The state of the Empire and the art of deflection

During the recent State of the Union address, a reality-TV star-cum-president stood in the speaker’s podium and announced this country will never be “socialist.” He was met with thunderous applause.

On the walls of the chamber, flanking him on either side, framing the seat of representative power, were symbolic manifestations of a violent historical-political alternative to socialism. These are fasces — a bundle of rods wrapped around a large ax. “Fascist” — the political identifier which takes its name from the fasces — is too loaded a term to unpack here. I will limit myself to a discussion of the fasces themselves, considering their symbological use in the Capitol building predates historical fascism by over a century.

The fasces, like a great deal of our country’s infrastructural and governmental inspirations, originated with the Roman empire.

The praetorian guardsmen who accompanied Roman senators through public spaces would carry physical fasces as symbols of the power of the state, and the strength which comes from civic unity. The mythological nature of the symbol speaks for itself — if the senator felt threatened by the crowds, the guards could shed the ax of its communal rods. Naked violence would reinforce a primordial meaning of the fasces: might makes right.

In a sense, there is no symbol more fit to frame a flag that used to only have 13 white stars alongside its blue field, in a building which consciously echoes Roman architecture, in a country whose founders purposefully incorporated the ghosts of the first Rome into their young government.

Ask yourself, fellow plebian, because the president and the Congress will not and never will: What makes an empire “evil,” why might it deflect attention from its Roman-classical baggage, and how might we make it “good?”

LIAM MCMAHON

Prairie Grove