Community members, cops, and parents in one South Carolina school district are all pushing back against two summer reading books they believe propagate anti-police feelings. The books, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, were on a list of four titles for students taking an English 1 College Prep course.
Students only need to read one of the four books on the list for the summer. The other books on the list are Love Letters to the Dead and 23 minutes. According to the local news, the option of letting students decide for themselves what to read isn’t good enough – “the Fraternal Order of Police says the two anti-police books should be dropped from the list because they focus on negativity toward officers.”
I believe the children are our future. Specifically those young enough not to have grown up inhaling poisons.
It makes sense, though, doesn’t it? People from poor, minority communities commit (and are convicted of) small crimes that can be counted for statistics. They also get the cheapest, most poisonous version of everything. But the privileged are just as violent and impulsive, and commit crimes on a bigger scale (financial fuckery) but can afford better lawyers/fixers or to have others be violent for them by proxy.
I mean, you can make more than a few comparisons between our current situation and another famously lead-poisoned empire. Rome may have built great monuments and infrastructure that’s still around today, but they were also a bloody war machine that liked to go conquer territories at the slightest provocation.
Oh, and as was pointed out in the silly grins thread this is another reason not to be eating the rich. No sense starting the cycle all over again.
I think it’s also a by-product of boiling acids such as wine and vinegar in lead vessels. Archaeologically invisible, though lead gets into bones, and that could be archaeologically visible given the willingness to drill into bones and the right lab procedures.
I wonder if a graph of the extent of mining and use of lead, plotted against a graph of the rise and fall of Rome might give some answers. I imagine a large scale civic project like leaded pipes can only occur once a society reaches a certain level of civilization.
Those ice core samples they recently took from Greenland did show elevated lead levels during the Roman period. The ice cores should show if there were more lead at the end of the empire than at the beginning.
I’d also wonder if a little heightened tendency to violence and lowered impulse control might help if you’re starting an empire.
Do you suppose it is fair to me to post the figure from the article? The emissions have big drops during the Punic and civil wars, but otherwise look like they peak during the height of Roman power and fall off after. Really though I think that makes sense for mining activity, and may not say as much about use.
I’m thinking, however, that Constantinople relied on public works of this kind, and that the Empire itself actually fell fully a thousand years after the fall of Rome. I’m thinking a few things here (and, as I don’t claim to be an expert, I may be talking through my bum):
The extent to which the lead in water pipes and vessels leaches into the water seems to be very dependent on the water’s condition. The Flint disaster, came about when Flint switched its water supply from Lake Huron and the Detroit River to the Flint River (harder water) and failed to add the necessary corrosion inhibiters that such a switch required. Lead pipes were a constant in older areas both before and after.
Half the Roman Empire fell, and half actually thrived for a fair length of time. I doubt that the civil engineering practices were different between the two halves. What does appear to be different was the level of social mobility. You’ll note that Justinian I was a peasant who married a courtesan: both were fearsomely competent people. Justinian’s predecessor and uncle, Justin I, who started life as an illiterate Illyrian swineherd, passed a a law that made marriage across class lines legal (which permitted the marriage of Justinian, by that time counted a senator, and Theodora). This appears to be some push back against Diocletian’s “reforms” that tied families to their inherited class and professions. (Ironically, Diocletian, who created the tetrarchy and thus the split Empire, was also an Eastern peasant made good.)
Now, I suspect the truth of the matter is even more complex than this - I am no historian - but I also doubt that lead alone had a determining effect on Rome’s decline.
Many of the most famously incompetent emperors were in the early Empire, though the relative fame of the 1st-century Empire, and obscurity of the 3rd-century Empire, may play it’s part.
Many came from cities. Caligula largely grew up in military camps, which had similar water supply issues.
Adrian Goldsworthy suggests that in the early Empire, only senators could aspire to become Emperor, which led to incompetent Emperors but less opportunity for civil war and in the later Empire, any ambitious military commander could aspire to become Emperor, which led to more competent Emperors, but more civil wars, and the agentes in rebus, conspiracy-hunting, and the rest.
Hard to say, really. The roots of the Flavian dynasty were, at best, equestrian. (The word I get is that Vespasian’s grandfather was a centurion who married well and worked the family up the social scale - parvenus, in other words.) His younger son, Domitian, was the first emperor to actively cut the Senate out of governmental processes.
But there you have it - the end of the Julians led to the Year of the Four Emperors, and all four contestants, Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian himself, were the Empire’s top generals. I suppose it is correct to say that, from the start, the army was the way up in the Roman world, although the officer class was at least nominally equestrian during the Julian, Flavian and Nerva-Antonine dynasties.
I think it is fairly accurate to say that, from Marius on, de facto power resided in the personal loyalties of the legions to their generals, with all that implies about problems of succession.
I’d also heard the suggestion to keep in mind that our accounts of emperors are largely the creation of aristocracy-friendly historians. Which has better odds: that the bad ones were really that incompetent, and cruel, and narcissistic, and awful in just about every conceivable way at once – or that we are just reading inventions of their opponents?
I thought it was a reasonable point, but my opinion of those odds has shifted a lot over the last couple years. If Trump appointed a horse to some government position, my main surprise would be that he didn’t leave it empty.
