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Ides of March

If you don't count the calendar shifts, today marks the 2,061st anniversary of the death of Julius Caesar. I'm not a classicist, but I hang out with one, and today he dressed in black. He discussed the events of that fateful day in Roman history, explaining what transpired, why they did what they did, and the consequence of Caesar's assassination.

Today, I discussed the events of a different assassination, but not one less consequential: The killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo 103 years ago this June.  

In the podcast lecture series I'm listening to, we covered the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, an actor who was, along with the rest of his family, best known for their Shakespearean performances. We don't know if Mister Lincoln had read Julius Caesar, but it's almost certain that Booth had.

Not even a week ago, someone breached the perimeter of the White House, though his motives aren't necessarily fatal. Still, there's a great deal of money spent on protecting former- and current presidents and their families, all to protect them from a similar fate.

Since I wrote about violence yesterday, it seems ominous and fitting that specters and possibilities of assassination suddenly crop into my thoughts. Part of what's so fascinating--or maybe it's disturbing--is the fact that assassination all too frequently turns the victim into a martyr. It's impossible to say what a Reconstruction South would have looked like under Lincoln's guidance, save that it was different than what President Johnson created. But the fine details, the currents and unexpected reversals that are so surprising in the moment and so inevitable in hindsight are lost to the counterfactual past. Some of this quasi-nostalgia, a yearning for an idyllic past that never happened, rather than a time when things were "simpler", paints over the sick parts of these men. Julius Caesar was a butcher. Lincoln abused executive privilege and violated Constitutional guarantees. Ferdinand was presumptive inheritor to an imperial European power, a power built on the exploitation of others. Yet these sins are forgotten in the sweep of the drama of the death.

And modern times? I remember students, hot off their parents' dismay at the election of President Obama in 2008, wondering aloud why someone didn't just shoot the man and be done with it. I remember asking them if they really wanted a President Joe Biden, and that tended to shut up all but the most pugnacious of the students, who then wondered what would happen after that. I pointed out that it would have been President Nancy Pelosi, and then they gave up their bloodthirsty plans, party preferences notwithstanding.

What of now? There's a lot of hatred and anger, a lot of violence and turbulence. I keep trying to understand our world; I keep coming up short. I don't advocate violence and I would not condone anyone even contemplating murder as means to a political end. But on the ides of March, I think it's not unexpected that one may wonder how the world would be turned upside down if ever one of the presidents of the United States were again killed. We almost saw it with Reagan. It's a miracle World War III didn't start when it happened to Kennedy (again, a man whose legacy is overromanticized because of his death).

I shudder to think what would happen in 2017, no matter how much I personally dislike the would-be target.

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