Photo: Bust of Roman Emperor (or maybe Empress?) Elagabalus.
I don’t usually go looking for trouble.
Nor do I go looking for ‘news about trouble’, for that matter.
But ‘news about trouble’ finds me anyhow. Because I have email, and the whole world seems to know my address. Like, last week, I got an email that began with:
It’s Wednesday, March 5, and it’s the 45th day of Donald Trump’s second term.
That statement could be interpreted in a couple of ways.
It’s the 45th day, and just think how much tax relief we have to look forward to!
…or…
It’s the 45th day. How the hell are we going to get through the next 1,416 days?
Based on the rest of the email, I could tell that the sender is implying Choice Number 2. That is to say, he’s expecting more trouble. And no doubt expecting to write about it, and send it to me.
Maybe our Daily Post readers have noticed the trouble bubbling up in Washington DC. It’s put the news media into a feeding frenzy, with so much trouble going on, they can’t even begin to cover it all.
Back when I was a kid, my younger brother and I used to get into trouble, occasionally. Usually, it was my brother’s fault, but he always tried to blame it on me. “It was Louis’ idea!” he would claim.
Or “Louis started it…”
That’s one thing I’ve never quite figured out. Why does it matter who “started it”?
And more to the point, how can anyone tell who really “started it”?
Take, for example, the Trump administration’s current efforts to dismantle the federal government. That process started on Day One, President Trump’s first day in office, when he signed 26 executive orders… including one that addressed ‘sex’.
Section 1. Purpose. Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong…
It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality. Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality, and the following definitions shall govern all Executive interpretation of and application of Federal law and administration policy…
Just to make things perfectly clear:
(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.
Obviously, President Trump didn’t start this trouble. He’s just reacting to trouble someone else started.
But who started it?
We could make the claim that George Washington started it, by agreeing to be the first President. Clearly, if we didn’t have Presidents, then Donald Trump would never have signed an executive order defining only two sexes.
But George Washington didn’t start it, because he was merely fulfilling the requirements included in certain founding documents written by other people, which were based — at least in part — in the democratic practices in Ancient Greece and Rome.
I will refrain from discussing the sexual practices in Ancient Greece and Rome, because this is a family-friendly website… other than to note the brief, four-year reign of Elagabalus, Roman emperor from 218 to 222 AD, who identified as a transgender woman, preferring female pronouns. So, maybe a Roman “Empress”?
According to Barthold Georg Niebuhr, “the name of Elagabalus is branded in history above all others… Elagabalus had nothing at all to make up for his vices, which are of such a kind that it is too disgusting even to allude to them.”
But even the Greeks and Romans may have got their ideas (to which I will not allude) from earlier cultures, such as the culture of Sodom and Gomorrah. We know how things turned out for those folks. No one wants what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah to happen here.
My point being, whoever started all this trouble, it was a long, long time ago.
Could have been the Serpent, for all we know.