That’s such a cliché, isn’t it? And like a ton of clichés, true.
Nowadays, engrossed as I am in a world history tome as well as in our current affairs, I’ve developed a panoramic view of the human experience as it interlaces with governance, starting maybe 6000 years ago.
It’s probably a human-being thing to compare what one knows as a child to what one is living in today. I once knew a woman who had come to New York from Hamtramck, Michigan. To my growing irritation, she seemed compelled to compare everything she saw in New York City to something in Hamtramck. “That’s like–” she would begin. I soon tuned out.
Yet here I am, reading news events and comparing them to historical events, especially historical figures. I’m especially intrigued, given our governmental structure and laws, about how much real damage a rampaging, stupid, crazed president and his wranglers could do to us. Looking for facts, I asked my brother if he knew of any historian who could advise me on this subject. He said, “No, because this has never happened before.”
Wow. So the mode we’re in is: we’ll have to see what happens.
It’s understandable that many historians and other experts compare Trump to Hitler. It’s more understandable why they do: their intense intellectual focus is on the Third Reich, on tyrannies and autocrats. They, along with Russian emigre intellectuals like Garry Kasparov, are doomy-and-gloomy. (I don’t want to suggest that Hitler [and Stalin, let us not leave him out of this] is the experts’ Hamtramck, but I just wrote that and do not feel like deleting it.)
But Trump really isn’t like Hitler for many reasons I’m not going to enumerate. Well, I’ll mention one: competence.
Now is there anyone in American history who might compare to Trump? I’m pretty much at the stage of yelling, “Absolutely not!!”
Then a lightbulb went off, somewhere. Maybe in my head, maybe nearby my head. And what it illuminated was…
Caligula!
Oh yeah! And I was so excited. And nerd that I am, I immediately rushed into what we’re now calling research: Wikipedia.
Whenever Jimmy Wales asks me to contribute to Wikipedia, I do. I use it a lot and feel I should put my money (it’s not much) where my fingers go. Since I understand how Wikipedia works, I do check anything that seems shaky with other sources but usually I feel OK with Wikipedia.
So I am crushed! Caligula (his nickname, given to him when he was a boy: “little boots”) was nothing like his bizarre appearances in I, Claudius, about which Wikipedia coughs up this description of Caligula: ” the depraved rule of the lunatic emperor Caligula…”
But, as you too will see if you click on that link up there, Caligula was not depraved, was not a lunatic. Indeed, the erotic and horrible tale of Caligula was written many years after he died (he was assassinated, but so were so many people in the paranoid culture of Ancient Rome, it could almost be termed death by natural causes).
Yes, yes, he did kill people but everyone else was doing it to save their skins; it was a part of the culture, like, maybe Minecraft or something.
In this context, the worst thing one could say about Caligula is that he was…competent! He built bridges and aquaducts and circuses to improve the lot of his people. When he suggested making his favorite horse a senator or something, he was probably exhibiting a sarcastic sense of humor.
So never mind Caligula. I’ll look for someone else.