Caesar, C’est Moi

Carlos Fuentes’s huge novel entitled Terra nostra (1975; English 1976) has a character called simply El Señor, a platonic figure who is incarnate in a number of despots throughout history:  Nero, Charles V, Philip II and so on.  When he finds his power being eroded, as for example his attendants on a hunting expedition act before he gives his orders, he declares that in the future all men will be Caesar, and therefore no one will be.  He is, of course, prophesying the advent of democracy, but the implications of his statement go far beyond the superficial.

One recalls Harry Truman’s declaration that in the United States a man can call the president an SOB, and all the president can do is call him an SOB back.  Richard Nixon was accused of running “the imperial presidency,” and some others of that tendency come to mind, but they never consolidated their power into true despotism.  I recall receiving the news of Nixon’s resignation in a taxi in Colombia.  The driver told me the world had been watching us, because they knew that in most countries a head of state accused of those same crimes would simply seize the armed forces and take control.  He said they admired us for actually following through on our stated principles.

So everyone is Caesar.  What are the implications?  There is vast power out there, economic, military and otherwise, and no one individual controls it.  The question that must be asked is whether humankind is presently capable of handling the increasingly dangerous power we’ve been handed.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been pointed out as a warning to a race whose scientific knowledge was increasing exponentially that they might well set things in motion that they would be unable to control.  Mr. Hyde, created out of his own self by Dr. Jekyll, proves to be an out-of-control destructive force.

For that matter, in one novel Fyodor Dostoyevsky placed in a character’s mouth, “The heavens are void.  All is permitted,” and in another he gave us his Raskolnikov, whose crime and punishment were set in a new register, anticipating André Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican (the Vatican wine cellars), which toys with the implications of “gratuitous evil.”  In it the protagonist, anticipating postmodernity’s values, wonders what it would be like to commit a major crime with no motive whatsoever.  Suddenly, as the train he is riding crosses a bridge, he takes a man seated opposite him and throws him out the door.  The authorities never make any progress in finding the killer because they can identify no motive.

Of course, we have progressed—if that is the word—far beyond that in today’s “thrill kills.”  A gang member my daughter counseled still laughed as he told of torturing a woman to death in Fresno, California.  “You should have heard her scream,” he said.

Caesar makes the rules, and if everyone is Caesar, everyone makes the rules.  Some of us think that’s called spiritual and moral bankruptcy.  This becomes corrosive in many areas, but perhaps worst of all in the courts.  This morning I read of a judge in New Hampshire who decreed that a ten-year-old girl who has been home schooled must now attend public school because she has developed some religious views that are “too rigid.”

Would one of you Caesars out there please ask that judge why the girl’s religious views are too rigid while his opinion of her views is not too rigid?  But then, the Caesars have always been hypocritical.