The Fall of the Roman Empire

Internal rot, external force. Purportedly. That's how it happened over the long run.

The widely held view of simple scholars brings our attention to the commingling of two multi-limbed factors in an historiographical bedding, the mattress of which being the sweet foundations of the democratic state, and the unsightly stains, well, pretty much ancillary to a relationship already destructive and destroyed before anyone gets to say, "what the hell color is that." Rome was largely unstable, had a fear of commitment, just opened up the door to new things and forgot entirely who it was. Barbarian collective wouldn't stop giving Rome shit all the time and it was funny at first but then it stopped being funny at all, someone was not laughing and I'll give you a hint: it was Rome. They got in the room and shut the door and all kinds of shit came out ("your mother" this, and "you eat too much Indian food" that) like real senseless, basic shit that digs in a little at a time until SPLAT something pops and a splinter comes out. Except in the case at hand the splinter was most likely a large wooden rod with a sharpened iron point and the splat was a deadly impaling turning into a KABOOM, the sound of popular representation and thong sandals and the Coliseum all exploding on the bed.

Internal rot, external force. Brings it down.

Now. In a spirit of unselfish loyalty infused with a tinge of revenge and a whole lot of hilarity, I come to you. Spirits of the blogosphere, readers of the night. By way of surprise, it was brought to my attention in post below that a strange looking man and another strange looking man are trapped in a strange resemblance. That one of these men is allegedly the author of current post is not entirely beyond me. Such an allegation begs, however, me, questions of the moral turpitude of my companion posters, or if there's just an expectation to fail, at all times, at collegiality, in the structure of this blog system that I happened to miss when I signed up. Something's wrong with these guys, basically, and it hurts me to watch. Nevertheless, maintaining said loyalty and revenge and, en tout temp et en tout lieu, an attempt at hilarity, it seems that I have to make a decision. It is, as they say in Scrabble, my turn. Any posturing here is political, as I'm already a part of the game. Response or no response, position is crucial. Ignoring the attack on this poster's person, on what some argue to be this poster's face, is an option, but I won't even pretend to think about what consent you, fair reader, might pull out of this poster's silence to the issue (He's making too much of this, you say. He's blogging about a facebook pic, you say.) The stink of internal photographic rot swills out of 37% blog like out of a bunch of dead men in the sun, togaed. Claiming the picture or, conversely, denying the picture, will in either case suggest a posting-worth to a previous poster that I'm just not all that willing to consider. Nor am I willing to render an attack on a blog that, given two posts back, and really all the ones before it, is suffering, tottering, could very well be on its way out. I will not be the external force to your internal rot, I guess is where the metaphor takes us.

A separate option exists! One that, if history teaches us anything, takes the greatest failures of our greatest civilizations and assimilates their not-clever effects into the fruitfulness of their intentions, and into the future! Let it be so! Let the photographs rain unto kingdom come, that previous post might not be an unsightly mustard-colored stain on a bed in flames, but the first dobs of a magnificent and continuous work of art! Let us take in the past with the present, the present with the past! Let our comments swoon! Let our angers enlighten! Let it all take place, and here! And there! Let us cocoon our spite and embarrassment and the tilted head of one clearly unaware of a camera or its flashing, cocoon it all in a, well, in a cocoon - a cocoon of loyalty and good will and hilarity, inhale into it a flicker of revenge, take it into our systems and breathe out something better. Let it grow!

Long live democracy!

And this, fair readers, is, among other things, what democracy looks like.

Also probably some extraterrestrials.