apologies to Caligula
Posted by kit on 2026-April-10 08:56:51, FridayIn reply to Is Trump off his rocker? Consensus: Yes posted by Manstuprator on 2026-April-6 09:21:15, Monday
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I have to admit, I'm not at all interested in Trump's psycho-biography (the slimmest book ever written, one suspects), much as I am uninterested in the sexual habits of Bill Clinton or the racial theories of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Certainly the King is mad: the King is always mad. The interesting question, as always, is: what particular madness has the King today? The monarch, as a twentieth-century historian famously observed, has two bodies. Perhaps more importantly, the King has two minds: one as mad or sane as any individual can be, and the other plagued with all the grotesque fantasies and delusions of state. To put it bluntly, if the King is mad it is because the whole order of being that he underpins is corrupted. When Caligula made his favourite horse a consul, this was not (or not just) because he was insane, but rather because the crazed pretence of Roman republican continuity was inherently mad. Maybe Trump is mocking us, and - like Caligula - it hardly matters whether or not he is personally sane enough to know it. The American republic is a mere parody of itself, and it must now decide how much reality it can bear. |
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