Megalopolis and the Fall of Republics

Life's a funny, funny thing.

In 2000, the California electricity fiasco fell directly on my head — “There may be ethical issues related to ‘the end justifying the means’ but there is a large region of opportunities between what is ethically viable (profitable) and ethically dangerous (illegal).” — with some $70 billion in fraud and bailouts. No one went to jail, proving only a warmup for the Wall Street derivative fiasco to follow seven years later. Our program, the most successful of the whole legislation, allowed homes, businesses, and local governments to directly purchase electricity from renewable energy providers outside the monopoly utilities, was the first rescinded by the legislature. What I had worked to help develop and then enact over the previous six years was now illegal, wording difficult to convey on your next resume.

While a couple people like Gray Davis and Steve Peace rightly paid for the travesty with their political careers, I mistakenly thought enough people could now see how corrupt and dysfunctional the system had become and understand reform was essential. I set about writing and sending out a book proposal on the fall of the Roman republic, an era I had long studied. It became a word for word, scene by scene, character by character script for contemporary American times, that had been written two-thousand years ago. Unfortunately, I sent it out right after 9/11. The great fear proactively and instantaneously descended on the homeland, crushing all thinking. I heard back from one publisher, who was more amused by the ideas than interested in any book.

A couple years later, I had the delightful privilege to spend an afternoon with author and historian Gore Vidal. We sat across a small table in his Hollywood Hills home and had a wonderful conversation lasting until the early evening that included three ice-filled tumblers of whiskey. Midway through the first glass I told him, Gore was a premier American Classicist, about my fall of the republics book proposal. For some reason, maybe Gore’s Hollywood pedigree, I mentioned I had sent it to Francis Ford Coppola, with the idea it might make a good movie. I was always a big Coppola fan. He's made some of the great movies in my life and I half-remember reading about him then saying something about the Roman republic.

Gore sat straight and said, “Oh, for a long time every few years he sends me a script on the fall of the republic (Roman). I read it, scribble across the front, ‘Try again Francis,' and send it back.”

He smiled and added, “If there was anything any good in your proposal, he’d just use it.” Gore was a very funny guy.

Over the last year, I’ve seen reports Coppola was making another movie, then recently a couple suggestions the movie, Megalopolis, was about Rome. Yesterday, the Washington Post quotes him at the film’s premier in Cannes saying,

“I had no idea that the politics of today would make that so relevant, because what’s happening in America, in our republic, in our democracy, is exactly how Rome lost their republic thousands of years ago,” Coppola said. It wasn’t politicians who’d be the answer, he added, but artists who would illuminate what’s happening, “and allow people to see it, because you can’t act on it if you can’t see it.”

I can count on less than one hand the times in my life I’ve seen this analogy in any American media. Coppola's comment immediately invoked Machiavelli’s analysis in his Discourses on Livy,

“The wish to reform (institutions) little by little requires a prudent person to come forward who sees this problem from some distance and in its initial stages. It is very likely that an individual of this type may never emerge in a city, and even if one were to emerge, he might not be able to persuade others of what he himself has come to understand, because people used to living in one way do not wish to change, and all the more so when they do not see the evil for themselves but must have it demonstrated to them through abstract arguments.”

Coppola suggests there is a role for art to ring the alarm bells of political decline, but art is incapable of leading resulting action. Only in the collective historical knowledge of a people resides such necessary republican vitality. Only there can the malignancy and danger of republican dysfunction and corruption brought about by ever greater concentrations of wealth and unchecked imperial ambitions be truly diagnosed and treated. Today, America is a completely ahistorical culture, defined almost exclusively by technologies at most a century old. Our republican past has no value. Only fantastical, despotic, technological futures are prized.

Here, I’ll point to an interview I did several years ago with Leila Conners of Tree Media on the fall of the Roman republic and it's distressingly contemporary analogies. I never did the book, this is the most extensive, cohesive, single exploration.

I look forward to seeing Megalopolis, as always with any of Coppola’s work. Reading some of the reviews out of Cannes, it doesn't appear Francis got his message across, but from personal experience I’d say doubtful the average movie reviewer, or the vast majority of Americans for that matter, would get the message if you smacked them right between the eyes with it.

Mostly, this all made me think how much Gore is missed. He was far ahead of everyone. In a wonderful, 1972 pre-Watergate take down of Howard Hughes, America’s then worshipped, technology besotted, oligarch of wealth, throwing money at the political system, paltry sums in today’s era of billion dollar campaigns, he ends,

“Political corruption has been with us since the first Congress sat in Philadelphia, and there's nothing to be done about it as long as we are what we are. In fact, as election costs mount the corruption will tend to be institutionalized by the small group of legislators, bankers, generals, and industrialists who own and govern the United States, Inc. It does not take great prescience to realize they are playing a losing game. As the polity become more and more conscious of the moral nullity at the center of American life, there will develop not the revolutionary situation dreamed of in certain radical circles but, rather, a deep contempt for the nation and its institutions, an apathy bound to be exploited by clever human engineers. In the name of saving the environment and restoring virtue, they will continue dismantling an unloved and unhonored republic. But then republics are social anomalies, as Thomas Jefferson must have suspected when he claimed to see, off there in the distance, no larger than a Federalist's head, the minatory shape of the despot's crown.”