Wednesday, May 24, 2017

City of God is a Response to MRGA

Augustine: So, Chris, I saw this hat…




Chris: Indeed… they’re all over the place, 39% of Americans like him.
Augustine: Well, it reminded me of this hat.


Chris: Well, that’s a novelty hat.
Augustine: No it isn’t. It is the genesis of my writing City of God.
Chris: Really?
Augustine: Yeah, everyone looked at the sacking of Rome and started shouting Make Rome Great Again! MRGA! MRGA! MRGA! 
Everyone blamed the Christian faith for Rome’s ills. They thought Rome was great before it adopted Christianity. 
I simply took out my literary brass knuckles and boxed that idea back into a corner. I reminded them the Roman “gods” were in fact foreign Trojan “gods”, that the wars between the Alban and Roman armies were far from great, that many of Rome’s kings met small ends, from Romulus on, that the Punic wars would make you puke, that her civil wars were all rather uncivil, that there was, in short, no time when Rome was great and pure and right over against the moment we were living in—no “again” to go back to.
Chris: Right… and… imagine if someone wrote a new City of God! They could point out that our foundation was on the backs and bodies of Indians and Slaves, the Founding Fathers were o’ so human, the war of 1812 was a defeat, the Civil War pitted brother against brother and the North did not see itself as fighting a war to end slavery until the latter part of the war, Reconstruction was stillborn, the Gilded Age…
Augustine: I get your point. But, I think someone has already written that book, though not aimed particularly at MAGA.


Chris: Oh, right...

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