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...
