Reprising this quotation about things that stay the same:
“King Louis XIV, the Sun King, died after seventy-two years on the throne. As he lay dying, the old king counseled his heir, his five-year-old great-grandson: ‘I loved war too much, do not imitate me in this, nor in my excessive spending habits.’ The five-year-old presumably nodded earnestly. His reign, as Louis XV, would be marked by a cycle of spending and wars so extravagantly wasteful and unproductive that they would bring shame not only on his person but on the institution of the French monarchy itself.”
Is it so wrong that my mind immediately leaped 300 years forward to two three four recent American presidents?
Source: Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (Crown, 2012), p. 23.
In a word, yes.
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The difference is that the French Kings were not hypocritical. They spent money on themselves. They didn’t pretend to spend it on the poor and “needy” while in fact they were just rewarding their supporters.
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George W. Bush and the man many are calling George W. Obama?
What would the founding fathers think seeing an American president today? More and more they’re coming to resemble emperors.
We thought no one could outdo Dubya in unbelievably profligate over-spending. Sadly his successor proved us wrong.
The war in Afghanistan became an adjunct to America’s insane War on Drugs with shadowy CIA types torching crops of some of the poorest farmers on earth in turn fueling obstinate intransigence. The war in Iraq turned it into a warring-gang ravaged welfare ghetto. The bailout has been, I think rightly, called the greatest bank robbery in American history, of Main Street by Wall Street.
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Quoth Solomon, “Man has dominated man to his injury.”
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