply. From the general personality sketch that is gradually emerging from the collective stench of their common reportage, it couldn’t happen to a meaner guy.
I am not particularly interested in the meanness of this president in the literal sense of that term—his lack of imagination, his adolescent mistrust of intellectualism, his swaggering braggadocio—nor am I interested in the meanness of the memoirs. Rather, I am interested in the history of such things, the fact that there is virtually a genre to which such things belong.
The classic example of such a tell-all memoir is Procopius of Caesarea’s posthumous recollection of the Byzantine emperor, Justinian, and his consort, Theodora. Entitled simply “Anecdotes,” and usually translated as “The Secret History,” Procopius’s alternately harrowing and hilarious account essentially made ‘Byzantine’ mean what it means to us today. Justinian was addicted to money; Theodora was addicted to sex. It was a marriage made in hell, and in at least one place Procopius entertains the serious possibility that the emperor was a demon rather than a man.
The book is a gold-mine for evidence of reigning social mores in the sixth century in the eastern Roman empire. It is often fascinating to learn what forms of behavior Procopius’s audience would likely have found most shocking. The variability of sexual tastes at the time is especially pronounced.
But there are historical commonalities as well, abuses of power that are condemnable in any and every age. Here is one of Procopius’s more memorable passages:
Justice was established in the market-place, and that too though she had once dwelt in the Palace, and there one could find salesrooms where, for a price, you could have not only court decisions but legislation to boot.
And the Reverendarii, as they were called, were no longer satisfied simply referring petitions of suppliants to the Emperor, and then informing magistrates in the usual way about his decision, but rather they collected from the whole world “unjust reason” [adikon logon] and thus they kept deceiving Justinian with various and sundry sophistries, he being by nature an easy prey for those adept at such verbal tricks…. And the soldiers who kept guard at the Palace would come before the public arbitrators as they sat in the Royal Stoa and force them to admit their own cases. And practically all the soldiers at that time were abandoning their posts and, according to their own sweet will, walking in ways that were forbidden and had never been open to them before, not even retaining any proper designation of its own, and the commonwealth resembled a kingdom of children at play.
[Procopius, The Secret History, XIV, 10-14]
The “game” in question was called basilinda, or basilidi,—“kings,” basically—in which children played at being kings and queens and courtiers. And the childishness of courtly behavior at Constantinople—the crude selfishness, the shallow disregard for loyalty or decorum, the utter absence of a rule of law to counter the overwhelming appetite for money—all this makes the Royal Stoa sound a lot like “Animal House” on a Friday night; the presidency as frat party.
But the game Justinian was playing was not child’s play, it was done in utter seriousness. According to Procopius, Justinian’s seemingly infinite appetite for wealth was not an addiction, as the empress’s sexual appetites seemed to have been. No, this emperor understood well that with the concentration of wealth came the concentration of power. Thus he engaged in an altogether systematic, empire-wide campaign aimed at raiding concentrations of wealth in order to gather them together in the royal coffers. He also lined the pockets of his own people with money stolen from traditional aristocratic families and governing institutions. A self-professed defender of Christian orthodoxy, he took special interest in targeting the richest “heretical” groups he could find, subsequently looting their sanctuaries before he shut them down. The game was wicked and altogether intentional.
What it ultimately amounted to was the destruction of any credible system of balanced political power, the proud Roman tradition of a senate that advised both the people and the emperor.
Reading Procopius in tandem with, say What Happened, the Scott McClellan memoir, makes for some chilling historical connections; the Bush White House as “Animal House.”
But to read these texts in tandem in Italy today, and then to listen to Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben put many of these same points with theoretical elegance and clarity is harrowing. The “state of exception,” Agamben warns us, has now become the rule. In a post-9/11 world, the rule of law has culminated in presidential decrees that proudly proclaim the death of all legal restraint. With a wave of the child-like presidential wand, entire groups of persons are defined away as status-less and right-less. Not combatants, not criminals, not even accused—but simply “suspect”—they are permitted to languish, all-but-invisible, far from the ability of a weary Congress or an increasingly politicized Supreme Court to intervene on their behalf.
This is not child’s play, however childish the justifications, and the Bushes and Berlusconis of the world are of a piece. It is not only a matter of their money and outlandish privilege, the terrifying world in which money does most of the talking. And it is not even the duplicity of the shell-game they both play: create legal immunity for yourselves even as you create its impossibility for others whom you have defined away as political non-entities.
No, ultimately it is a matter of what those with the most money and most entrenched business interests are actually saying, and with increasing shamelessness. You do not count. You do not matter. You are no one.
Procopius believed there was a special room in hell reserved for any adult who said such things out loud.
