The Culturalist: Our Satyricon

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is The Culturalist, and we're a Saturday show, so we have some special things today.

Victor is the Martin and Ilya Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He has a new website at victorhanson.com.

We'd like you all to come see the new website and we've got a lot in store today for the show.

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Welcome back and this is a Saturday and we want to talk to Victor a little bit about he often references the Satyricon and cultural decadence and I thought today we would have a discussion a little bit more in depth on the Satyricon itself and then also look at our own culture to see if there is any resonance there.

I did want to ask you, Victor, though, we recently had Millie testify before Congress and if you had any comments on that first before we go into our Saturday show.

It was not.

impressive.

It was not encouraging.

He basically was asked, why did he speak to a number of Washington insiders and books?

And he gave the ridiculous excuse that he was trying to communicate with the public, that General Milley had an obligation to talk.

But of course, we were to believe those were going to be press conferences.

These are behind the scenes, confidential, cover your rear end quotes.

If I don't give you my version, you'll give another version type of interviews with a whole series of

sensationalist muck-raking journalists.

That was embarrassing.

And then, secondly, when he was asked specifically if there were groups of people

in the January 6th riot that he had called Nazis, and among those were people from the Epoch Times and Newsmax.

And he told

Mr.

Woodward that he had put them in a book or he had references or written them down.

He was asked about that.

And that seems something that you could subpoena, but he denied that.

And he also, as you remember with Secretary Austin, they've all denied that what Joe Biden has said with George Stephanopoulos, that he was not given advice about the dangers of an abrupt withdrawal.

So here's what I'm getting at, Sammy.

Joe Biden cannot be reconciled with General Austin, General McKinsey, and General Milley.

And none of them can be reconciled with what they have said.

None of them, all four of them, cannot be reconciled with what they said before.

And I mean by that,

just get your passport and go to the airport for Joe Biden, or there's a lot of progress, or we think we can, it's sustainable.

And so

what we, the public, are left with is the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or the secretary of defense

of the president of the United States is lying.

And so that's upset.

upsetting.

And then he said something that was really upsetting.

He was asked specifically by members of Congress

about his views on politicizing the military, and he said he was not politicizing the military and he did not convey political views.

And we know, since he hasn't denied anything in the

Woodward book, that he said to Michelle Obama that he was really, that he was happy

that Joe Biden was now president.

We were told that he also conveyed to Nancy Pelosi that he shared her worries about a crazy president.

When he was asked to take a picture with Donald Trump, as all joint chiefs are with presidents, he leaked it that he was

thinking of resigning.

So he's been the, and then, of course, when he went into the white rage, white supremacist testimony, and he didn't really give examples of whether this was endemic in the armed forces.

So he is the most politicized general we've had.

And just to finish

very quickly,

he's also quoted in the Woodward book as giving a lot of reference about Donald Trump's pathologies.

This is similar to this and this is similar to this and this is similar.

And among them was Mein Kampf and Hitler references that Millie gave supposedly.

And if that's true, he's violated not as a retired officer, which is bad enough, but as a sitting officer, Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

And let me then focus just in finishing on the most egregious discrepancies and really a reason why he should resign.

And that is,

according to the 47, 53, and

2006 Goldwater-Nichols law, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs purview has been narrowed considerably and continuously.

And by that, I mean

they are advisory only.

They do not interrupt the chain of command.

And he says he did not interrupt the chain of command, that he emphasized it.

But according to the account, which he has not denied, he got together a group of top officers and he said, we're going to follow the procedure, the protocol.

Okay.

Maybe he meant, you know, even though I'm only advising the president, now I'm absurping that role, sort of, by re-emphasizing that the role of the president is to contact the

defense secretary, then who will contact the appropriate leaders in the field.

Okay, military leaders.

But then he said, and nothing, it comes through me, the procedure comes through me.

It doesn't come through him.

So he has appropriated a chain of command that is not his by law.

And that's a violation of law.

Second thing is he's opportunistic when he is in the chain of command and when he's not.

When Nancy Pelosi calls him up and says, you know, the president's nuts and aren't you afraid?

He apparently says, kind of, yeah.

So what are we going to do?

Well, I'll go interrupt the chain of command and remind everybody they're not going to do anything unless it comes through me.

And then, okay, so now he's in the chain of command.

We have the greatest military disaster in 50 years.

And

he advised and said and did.

No, he's not in the chain of command.

He said, he said that explicitly under oath.

He said, Afghanistan is just, I advise the president.

I'm not in the chain of command.

I'm not responsible for the evacuation.

I'm not responsible for the decision to leave at midnight from Baghdad.

I'm not responsible because by law, I'm not in the chain of command.

So you figure that out.

And when you get a chairman, the joint chief that lies like that or his testimonies cannot be

They can't be synchronized or they can't be corroborated with what he said before or what the chairman,

the defense secretary says, or what the president says, and it's time for him to go.

And this is all in the background of white rage and the photo op.

And remember another thing, he has not apologized

for things he has said.

And after the

June 2002 riot in Lafayette Square that poured over near the White House grounds, and

remember we had all the retired officers said there there was tear gas, and they're not going to bring in federal troops.

And the

former chair, Dempsey, and Mullen, and Myers, etc., they said, you know, this is horrible that even consider bringing federal troops.

And Joe Biden said, oh, this is so great.

They just ripped Trump apart.

I can call on these guys to remove him if I have to.

And Colin Powell weighed in.

And, you know, it was just a

It was just hysteria.

And then, you know, months later, the sober and judicious Inspector General of the Interior Department says, you know, the President of the United States, there's no record that he ever gave an order to use federal troops and nor did he tell them to tear gas.

So what did Milley do?

Did he apologize?

No, he did not apologize.

He did not apologize at all.

And then on the Capitol riot, when he said this was an insurrection, et cetera, et cetera, did he apologize when we were told that the FBI ran a thorough investigation and there was no evidence of a conspiratorial insurrectionist plan?

There was no evidence that Ashley Babbitt was armed or trying to take over anything when she was shot and killed.

There was no evidence that Brian Sicknick, as reported, who laid in state, according to the Democrats, who said he was slain in the line of duty.

He died of natural causes a day later.

There was no evidence to support the word armed.

And so General Milley has been on record that this this was, you know,

an insurrection.

It was a con, and it was, you know, he gave all these examples historically how serious it was.

And then final two natural questions are: well, if you're so worried

about the January 6th and you obeyed all of these orders from new President Joe Biden to militarize the Capitol and you sent in

25,000 federal troops, then why in the hell did you tell the media and why did all you brag and all of these co

comrades, these comrades of yours in the military say, we're not going to militarize the Capitol after the burning of a St.

Episcopal church when there was a riot next to the White House, when the president was escorted out of the White House quarters.

That's not anything to worry about.

No federal troops, because on principle, you don't agree with federal troops being used for domestic violence, but you do use them when you want to put 25,000 when there's no evidence that that crazy riot on January 6th was going to be repeated.

And more importantly, and I think this is very important,

there was 120 days, General Milley.

28 people were killed in these riots: arson, looting.

$2 billion,

damage, 14,000 arrests.

Did you ever consider that this was far more serious than what happened on January 6th?

Apparently, you didn't because you called it basically a penny packet, just a little minor thing.

You wrote that down, or you supposedly told

Bob Woodward that.

So he is all over the place, and the only consistent theme in all of these

statements, it's not politics or ideology in the strictest sense, but it is that whatever the perceived 51%

politics are in the Congress or in the country at large, then he will adopt and mimic as his own.

Yeah, Millie seems like Mr.

Fairweather friend, right?

And every time

that's a euphemism,

you know, but every time somebody starts talking about him breaking the chain of command, I keep turning back to Dr.

Strangelove and that George C.

Scott character.

And that was based on, in part, Curtis LeMay.

And remember, people make fun of Curtis LeMay

for editorializing about the so-called sellout of not using air support to support the Bay of Pigs operation.

But one thing is different than General Milley.

Curtis LeMay was an authentic military genius, the man threw 25-plus missions in a B-17.

He created the entire stack squadron formation that saved hundreds of lives over Europe in B-17s.

He transferred to the Marianas.

He took a failed B-29, $2 billion project, and he saved it.

And he destroyed 75% of the industrial capacity of Japan.

And he mined their harbors to such a degree with B-29s, they were incapable of exporting or importing goods out of Japan or into Japan.

And the result was he was an authentic military hero who created the Strategic Air Command.

And yet, he's caricatured in Stanley Krubik's movie as a nut.

And General Milley,

what has he done that's even comparable?

And comparable in either way, comparable in his actual achievement on the battlefield with Curtis O'May, or more importantly, he has done things that are far more political than Curtis O'May ever did.

And so

Douglas.

So an unfair caricature.

Well, I mean,

Edwin Walker is the only general ever to be relieved whoever resigned.

I don't mean resigned from command.

I mean, he was a nut.

And in the 50s and 60s, he was a three-star general.

He's apparently a very good general.

Ike had confidence in him, but he did call

Harry Truman pink, and he wouldn't shut up.

And they told him to shut up and he wouldn't.

So he resigned and he became sort of a marginal figure.

And he was wounded by.

Lee R.B.

Oswald prior to the Kennedy assassination and an earlier attempt to shoot him.

But But in that period, not that MacArthur, LeMay were like General Walker, there were, MacArthur said things that could not

be sustained.

I think his strategy in Korea was superior to Truman's.

That's debatable, but he cannot attack the

commander-in-chief in a way that he did to journalists.

But what he did and what he said about Truman is nothing compared to what Millie, if Bob Woodward's accounts are true, has said about Donald Trump.

And yet today, under oath, he said he did not believe that Donald Trump was capable of staging a preemptive attack.

If that's true, that what he said today,

then that's completely at odds with his behavior when he got on the phone with Nancy Pelosi.

And after talking to her, he went, called a meeting, and said, you, you, you, you, are going to come through me on all matters of possible nuclear use.

Because he did that, because he he apparently agreed that he Trump was supposedly crazy.

Trump, who has, of all of our presidents in the last 40 years, is the only one who hasn't started a major military engagement.

And so

I just get, you know,

just as a fillip to all of this,

here we have General Millias, the

chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

We went through him.

Then we have

Secretary Austin who rotates out of Raytheon right into the Secretary and he's been going through the ranks

supposedly scouring out white supremacists, although I don't think they have any evidence they found any of them yet.

A lot of the theater commanders and admirals said we have never seen them.

Okay, that was all this hysteria that the Democrats pushed on them and that they were so willingly complied after January 6th.

And this is all in the context we look to the FBI and we think, okay,

at least there's stability there.

No, there isn't.

An FBI liar, lawyer, Mr.

Kleinsmith, forged a document, doctored it, and was convicted of a felony.

James Comey, 245 times under oath said he couldn't remember.

And then he leaked confidential private note meetings of a private meeting with the commander in chief.

And we said, okay, well, Andrew McCabe, he's an FBI in line.

Well, no, Andrew McCabe,

he admitted that he lied four four times about whether he had contact with the media leaking things.

And we said, well, okay, we've got the head of the CIA, John Brennan, was good.

No, he lied twice under oath when he said that the Senate staff computers were not being surveilled by the CIA and drone missions don't kill people collaterally.

both lies.

And he admitted they were.

And then we said, well, we have the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, one bright man, one honest man, one man we can trust.

No, he said he lied when he said that the NSA didn't surveil people.

He said he gave the least untruthful off.

And then you say, well, there's old Bob

Mueller.

Let's bring him out.

That was the old FBI, and he's a good man.

Well, no,

he testified after spending 22 months and $40 million on the Russian hoax when he was asked explicitly, could you describe Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele's fake dossier, the two

twin pillars of your investigation?

basic.

Oh, I don't know anything about them.

Never heard of them.

Don't know anything.

So where do we turn in this administrative state for an honest person?

They don't exist.

No, you've got me stumped.

That's right.

We need to take the military and we need to tell the military.

If you want to have a uniform code of military justice, you either enforce it or you scrap the whole damn thing.

But if you don't scrap it, then you better not put a Marine Lieutenant Colonel in jail as we speak for criticizing the policy of his commanders.

When those commanders, both active and retired, have called the president in violation of Article 88, a Nazi, a Mussolini, a liar, a person who should be removed sooner than later, i.e., without an election.

If you're not going to do that to these four stars, then just scrap the whole uniform code.

And if you have a joint chiefs

and you have three series of legislative statutes that very graphically,

explicitly, literally define this advisory role.

And then they don't just advise, but they interrupt the chain of command and you don't do anything to them.

And yet you have all these Harvard professors and

four stars and military.

Oh, you know, he saved us from Trump.

He saved a nuclear war, maybe.

And then you add to all of this chaos that he called up his Chinese chinese counterpart

you know

and warned him that if there was any attack order or aggressive action order he would warn the chinese about it and i'd mentioned earlier i you know american greatness it would be as admiral king or

or any admiral in world war ii or any four-star general was told you know

before we were in a war with either germany or japan or both well you know roosevelt's very ill and they're hiding his military uh competency his ability to make military decisions because you know he can't he's got high blood pressure he's uh he's got a lot of ailments uh

and you know what we're going to be at war uh he wants to be at war that's his plan he wants to help churchill he wants to go in a pacific war and the people were saying that at the time and then you know maybe

I don't know, George Marshall or Admiral Leahy or any of these people would say, you know what, I'm going to call Tojo or Yamamoto over there in November of 41 and say, you know what, if I get an order from that crazy sick, listen, democracy is messy, you know that?

And we're under a lot of stress here, but I'll warn you if we're going to do anything, or they had called, I don't know, who would they called up, General Halder at the

Wehrmacht,

OKW, and said, hey.

I don't know what's going on here.

Democracy is messy.

Roosevelt wants to be a little bit more muscular.

We might be doing some stuff that will be attacking, but I'll warn you:

what would we call that?

What would he call that?

I don't know.

And we certainly are in a weird stage in our civilization that these things all look warped, or at least you're convincing me more and more just how there's something really warped about what's going on in the left conduct of our government.

But that

theme, warped, takes me to what I wanted to talk about today.

So,

can we move move on?

I don't know if you're done with Millie, but I wanted to talk about the Satyricon.

And the reason that this came up for me was I was recently in a waiting room of a local business, and they had a television on, and it was 10 a.m.

in the morning, and they had one of the

network stations on, Fox 26, so an ordinary station.

And on it, there was this woman, and at first I couldn't hear what she was saying, but she visually looked like a distorted version of an hourglass.

She was so voluptuous and, you know, I guess if you want classic curves, it was almost like a cartoon.

She was so accentuated in all the hourglass places.

And I thought, wow, this is so, you know, weird looking.

And then I started to try to listen to what she was saying.

And she wasn't really saying anything as far as I could tell in terms of substance but then I realized it didn't matter because she went on to show videos that were taken on the street of these kids out who knows what they were doing but there were young girls that were gyrating below their waist I think they have a formal term for that it's called something like courting

yeah and I was thinking wow this is 10 o'clock in the morning little kids could be watching this what is this you know why a show like this on i thought this is absolutely so decadent and so warped in the way almost that you're describing General Milley's character.

And so I thought, well, maybe Victor would like to talk because I know the Satyricon, you often reference it.

And I thought maybe you would like to talk about the Satyricon and how

in ancient Rome, at least,

I don't know, who's the author?

Is the author of the Satyricon anonymous?

I'm sorry.

No, but before i do very quickly and i could add to your collage and that would be the vanity fair gala for the met where we had aoc walking in with a 35 000 designer dress among other uh progressive luminaries and they were waited on by people in masks that were even carrying their little dress tails as they dragged along the floor and they had no mask or maybe we could direct everybody's attention to the Emmys or the Tonys where we had all of these politicized elite, wealthy people without masks, why the Hoi Polloy, Hoi Polloi were wearing masks, and then they were doing their usual.

As you describe that Obama gay,

people holding their trains.

I mean, it almost sounds like the old regime in France just before the revolution, the whole culture there.

This is so weird.

These aristocrats that we have in our new world.

Yeah, I mean,

we have the 60th birthday of Barack Obama, who's a big advocate of quarantines.

And what is he doing?

He's got this big bash where nobody's wearing a mask, and the servants at his $24 million

estate

have to be masked.

And so, what we're getting at is a corrupt ruling class.

And so, somewhere in the reign of Nero, we think

we have a manuscript that can be traced to that time period.

And it was written by somebody called Petronius.

We know from Tacitus there was a noble named Petronius who killed himself.

He was the

arbiter of eloquence or elegance, I should say, elegantii, arbiter elegantii,

the judge of what the emperor should see as

proper taste.

And he apparently got on the wrong side of Nero and he committed suicide.

But there's a great disagreement of whether he is the same Petronius as the manuscript author.

But if you date the language, the colloquialisms, the reference, the personal names that appear in this massive novel, then they seem to fit best somewhere around 60

to 65 AD, right when they should, if it's about Nero.

The next problem is it's a huge novel.

Satyricon just means full of satyr-like things.

Satyrs are just that's, and there's another argument about the etymology of satura.

It means it does that mean full, or is it from the Greek word satyr, you know, satyr?

And so, but it means kind of making fun of things that are unusual.

And so, that was what the satiricon, probably the genitive plural in Greek, of a book of satyr-like things.

And it's the tragedy is, except for portions of 14, 15, and 16, most of the novel is lost.

And it's very risque.

And what it is, is a story of a bisexual man in Colpius.

And he has a little, what we would call underage boyfriend, Gaeton, 16, and then a rival, Ascletos.

And they are wandering.

in through southern Italy,

around the Bay of Naples,

under the, probably under Mount Vesuvius.

And we know from Pompeii's ruins, we've seen a mosaic, Cave Canum, that says, beware of dog, that appears, that phrase appears in the novel.

So it's probably right there.

And what the novel is trying to do is saying, you know, we've got all of these corrupt,

nouveau-rich wannabes, and they've got, because of the imperial expansion where Rome, the Republic of Rome has gone suddenly within 150 years to a Mediterranean global wealthy empire.

They are wealthy beyond imagination, and they don't know what to do with their wealth, and they're poorly educated, but they have a sense that they're supposed to emulate the old Roman educational

system and the aristocratic

pretense of knowledge.

So they sit at a dinner when they go to this dinner of Tromalchio, the Cana Tromalchionis, the dinner of Tromalchio, then this big fat slob with makeup.

It's all of our stereotypes of decadent Romans.

And then they have a dinner and they have birds and they have quail and they have all sorts of surprise decadent food.

And they brag about how much money they are and they're gross.

They brag about farting and sex.

And these guys then leave the dinner and they wander around and he's impotent.

There's no Viagra there, but he's trying to go get cured by some superstitious, quote-unquote, witch.

He meets a decadent, bankrupt poet, Eumopus, who thinks he's kind of like an academic creative writing guy.

He's, you know, he sits there and pontificates, but he has no talent.

And

he's a lecher, too.

They fight over this little boy.

All of them are bisexual.

They're transgendered, some of them.

They wear different clothes of the sexes.

They wear wigs.

They dress up.

When they get to Croton, they act like they, Eumopus acts like he's wealthy and he's got tuberculosis, he coughs, so that all of the legacy seekers will think, no heirs.

He's sick, he's fat, he's old.

I'll hand over my daughter, my son, for his sexual pleasure, and then he'll give me his riches.

So it's just a constant sick

reiteration.

insidious, incremental.

Everything about it is this is what happens to a society that has huge infusions of wealth, has a lot of foreigners who have not been inculcated in Roman Italian old

traditions,

and the expressions of this leisured affluent society manifest themselves in decadence in food, decadence in

furnishings, decadence in sex, decadence in sexual ambiguity, making fun of institutions, making fun of Roman soldiers.

And then you're supposed to think, well, wait a a minute, while this is all going on, there are people in the slaves, slaves in the mines of Spain that are mining silver, or there's

legions up on the Danube and Rome,

men out in the cold, that are keeping all of these creepy people safe.

Or there's Greeks and there's North Africans that are crisscrossing the Mediterranean at great danger to themselves.

And there's a shipwreck in the novel.

And they're trading and they're trying to make a living and they're creating great wealth.

And there's scientists that are

building everything from the pantheon to Roman roads to aqueducts.

And so it's trying to say that in this Western scientific

administrative state, it's so successful.

that it creates so much leisure and affluence that people turn

in on themselves and become pretentious, snobbish, cruel, and they are prisoners of their sexual and culinary appetites.

And so, when you say satiric on today and with these events that we talked about,

why does anybody have a $35,000 dress?

What possibly could a $35,000 dress entail that, say, a $1,000 dress could not?

And why, at this level, at this point in our civilization, suddenly, suddenly, we are told that you are homophobic or you're a misogynist or you're transgender phobe if you don't agree that there is a biological,

either there's a biological transgendered sex or that there is no such thing as biological sex.

It's all constructed.

Or why at this point do we have we gone hysterical with this racial obsession?

Or why do these Emmys and Tonys and Oscars,

why do all these celebrities get up and point their finger at us and say, bad you, bad Trump person, bad Middle America?

And yet they never say, good me, homeless, come into my garage.

Good me, illegal alien, sleep on my lawn and help me.

I'll help you out.

Or why does LeBron James sit up there with his little fake, you know, Malcolm X readings?

We're supposed to see that he's now an intellectual when he's got a billion-dollar lifetime contract with firms that profit from Uager slave labor in China.

You're forgetting Bill

Gates and Jeffrey Epstein's plane.

Yeah, Bill Gates still can't tell us what he was doing, can he?

No, he sure can't, but we can probably imagine what he was doing.

Well, we don't want to.

You know, and also I was thinking the

education system where everybody's learning all this therapeutic stuff and not being trained in inductive reasoning at all, or very little of it.

The emphasis seems to be therapy.

It just seems to be the whole population is turning to a lack of understanding of rational things.

Well, they're becoming very empathetic.

They know that they have to have a particular made-up pronoun, or they have to know the difference.

They have to capital the word B when they write black, but they don't know anything.

So they're therapeutically ignorant.

And I mean that literally.

I've taught a long time and I've talked to a lot of young people.

And it's tragic what's happened from the K through 12 into the colleges.

So if I say to a young person, can you just define what rhetoric is?

Can you tell me who Socrates is?

What is 1776?

What's the difference between a Spartan or an Athenian?

You ever heard of the Parthenon?

You ever know what Michelangelo's David is?

Can you tell me the difference between French and Italian?

I could ask anything.

What's the Pythagorean theory?

They don't know anything, anything.

And if you ask them things about their own immediate customs and traditions, who was Ulysses S.

Grant?

Who's John J.

Pershing?

What was Iwo Jima?

What was Normandy Beach?

Ever heard of Omaha Beach?

They don't know any of that.

because they've been taught something differently.

And that differently is, we're going to be therapeutic and tell you how you you should speak and how you should think, but not any information that would allow you to be learned.

So, boy, if we gave an SAT test to these college students and charted their progress after four years of college, I just assume that their scores would go way down.

Yeah, yeah.

And we have a government that's got an extraordinary debt and

no people working.

I mean, that to me struck me as very satiric onish or strikes me as very satiric onish in the sense that, wow, you've got this massive government debt, but you've also rendered your population unproductive somehow.

And, you know, where is all that gonna go?

How are you gonna ever pay a debt off if you just paid a whole bunch of people not to work?

Well, it's very scary because it's very scary because

we're worried about what it's costing us to pay people $600 a week or whatever.

But what we're doing really is we're inculcating a mode of life the last 24 months where people do not want to work

because they think the government should pay them because they feel they're entitled and they can always come up with the proper exegesis to justify their sloth.

And meanwhile, you pick up any newspaper, go online, and the port of Los Angeles, they can't get anybody to move these containers.

So we've got all this backlog stuff.

You go in to buy a car.

There's no cars there on the lot.

You go into, I just went into a save mart in California, and there's key items missing on the shelves.

And this is a very affluent, leisured society that nobody's producing things in the past, but we printed so much money in Satyricon-like fashion.

Everybody's going out there.

So the airports are packed.

The restaurants are packed.

But

these are all the fumes of printing money.

And when not enough people are working and the labor non-participate patient rate is going higher and the entitlements are more costly, you can see what we have a rendezvous with very soon.

And it's going to be stagflation, I think, like we saw in the 1970s.

It's going to be really hurtful.

I don't like that word, but it's going to be really tough on a lot of people who don't deserve it.

Yeah, maybe the country will get back to normal after all of that.

You sound like my uncle said there's nothing that a good depression couldn't solve.

All right.

Well, thank you, Victor.

That was a very interesting discussion of the Satiricon.

I always liked that.

I always got a feeling that

Petronius was sort of talking or writing as though something outside of the Satyricon was normal.

And today it feels like that whatever

elite groups we have in their satiricon

celebrations and such,

it seems to have

worked itself all the way down to the ordinary people as well.

That's what's sort of troubling me.

It is.

Well, I mean, as someone who had to go speak in Las Vegas this weekend and going into the airport of Las Vegas or walking around outside Las Vegas,

I gave up counting the number of people who who had, I would call them, more than revealing yoga pants.

One woman was ahead of me in the

TSA line, and it was very clear she had yoga pants without underwear on.

And it was very clear to me that I didn't really know what her skin color was because it was completely those sleeve tattoos.

And she was jabbering and jabbering on the cell phone when she was holding up the entire line of people who had flights to catch.

So there is something, and then getting on the plane today, it's like being on a Greyhound bus in 1965.

People, the way people are dressed, it's not like you're flying.

It's really kind of scary.

And so, what I'm getting at is, yeah, this

bankrupt aristocratic culture filters down as it did in Satyricon, popular culture.

And the aristocracy has no, that's what one of the things that Satyricon is trying to suggest to us: that the

the old upper agrarian gentry set a standard.

The new people, whether they're Ciceronian or the old families,

like Elder Cato, they set a standard that then filtered down to the peasant or the middle class.

And what he's trying to say is that they are filtering down, but it's bankrupt.

And the wealthy people are responsible, but the

working classes have been utterly corrupted.

And in defense of Petronius, whoever he was, and I do think he was the arbiter elegantii of Nero, the Latin is just beautiful.

The prose accounts are beautiful.

And it's the only, maybe Apuleius and maybe Catullus here and there, as well as graffiti and some inscriptions, but it's the only Latin that captures the colloquial.

So he has a, at the Cana Tromalchiolnis, he has a stonemason talk to a rag collector.

And the way they talk, it's almost eerie, eerily modern.

And it's colloquial Latin.

But the prose accounts are beautiful, and he's very witty.

He understands the whole

inheritance of Greek rhetoric and oratory.

And he knows how the half-educated emulate that they're educated by botching all the names and the concepts.

It's just, there is really no novel.

That was the first novel, probably, at least written in Latin or with Greek earlier Greek ones, perhaps, but it's the first

novel in any language that reaches that degree of awareness and satire, sophistication.

And it's really a damning portrait.

But I'll leave the audience this final observation:

if it was written somewhere between 60 and 65 AD and you read the satiricon, just as if you go to the Las Vegas airport or you go turn on television today,

or you listen to certain types of music and you think this country can't go on.

It's so screwed up.

Rome went on for about 400 years after that.

And so as, you know, Adam Smith said, there's a lot of rot in society that you can coast on, basically is what he was saying.

So

we have such a wonderful inheritance and we have such a wonderful constitution.

And when there's all these dead people

that we see their names in the cemetery and they work for nothing and they created our roads and our bridges and our aqueducts and our reservoirs and our system

and our military and they won these wars and they protected us and they were so singular that we are coasting on their fumes it's quite tragic because we don't give them any any thanks no gratitude we're the most ungracious generation in the world when we we reduce them to racists or supremacists and then we say to ourselves we're so much superior.

And I look around and people of all races and genders or whatever, I think, show me what you have done.

Show me the concrete achievements of what you have done that would rank in any way comparable to the people who won World War II or World War I or blazed the trails out west in the 1850s or the Union Army and the Civil War.

Just tell me what you have done.

And I find them wanting.

Yeah, we definitely need to pay more tribute to our ancestors as as

i actually recently a

person who was trying to celebrate native america and he said well we want to celebrate ancestors like the native americans do they never think that well okay maybe you should celebrate the ancestors that wrote the constitution here and made your life so good right

and so we should do that and

that's a great oh go ahead yeah i think it's even beyond that so i mean i think if you ask if I go into the local high schools and I say to people, would you please just tell me

some three of the 10 Bill of Rights, the original 10 Bill of Rights, or you can just tell me what the founders thought about the legislative branch or its relationship to the executive, or how does the judicial branch check by the legislative branch that they have no idea.

none, but they do have an idea that if you said to them, do you think that the Constitution is racist?

Oh, yeah, it's racist and they don't know it's just like we've been in a north korean re-education camp and when we start to blame these kids that have 1.7 trillion in aggregate collective student debt uh

you want to blame it's in the wrong place it is you want to say what college administrator what dean what admissions officer why not financial aid consultant told you to go get a ba in gender studies or sociology or whatever it was, psychology, when you could have gone out and been a plumber, an electrician, master electrician or a contractor and made so much more money and been so much more productive than just sort of three units here, six units here into your mid gobbling up your mid-20s.

And who are your heroes?

General Milley?

Anthony Fauci?

you know, gain of function research and Wuhan, subsidies?

Is it Secretary Austin?

Maybe it's Joe Biden.

Maybe it's Hunter Biden.

Hunter Biden belongs right in the Satiricon.

I'll leave you with that final observation.

Yeah, thank you.

We better close off here.

Thank you, Victor, for

this Saturday morning or evening discussion of the Satiricon.

I hope everybody goes out and buys an edition of the Satiricon and enjoys.

It's definitely an enjoyable novel, strangely enough.

After they buy The Dying Citizen out on October 15th.

Of course, out on October 5th, right?

Yeah.

Yes, October 5th.

Great.

So be sure to get your copy of

The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hansen.

And thank you, everyone, for

listening to us today.

Victor also has two shows, The Traditionalist and The Classicist, that he is co-hosted by Jack Fowler and are played on Tuesday and Thursday usually of each week.

So we hope you enjoy those as well.

Thanks very much.

And thank you, Victor.

Thank you.

And this is Victor Davis-Sanson and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.

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