The Truth Won’t Set You Free Department
I follow Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum to not read books less than a year old for two reasons, and the second is not laziness. Caligula For President proved (in both senses) the second reason, because reading this book now convulses and repulses in a way it could not have done if read when originally published, during the twilight years of the last Bush presidency. This unclassifiable book might then have been only an enchanting exercise in genius, a staggering indictment of the American Dream turned Nightmare under the brute fist of Cheney and company. The cloud of hope might have made my reaction a mere chuckle, no more. To read this book now, however … what can I say? We already have grown nostalgic for Bush fils, an eventuality that I would have believed impossible a few dozen moons ago. But I found myself going further, furtively wishing that the protagonist of Cintra Wilson’s magnum opus, the Roman emperor Caligula himself, could somehow become president, as she outlines in this funny, depressing, brilliant, rollicking, educational satire.
Do not say, “Personally, I am as worthless as a bolt, but if I stop being an isolated bolt and start gathering with my equally undistinguished and bolt like neighbors, we are, collectively, a big sack of bolts that can hit things harder.”
You are not a bolt. You are a wonderful special individual with talents and hopes and dreams of great fortune, fame and luxury. You are going to sing on television and become rich beyond your wildest dreams just by writing upbeat affirmations on Post-its and sticking them on your bathroom mirror.
Caligula explains just how easy it is to manipulate and control us dolts … er, bolts
Cintra Wilson begins her book with an excellent mission statement of the Caligula©®™∞ brand which doesn’t even use the word “excellence”. (How many major corporations can make that claim?) It is a tour de force of corporate business speak from the dawn of the era that replaced “writing” with “content”. Caligula hasn’t even started his introduction and he already has grabbed us by the short and curlies, because he too knows that the powerful can just do that. Of course, Caligula is a handsome devil with omnivorous appetites, but he deigns to talk to us boring nonentities to explain just how a godlike tyrant is the perfect candidate to occupy the U.S. White House. Thus the subtitle of Wilson’s book: Better American Living Through Tyranny.
As emperor, you can be paranoid, corrupt, sadistic, drunk and incompetent, as long as you have a lot of very rich friends, a ridiculously aggressive approach to spin control and a highly fortified and corruptible private army.
Caligula stands strong for freedom … or something
Reading this work a decade after Caligula channeled it through Cintra Wilson allows us to perceive the amazing psychic prophetic power revealed within its pages. Its prophecy is not like that famous novel about the gigantic steam ship Titan (although the subtitle of The Wreck of the Titan, or Futility, might be apropos here). Rather its prescience is like that found in John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, where the future is perfectly revealed, only the earlier recognition and interpretation is distorted by viewing it through the imperfect lens of the past. What was dimly limned in the mirror Ms. Wilson held up to our decrepit body politic is now clearly seen in the present, where the ashes left behind by our incinerated hopes and dreams serve only to clog further our Cloaca Maxima which already cannot get rid of the fatberg of our corrupt septic excellence.
Here, for example, we see the effect of the DOJ’s OLC opinion stating the president cannot be prosecuted (the opinion itself another gift of the Bush presidency) in Caligula’s description of the uses of the Unitary Executive Theory:
If you wanna be a princeps legibus solutus–a princeps not bound by the laws–it helps if everyone else around you with any kind of executive power gets really confused by some overt proclamation of the legality of what you’re doing and therefore does nothing but stand around haplessly with their thumbs up their eunuchs.
Caligula explains John Yoo’s Unitary Executive Theory and its effects
Or this example of our now accepted disregard for the post-born child:
Due to the dictates of your capitalist economy and the corrupt mechanisms now set in the stone tables of your national laws, you are already helping me kill small children on a daily basis.
More hyperbole become prophecy
Or even outdoing Nostradamus with this entirely topical vision of remaking military uniforms to hearken back to the glory days of World War II:
I plan to increase voluntary enlistment numbers in the U.S. military by bringing back the inarguable sadomasochistic flair of Nazi tailoring.
Caligula — like you — loves a man in a uniform
Driving home listening to the East Village Opera Company’s rendition of “Un Bel Di” I was struck by the one missing note in Cintra Wilson’s prophetic book. ‘Twas not the leering dominance of the InterWebs and AppSpaceBook that she failed to limn, nor the continued balkanization of ideology and interest. What her Caligula did not see as clearly as we can a decade after, is just how much self-loathing we Americans turn out to have, just how much we veritably hate, hate, hate the very idea and ideals of democracy itself. Though Caligula riffs on the failure of slave revolts and how the powerful always win again, he had no concept in this 2008 book of how we despise even the simplest premises of the government we learned of in grammar school (no matter how divorced those lessons were from the reality, a point that Caligula For President pounds into our thick though small skulls quite effectively).
Will Caligula detain me in prison indefinitely until I am finally given pellets of angel dust and led blindfolded into RFK Stadium to fight hyenas wearing nothing but a loincloth made of ham?
You don’t need to worry about that right now.
Concentrate on this: My techniques, while criminally insane, cut through a massive amount of bureaucratic red tape.
Caligula promises to bring Reality TV into the 1st Century
Indeed, I had only two complaints — both minor — about this work. First, I wish that Caligula — sorry, I mean Cintra Wilson — had spent just a little time talking about the dictator Sulla, and I wish that Ms. Wilson (or her publishers) had used the Oxford comma.
I told you they were minor complaints.
I found this book among my novels, pulled it down and put it on the “to read and decide whether to keep” pile, and eventually started to read it. It is not a novel — there’s far too much actual history in it, both of the Roman Empire and of the Bush père presidency. But it isn’t history either, since the Caligula we meet here is based on the most scurrilous attacks by the foremost character assassins among the ancients, if this golden boy emperor might be heard on Howard Stern. We might call it political science, though attacks against Bush 41 for presidential overreach have grown dated and stale like a country medley on the Lawrence Welk Show. Thus when Ms. Wilson — I mean Caligula — points out the nefarious incestuous relationships between Cheney and the moguls who manipulated California’s energy market while creating the energy policy that was a blueprint for invading Iraq, and concludes by reminding us all that Cheney and Karl Rove distracted everyone from the news about this when it broke by blaming Gray Davis, who was recalled and replaced with The Terminator, we only think it quaint. Quaint and sad, particularly Caligula’s last words on the subject:
Nobody thinks about this major crime committed against the people of California anymore, because so many other crimes have been committed since then that nobody really remembers that one anymore.
Caligula said this eleven years ago. SAD! No, seriously, it’s quite sad.
So though it makes me sad, I will be keeping this book. I will keep it in the “Other” section of my library, alongside such luminous works as The Ship of Fools by Brant, Le Pétomane, and The Night Climbers of Cambridge. Also on those shelves is the spiritual ancestor (assuming there is any spirit left in this old world) of this book, the classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. An appropriate neighbor, since Caligula For President made me understand for the first time why Hunter S. pulled a Seneca the Younger and bought his own farm.
Realpolitik is not for the twee
True dat
I wish I could say this book lifts the spirit as it destroys illusions through the magic power of its fantastic style, just as the works of that other Thompson, Jim, had their lack of morals somewhat obviated by the damn fine writing. But I cannot. Truth be told, in neither case can the truly wonderful style and powerful writing belie the underlying depression, despair, and eternal pit revealed in the writer’s words. And our current universe has fallen into an even deeper black hole than the center of Jim Thompson’s dark vision. Asking “Is there any hope?” only makes sense in a world where words and ideas have meaning, and to ask “Is there even any meaning?” is to recognize that the game is fixed, is over, and we lost every bet that was made for us before we were even born.
When your government stops bothering to lie to you, it seems like they just don’t care. It’s like letting the White House lawn turn brown and walking out to press conferences with a bottle of Seagram’s gin ‘n’ juice, wearing a polar fleece housecoat streaked with Egg Beaters and a shower cap and screaming unintelligible obscenities into the microphone. It gives You People the impression that your dictator isn’t even trying.
But Caligula cares, he really does. He just doesn’t care about You People.
Our only hope at this dark juncture may be the collapse of everything, though if that’s hope then we’re in deep trouble. What can be done? Nothing can be done. Not the nothing of nihilists secretly hoping they look cool, but true nothing. Caligula is promising Hopelessness, and “the good news is, you’re at least halfway there.” And this is why I highly recommend this book.
Oh, oh, look out … a march. On the streets! With big banners! Saying, STOP, BAD GOVERNMENT! STOP DOING THAT BAD, BAD THING!
Hold me, Mother! We must, as a governing body, stop doing immoral things immediately, or bisexual college girls with nose rings might wave colorful signs at us!
Caligula is simply terrified of your futile demonstrations
I very rarely recommend books — personal taste being so, well, personal and everything, and besides I have to admit that what I have isn’t exactly taste. But I am recommending this one strongly in spite of the fact that a) 97% of you will not like it. (It’s got a parental advisory sticker cowering in the corner of the room, sobbing quietly to itself.) And b) 97% of the remaining 3% will merely find that it confirms and reinforces your already extant despair. But! It is my hope — “Not dead, yet!” — that the remaining 0.09% may discover some path out of our Slough of Despond which does not lead directly to Hell, and I pray you please tell me where and whither that path lies.
I will simply try to ignore the fact that I do not have anywhere near enough friends — neither online nor in real life — to make 0.09% of that number anything other than a very close approximation of Zero.
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