by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/i><\/p>\n
Trimalchio\u2019s Bowl<\/strong><\/p>\n Sometime during the reign of the emperor Nero, the novelist and imperial confidant Petronius wrote a novel about life among the Roman\u00a0nouveau riche<\/em>in the Bay of Naples. The surviving centerpiece of the now mostly lost novel is an extended banquet scene at the zillionaire freedman Trimalchio\u2019s house, where money, entertainment, and self-indulgence meet. Sunday\u2019s Super Bowl\u2019s festivities were something like Trimalchio\u2019s dinner \u2014 which I urge you all sometime to read. It is a brilliant novel and a tragedy that most of it is lost.<\/p>\n Christina Aguilera did not quite sing all the national anthem. That might be considered shocking, given that Superbowl Sunday has become America\u2019s signature cultural event. But the lapse was hardly surprising in today\u2019s era where millions no longer lead off their school mornings, assemblies, and meetings with the pledge of allegiance or the singing of the \u201cStar Spangled Banner.\u201d The better question in these times is how in the world did Ms. Aguilera get most of her lines right?<\/p>\n There have been wretched halftime shows, I know, given the impossibility of staging such outdoor performances. But I don\u2019t recall anything quite like the talentless, self-congratulatory shouting of a group called \u201cBlack Eyed Peas.\u201d Take away the smoke, the fireworks, the light shows, the Star Wars costumes, the North Korean-like supporting dancers, the Leni Riefenstahl sets, and what was left was some off-key yelling and frenetic prancing \u2014 half Road Warrior, half high-school bleacher noise \u2014 nothing remotely akin to music, but eerily similar to the sort of shrill musical interruptions that characterize Trimalchio\u2019s feast.<\/p>\n Some strange man, I think, was lowered in on a rope, and I think we were supposed to be delighted about his appearance. But he muttered almost nothing, and Elvis decades ago had crafted a far more impressive sequined outfit. The fact that Barack Obama has borrowed over $3 trillion in just two years did not register with the suddenly politically concerned Black Eyed Peas, who at one point pleaded for Obama to borrow even more money: \u201cObama, let\u2019s get these kids educated \/ Create jobs so the country stays stimulated.\u201d If singers can\u2019t sing, why would we expect that they could think? Apparently, lip service to some progressive cause is supposed to do what supposed music cannot?<\/p>\n There were numerous commercials and previews of movies to come; but I can remember none of them. They all became a blur of car crashes, explosions, computer animated fire breathing monsters, and assorted toy dinosaur-like creatures. Blowing stuff up and postmodern mini-plots to no purpose were supposed to make us buy beer, cars, and go back to the movies.<\/p>\n I have nothing much to say about the super-hyped O\u2019Reilly\/Obama pre-Super Bowl interview. When the president said that he had not raised taxes, I recalled in a nanosecond various \u201cfees\u201d that have been hiked and, of course, all the embedded taxes in the new healthcare bill and his opposition to the continuance of the Bush-era tax rates \u2014 waited for the polite rebuttal to come, heard none, and turned off the television.<\/p>\n Some Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n Some readers sent me some questions; here are a few answers.<\/p>\n 1) What do I think of the Starz\u00a0\u201cSpartacus: Gods of the Arena\u201d<\/a>\u00a0series? Brilliantly marketed. How does one offer gratuitous violence and raunchy sex? Easy \u2014 remind that the Romans did both, offer a sort of historical script tangentially related to Spartacus (less so apparently this season), and hope that the right, angry at the sex, won\u2019t mind the violence, and the left, angry at the violence, won\u2019t mind the sex. That said, there were a few gifted British actors, but otherwise it was well-done soft-porn.<\/p>\n 2) Did I read the current\u00a0Commentary<\/em>\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0on Rush Limbaugh? Yes, and I am on record as impressed with Limbaugh, always have been. Great article by Wilfred McClay. I wouldn\u2019t last one hour on the air. How does one for 20 years comment three hours per day on current events, earn an audience of 20 million, have no insider contacts with the DC-NY ruling class, come out of the Midwest, fend off rivals and emulators yearly, and combine voice imitations, bombast, astute and incisive analysis, parody \u2014 all\u00a0ad hoc<\/em>? No one else can do it; those that have tried, from O\u2019Reilly to Air America, proved that well enough. It would require a Don Rickles, Charles Krauthammer, Rich Little, William F. Buckley, George Will, etc. all in one. The ignorant write off Limbaugh as a overweight demagogue; the not so ignorant conclude that he is a genius of sorts that figured out the myriad of hypocrisies of the liberal cultural elite and created an entire industry\u00a0ex nihilo<\/em>\u00a0at their expense.<\/p>\n 3) Any comments about\u00a0The Huffington Post<\/em>\u00a0sale<\/a>? Hmmm. A P.T. Barnum con. She reminds me of a Jay Gould or even a Carnegie, Rockefeller, or Mellon. Think of\u00a0the Robber Barron model<\/a>: Dream up a far left website that allows celebrities and wannabe celebrities to post their rantings that otherwise would never be published. Give them respectability by offering space to ranting academics and politicians, who in turn like telling colleagues that they appeared online next to a film sort of star. (Academics dream of being actors; actors dream of being professors). Bring in readers with lurid\u00a0National Enquirer<\/em>-like T&A photos and stories about celebrity drug and sex escapades. Pay almost nothing to the left-wing, anti-capitalist contributors, claiming an absence of revenue in such a grassroots, cobbled together, one-day-ahead-of-the-creditors public service \u2014 and then cash out to an idiotic corporation for a $315 million payout that will never recoup its \u201cinvestment\u201d \u2014 railing on the way to the bank about capitalism\u2019s two societies from exile in Brentwood. How cagey is that? Mansion-living John Edwards\u2019 two-Americas brilliant; Al Gore\u2019s global-warming\/pay-me-for-your-salvation brilliant; Michael Moore hating capitalism\/suing for another $3 million<\/a>\u00a0in profits to top his $20 million for his mythodrama brilliant.<\/p>\n Odds and Ends<\/strong><\/p>\n We just had a cancellation and an open cabin come up; anyone interested in our June Tyrrhenian sea cruise and trip to sites and accompanying lectures on military history, ancient and modern, should sign up asap. Seevictorhanson.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Two new books came in the mail. I am reading Donald Rumsfeld\u2019s\u00a0massive memoir<\/a>\u00a0Known and Unknown<\/em>\u00a0and find it hard to put down. Bruce Thornton\u2019sThe Wages of Appeasement<\/em><\/a>\u00a0arrived; the last third of the book on jihad is eerily prescient in the current Egyptian context of Western welcoming of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both are riveting books.<\/p>\n I give a public lecture at 11AM Thursday at Pepperdine in Malibu on a book in progress, The Savior Generals. I am offering a class there on Friday mornings for a semester.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media Trimalchio\u2019s Bowl Sometime during the reign of the emperor Nero, the novelist and imperial confidant Petronius wrote a novel about life among the Roman\u00a0nouveau richein the Bay of Naples.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[86],"tags":[1025,12,207,94,1044,1071,1024,374,5],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-ZU","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11827,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-modern-satyricon\/","url_meta":{"origin":3838,"position":0},"title":"Our Modern \u2018Satyricon\u2019","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 16, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Sometime around A.D. 60, in the age of Emperor Nero, a Roman court insider named Gaius Petronius wrote a satirical Latin novel, \u201cThe Satyricon,\u201d about moral corruption in Imperial Rome. The novel\u2019s general landscape was Rome\u2019s transition from an agrarian republic to a globalized\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11740,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/did-trump-really-do-all-that\/","url_meta":{"origin":3838,"position":1},"title":"Did Trump Really Do All That?","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 25, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Peggy Noonan, apparently like many, believes that Trump\u2019s occasional callousness and crassness are unprecedented. And they have so befouled the political landscape that he has spawned rude and crude leftwing imitators. The result allegedly is the vile language of the \u201cmean girls\u201d such as\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1304,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-novel-vdh\/","url_meta":{"origin":3838,"position":2},"title":"A Novel VDH","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 23, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Reliving the fall of Sparta: An interview. by Katheryn Jean Lopez National Review Online Victor Davis Hanson, known as VDH to his fans, has a new book out. This time, it\u2019s a novel,\u00a0The End of Sparta. He talked with\u00a0National Review Online\u2019s Kathryn Jean Lopez about the Greeks and the novel.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Greece"","block_context":{"text":"Greece","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/greece\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4392,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/reconsidering-tenure\/","url_meta":{"origin":3838,"position":3},"title":"Reconsidering Tenure","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 16, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Its time has come by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Tenure in our universities is simply unlike any other institution in American society. Take the case of Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado. Because of his inflammatory slander of the September 11 victims, the public turned its attention\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2005"","block_context":{"text":"May 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/may-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6534,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-end-of-sparta-a-review\/","url_meta":{"origin":3838,"position":4},"title":"“The End of Sparta” — A Review","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 23, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"A classicist's exemplary historical novel. by Albert Louis Zambone \/\/ BooksandCulture.com Classicists should infuriate other humanists, in the way that the handsome scholar-athlete who volunteers to help dyslexic children and is a genuinely nice guy should infuriate the guy who just made it onto the football team and has a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3801,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/historian-and-contemporary-critic-interview-with-vdh\/","url_meta":{"origin":3838,"position":5},"title":"Historian and Contemporary Critic: Interview with VDH","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 27, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Randy Brich Nuclear Street Raw, uncut and uncensored\u00a0Nuclear Street\u00a0proudly presents Victor Davis Hanson, a historian who\u2019s not only an expert on the past, but the present as well. 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