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For nigh three years, there was one man from whom every politically inquisitive American yearned to hear. Despite our desires, however, we heard from him not. He was an imagined interlocutor (or, for those more politically pious, a martyr or a savior) as we spoke and speculated amongst ourselves, but not a word came from him.

His taciturnity, sustained for so lengthy a period of time, felt like a century of silence. He was reticent beyond every natural constraint. His lack of interaction exceeded that which we usually permit and his dearth of loquacity unsettled our busy interiors to the core. Garrulous to the point of excess, this deeply troubled our ever-so talkative society. If only he were ambiguous in what he said (so long as he said something) there would be a point or two—however exiguous and obscure they might be—about which we could talk—having heard him talk. But his obscurity was held with so scrupulous a tongue that we never did get the chance to hear him speak.

And so, every sentiment of his concealed, we took it upon ourselves to fill in this torturous and unrelenting void between the spring of 2016 and this past week. It was believed by the philosophers of old that, not unlike us, nature abhors a vacuum—horror vacui, as in the Latin of the phrase’s origin it might’ve been said. Having no observable predilection to which we human beings are privy, who’s really to say that which nature finds desirous or loathsome, abhorrent or agreeable? We’ll leave that subtle contest of materialism and space between such brooding thinkers as Aristotle and Hobbes. What’s manifestly clear, however, is that our conversation, be it natural or not, absolutely disdains a vacuum. As its remedy, speculative prattle is always at the ready to fill it in. With alacrity, though often with just as much vapidity, that disquieting void is filled with speech.

Insatiate for information and empty of ear, throughout these three years, our appetite for leaks, asides, and “off-the-record” comments went sorely unfulfilled. We have to thank for this the man who was tasked with producing an eponymous, infamous, and now perhaps dubious report to which he lends his name. His report, the unimpeachable Mueller Report as it’s historically to be called, addressed the two intertwined questions of whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government in an attempt to manipulate an auspicious electoral result and, if so, whether or not the man Donald Trump himself obstructed the investigations related thereto.  

For the sake of brevity and succinctness, both of which are under-valued in our cacophonous age, the answers to the above questions appear to be no and maybe. The maybe, as it were, is an unequivocal ellipsis with which the Congress will be made to grapple in the forthcoming months. Although the president’s nearly disastrous indiscretions and countless peccadillos were causes of great alarm to the Mueller team, none was deemed sufficiently grievous to prompt a call for immediate prosecution.

My desire here is not pedantically to delve into the legal intricacies of presidential privileges, executive expletives, or the thresholds beyond which the charge of obstruction of justice is acknowledged or even the definition, still somewhat cloudy in my mind, by which it’s to be understood. I haven’t the legal acumen nor the layman’s inclination to explore this daunting idea.

As a slave to superficiality, however, I feel it my place to comment on how Robert Mueller presented himself in vivo—specifically in sound. As stated, I—like everyone else of a commensurate age perilously shy of three decades—hadn’t an inkling of what Mueller might sound like. Audio recordings from his previous governmental commissions (as head of the F.B.I. under George W. Bush and then Barack Obama and as the Attorney General for the first of those two) were sparsely to be found. This made the anticipation for his elocutionary entrée into my life all the more riveting. Add to this the fact that he was considered by many on the left to be the deus ex machina for whom they so long prayed.

Alas, his live appearance rendered naught all these celestial political dreams. Instead of deus, he looked to be a dotard. Instead of machina, he looked to be afflicted by the more benign parts of dementia. At the very least, we might from a distance diagnose the Vietnam War veteran and long-time public servant with amnesia and fragility of speech.

When first he appeared at a brief press conference a few weeks ago, the manner in which he spoke struck me. No commentator of whom I know was so insensitive to make it a point upon which she remarked. But I, ever attentive to the effects of good oratory and the benefits of precise and mellifluous speech, couldn’t help but take note. As such, his bearing wasn’t completely surprising. At the hoary age of seventy-three, one might expect the infirmities of anno domini to infiltrate the voice, as it frustratingly does all other things. Orotund and confident in youth, the voice—though an intermediary between body and soul—isn’t immune to the ailments by which the former is so inescapably burdened. It isn’t impervious to feebleness nor resilient to the quivering that is a consequence of the accumulation of years.

That’s what I heard when I initially experienced him speak. The second time, and presumably the last as a public employee, was this week. The apogee of Democratic anticipation, Mueller was beckoned to testified before Congress on the contents of the report to which he lent his name. And lent his name, as it was painfully made clear, was all that he did. It was obvious that those investigators and lawyers over whom he, a man of impeccable pedigree and universal renown, presided wrote his eponymous report. Absent a grasp on the subject matter before him, his voice sounded even more tentative and senescent than before. Certainly, he wasn’t the Demosthenes-type figure for whom the Democrats might’ve hoped. He didn’t stand before the senate as a latter-day Cicero exhorting republican truth to tyrannical power. He was inarticulate, unmelodious, feeble of voice, unsettled of substance, and undeserving of elocutionary exaltation.

Sadly, most prominent public figures are, and those aforementioned characteristics are attributable to most. They aren’t traits of which Mueller is in sole possession, but it was especially revealing to see them so inopportunely displayed. He maintained his silence within the verbosity of our media web for three entire years. He did so with a punctiliousness quite uncommon to the political man. He was devotedly mute, but—for the sake of his now diminished reputation—he may have persisted in being so for longer a period of time.

There are few historical figures by whom I’m perpetually besotted. Alexander the Great is one, George Washington, commensurately great, yet another. Thomas Paine, Marcus Aurelius, and Julius Caesar—a third, fourth, and fifth to round out that list. I could go on with Newton, Galileo, Spinoza, and such, but I’ll save for the moment my breath. So boundless however, is my adoration for these men that any time there’s a series or a special produced in their memory, I’m quick to consume it.

Netflix last year released a five-part series on Julius Caesar, history’s quintessential general, statesman, and—had time permitted—imperial king. Below is my reception and review of the series and its subject as by Netflix they were conceived.

By and large, the show disallowed any tincture of mythology from mixing with the historical sobriety of its script. It was downright abstemious of any story or gossip that might deviate from the reality of the past. The show determined not to forsake a primary source, no matter the dramatic potency of the hearsay by which it might’ve been inspired or even supplemented—though surely not supplanted. After all, the transition from republic to royal empire was an incredible moment in time, often beggaring belief. While on the whole, I was deeply appreciative of the show’s unwavering commitment to history and to the facts, I felt as though I’d been dramatically dispossessed of the ending for which I had hoped. Perhaps a surfeit of Shakespeare and a too-heavy reliance on Plutarch had corrupted my soul in its expectation to see that which I saw not.

The day upon which Caesar was fated to die, the infamous ides of March (in the forty-forth year, lest we forget, before that subsequent, though certainly less militant man sharing in the initials “J.C.” was destined to arrive on the scene) contained none of macabre premonitions, the baneful forewarnings, the desperate exhortations, nor the nervous qualms for which I so patiently waited. “For many strange prodigies and apparitions”, so says Plutarch, “are said to have been observed shortly before the event” of Caesar’s death. Perhaps my literary fancy, my classical inclinations, and my unabashed bardolatry have obscured my thinking as it pertains to the facts (apparitions, sadly, evade the scrutiny of history even when emphasized by Plutarch’s pen). But none of the moments by which that most moribund of all days is remembered permit themselves to creep into the Netflix narrative.

Calpurnia, last though certainly not least of the innumerable lovers to whom Caesar was treated, is accounted not to have dreamed her ominous dream—a startling nightmare at whose end her pompous paramour was seen to be washed in his own blood. With feminine sapience and in fear of this dream, she implored Caesar not to go to the senate that day. Contemptuous of good sense and desirous to made king, he listened to her pleas briefly, but not seriously nor long enough.

The pictures in Caesar’s house of his ambivalent ancestors are shown not to have fallen to the floor—a sign that even gravity yields and submits to history when the latter’s wheel creaks and turns. Omitted completely is the voice of the soothsayer, whose salve is not in words but in deadly prophecy. Insouciantly, though perhaps prematurely, in approaching him Caesar claims with regal confidence and good-natured raillery that the ides have come, and still here I stand. He thinks himself well for feeling momentarily alive. With a rejoinder that makes my skin crawl even after the passage of two thousand years, the prophet of death reminds the timeless dictator that yes, the ides have come, but they haven’t yet passed. His death was ordained to occur within the length of that most memorable day.

Absent also is the Greek servant from whom Caesar might’ve been the recipient of a life-preserving note. Had he read it promptly and in due course, the general-turned-consular would’ve known upon entering Pompey’s theater his neighborly senators’ aims. Also missing is the animal upon whom Caesar performed traditional Roman sacrificial rites. Disquietingly, it was an animal in whose chest no heart was to be found—an obviously bad omen, as no animal can long persist without that vital organ by which it’s brought to life. And finally, the show omitted the foreboding conversation that Caesar had with Lepidus, the latter of whom would go on to be a tertiary member of the second triumvirate in the tumultuous years to come. Philosophically, Lepidus broached the question of what sort of death would be best. It’s a question into which every Stoic and Epicurean has stuck his nose. With an abrupt immediacy and a Laconic brevity, Caesar responded, “A sudden one”.

And sudden it was. Not one whole day following the provision of that answer, Caesar was led by Decimus Brutus to the theater to which his late, great arch nemesis lent his name. Standing beneath the statue of Pompey, Caesar conversed with the gathered senators over contrived and weightless odds and ends. Each appeared to be supplicating the dictator more than his wont. Eventually, Caesar made his way to his seat, around which all of the conspiring senators gathered to stand. Preparing to effectuate this greatest coup d’etat that ever a state did see, Tillius Cimber continued to supplicate the fledgling monarch for the remittance of his banished brother’s crime. Caesar refused, Tillius grasped his robes, and the clumsily conspicuous sign to initiate the attack was made.

Casca struck first, with a non-lethal blow to the neck. Perhaps it was his nerves or a second-guessing of himself that unsteadied his normally resolute hand. Perhaps, if not that, the political comforts by which the haughty senator was surrounded had enervated the formerly martial spirit by which he once rose. So impotent was his thrust that Caesar was able not only nearly to wrest from him his dagger, but to shout at him in anger. “Vile Casca”, cried the incredulous Caesar, “what does this mean?” He soon would know, as after twenty-three blows, he’d be dead.

I was simmering in anticipation when Netflix portrayed this scene. I knew it wouldn’t fail in dramatizing Caesar’s immortal line, Et tu, Brute? as the dying dictator gazed into the eyes of his final killer and putative son. Brutus, ephebic, eristic, and republican to the core, was the final cause of his downfall, and perhaps his first joy. Indeed, I held onto the hope that the show would place into Caesar’s mouth the line in the original Greek (kai su teknon, or, “You too, my child?”) from which a world of speculation emerges as it regards the parentage of the spurious Brutus and the sire from whom he came. Disappointingly, the show defers from using this possibly legendary line and committing itself to this idea. As viewers to whom all possibilities ought to be offered, we’re left inconclusively charging Brutus with tyrannicide alone. Probably, parricide should be included.

The Et tu, Brute? line is merely one of many throughout the course of the series of which Caesar is dispossessed. Upon crossing the Rubicon, that still ill-defined trickle of water separating Cisalpine Gaul from Italy, Caesars fails to utter alea iacta est. Apparently, the historian Suetonius was wrong in making us believe the die were cast. Another famous line, perhaps more so than those other two, finds not an utterance in Caesar’s mouth. Veni, vidi, vici—“I came, I saw, I conquered”—were rather the words written than spoken to the senate upon the great general’s victory in Pontus, a city in the northern part of the modern day Turkish state. Appian, the third of the most reliable of Caesarian historians, claims Caesar to have conceived of this line but is fully ignored by the show. Its “suitable air of brevity”, as Plutarch describes it, is entirely lost. There’s also no mention by the show of the famous line, “Fear nothing; You carry Caesar and his fortune in your boat”

But Caesar’s true fortune was to be carried in a different, slightly more organic vessel. That vessel, of course, was to be found in none other than the imperial temptress and the Egyptian queen—the femme fatale of antiquity, Cleopatra.

It was on this point that the show sacrificed historicity for sensuality and veracity for voluptuousness. A crime of which all production houses are guilty and one they can’t help but commit, Netflix’s portrayal of Cleopatra is, if we’re to take seriously the accounts of her, misleading. Doubtless, she was an alluring woman of whom most men of stature were enamored, but in no text is she described as having been an especially beautiful woman.

Probably, as a North African woman of aristocratic birth, she was in possession of a dark complexion, an ample ornament, and a slender physiognomy with high cheekbones, exiguous bosom, and confidence nonpareil. The attribute by which most men were attracted, however, was not her femininity in physique but her facility in speech. She was a particularly capable mistress of linguistics, often able to converse with potentates, emissaries, and foreign kings in their native tongues. A pharaonic polyglot of no ill-breed, her silver words slithered all over the Mediterranean coast—much like a later cobra slithered all over her, the opening of whose mouth ended that of hers.

Ultimately, so far as Cleopatra VII was concerned (though theatrically an original, she was actually the seventh of her name) her beauty was secondary to her tongue. Her intellect, her force of personality, and her political instinct were her primary attractions. She was more political than pulchritudinous, more Juno than Venus. Netflix, in acknowledgement of its need to retain the attention of its eager and virile viewer, overlooks this bothersome fact. The company rightly employed a breathtakingly gorgeous Australian actress to play the Egyptian queen. Perhaps it did so at the risk of alienating its commitment to history, but as one of those shameless, virile viewers, I forgive it this lapse.

So far as it goes, Netflix’s portrayal of the life of Julius Caesar is commendable. As such, it could prove a highly useful supplement to the study of that man and his time. It’s as irreproachably accurate from an historical standpoint as it is impressive from an artistic one. Graphically, it’s enlightening and illustrative of exactly where Caesar fought, and where Pompey and Crassus died. It confirms in the searching mind an image of the triumvirate, the Rubicon, the battle plan of the siege of Alesia, as well as that of Alexandria. It ignores the burning of that city’s eponymous library at Caesar’s hand, but otherwise captures Egyptian life accurately. It gives pictorial strength where merely historical facts fail to satisfy the student in search of a colorful past.

But it shouldn’t be taken alone. In an endeavor to understand and appreciate Julius Caesar particularly, and the waning Roman republic by extension in a broader light, this series should not be a first course. For that, you’ll want initially to grab for Plutarch’s Lives and Shakespeare’s unmistakably-named play. You’ll want also within reach the works of Suetonius and Appian from whom such endless knowledge is available. Cicero might also be added to this diet to salubrious affect, as well as such modern commentators as Colleen McCullough and Mattias Gelzer who best understand and depict this man, his life, and his mission. But Netflix does its part, however humble and, at times, un-theatrical, in adding to the list. After finishing your readings, it’s doubtless worth your time.

It’s a maxim, terse as it is true, that no man was ever written out of reputation but by himself. In other words, man—as monstrously autonomous and as autonomously devilish as any beast that’s yet lived—remains always in possession of his own fate. This is the burden of the human being—a species at whose founding reputation was valued before all else and, at whose end, will persist in being the only thing by which he’s remembered. Much though he may try, his reputation is an ownership of a lifetime, an open chapter of which he can’t be disencumbered and one upon which he must sit down and write.

Admittedly, there are few things for which we bother to feel ourselves responsible, but reputation may be the exception to this truant’s undergirding rule. That doesn’t stop him, however, from an attempt to distance himself from reputation’s control. To shirk is to find the least impeded path, and we humans tend reliably to shirk before we sink—at least so far as it concerns the ebbing opinion of another man.

Failing that, however, which inevitably he does, he ends up always the author of his own tale. His reputation is the story by whose weight he ultimately drowns or lives. He bales, so to speak, his own water from his own ship and weathers the tempest and steers its course. He’s the singer of his own song, the sculptor of his own opinion and hopefully, if wrought by a hand with any devotion to aspects of similitude and grace, of that of others as well. This is the mighty power of influence of which too many find themselves bereft. Above all else, be it by the magnanimity of a careful god or the benevolence of a happy muse, he’s the scribbler in whom the cursed gift of self-determination is endowed.

His reputation, you see, is his alone to write. It’s left for others, after his tongue has fallen silent or his hand sapped of its former dexterity and strength, to accept, ignore, or to impugn.

But the maxim, obstinate as it is old, doesn’t exactly specify the reputation from which he begins. It simply says that he, and he alone, is in sole possession of the capability of writing himself into or out of it—be it good or ill. It also fails to make explicit whether or not a man might be tweeted out of reputation, and not merely written to be so, by anyone but himself. Absent paper and pen, a mediating temper and an honest well of ink, might he still not (within the limiting confines of some two hundred characters and emoji’s and acronyms and “lol’s”) author upon this flightiest of social media platforms the reputation of himself?

The president again has proven, if indeed the ardent auditors to whom he communicates were ever in any doubt, that Twitter certainly is an adequate platform upon which a reputation might be gained, solidified, or lost. In this case, as you’ll see, he achieved two-thirds of these possibilities: solidification and loss. Neither, so far as I can see, is politically desirable nor morally defensible. He also made clear that by the mere act of writing (or, in his case, tweeting) oneself out of a reputation, it doesn’t necessarily land him in a better place.

In what already ranks as perhaps the most exceptionable, odious, and ill-informed tweet ever to have been conceived by his hand, the president exhorted four unnamed but easily recognized freshman congresswomen of color to “go back to the countries” from which they came. The exhortation, as you might guess, was as cursorily conceived as it was embarrassingly misapplied; only one of the four congresswomen to whom the tweet was directed—Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota—was born outside of this country.

An immigrant from Somalia, she came to America (under dangerous, dubious, and—with the emergence of compelling evidence and the later arrival of her brother—perhaps incestuous circumstances) as a young woman. Notwithstanding the antipathy she expresses for the country on a fairly regular basis, she’s as American as you or me—if not philosophically, then legally so. The full-hearted profession of one’s patriotism, as she proves time and again, is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a citizen in honorable standing of this fine state. She is a citizen head to heel nonetheless. The other three, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, though owners of variegated and quite beautifully darkened hues, all can claim America as their shared place of birth. None of the three is an immigrant, irrespective of the physical, religious, or ethnic diversity of which they’re so interestingly constituted.

Erroneously, the president accused them all of being just that: literally alien to this country in a very fundamental way. Ideologically, an argument toward that end could be made, but doing so is a hazard in itself. It tempts no shortage of missteps and pratfalls along the way. Bigotry lurks behind those arguments whenever their promulgator is white and the people to whom they’re directed, black, brown, or any shade approximating those two. The following ideologies, of which the four congresswomen are proponents in varying degrees, justifiably could be attacked: virulent and unabashed anti-Semitism, Soviet-style rates of wealth redistribution, the abolition of national borders, the liberation of illegal immigrants, the universality of health care and higher education, and a speciously environmentally-friendly Green New Deal—one needn’t too thoroughly examine these proposals before concluding with the president that they are un-American in most ways. That, however, is a separate, a more dignified, and a far more nuanced approach to the combat of these four congresswomen and the ideologies by which they’re so ominously enthused than that which was so slothfully pursued by the president.

By pursuing them not as I outlined above but as he did, the president formally has written himself out of whatever remnant of a good reputation he might’ve enjoyed. Admittedly, the length that he had to travel to do so wasn’t a long one, but he voluntarily made that small leap. He’s now solidified for himself a reputation as ugly as one can be. Frankly, it’s rather deserved after having tweeted what he did. In the final analysis (as if the indecency of our politics knew any finality) it’s a reputation with whose grotesqueness he seems proudly to be smitten and eager to employ. Ultimately, he’s a man of the maxim as inscribed above. The president has written his own reputation, and he’s done it all by himself. It’s by his own hand he’ll be remembered.

It’s not the dialectical intricacy found in the works of Plato by which I’m most bothered. Once properly inured to this tedious “back-and-forth” technique, to this maieutic maze, to this Socratic obscurity, to this building and demolition of one indefinable term after the next, one can get along well enough. Indeed, through the course of Plato’s many dialogues (for which his literary scapegoat and nom de guerre Socrates is made responsible; he serves as both agent provocateur and protagonist), the most intricate of passages become manageable. Some are steeped in dialectic, others abstruse with mathematics, but all—to some degree or another—can be enjoyed. Innocent for the most part, they’re all intelligent beyond belief and far superior to any other work from that age to which they might be compared.

Thus, Plato’s pen and Socrates’s brain combined in creating the most salutary of main courses upon which our early mind could feast. Not only has it been a healthful entrée into the germinal philosophy of the modern age, but an unexpectedly poetical taste of ancient Greece and western thought as well.

Plato, of course, would cringe at this unflattering characterization of himself. The pre-Aristotelian philosopher par excellence was no poet. He was, in his own estimation, a wrestler-turned-thinker, a champion-turned-utopian, a man in whose hardened opinion poets were to be held in the utmost contempt. They were masters of artifice and promulgators of deception. Certainly, these bothersome bards and unctuous rhapsodes wouldn’t be countenanced in his lofty Republic, nor tolerated to sing of their epic excitements in his austere streets. Doubtless this intolerance—whose severity was so unbecoming of so otherwise commendable a man—was bound to fail in time. And so, as every century yields to its next, we realize that Plato will never surpass, much less supplant the heroic immediacy of Homer—no matter how cosmic and pervasive his philosophy might be.

All that being said, I bother myself not with Plato’s anti-poetic position—though doubtless it’s one with which my own frightened Muses disagree. Aside from poetry’s very strict usage in the edification of his Republican pupils (who, it might be added, were callously shorn of their families and rendered to the care of the state), he cared little for the arts. He’s allowed his opinion, though it might be wanting of imagination and dreary of the vibrancy of life. The opinion of which he ought to have been disabused, however, and that one by which I’m most inescapably bothered as I write these words today, is that which concerns the love between grown adult men and pubescent boys.

More than a passing fetish that we might forgive as having been an idiosyncratic part of this Socratic age of Greece, pederasty—or the “mutual”, though often sexual and unilateral attraction between men and boys—was pervasive during Socrates’s day. Abstinent until the ripened age of thirty (an age most conducive to wedlock, if you ask me), most Athenian men enjoyed their pre-marital decades in the company of a boy. As such, the ubiquity of this practice, not surprisingly, is reflected in Plato’s works. He was a man, after all, as much of his time as he would become for eternity.

Time and again, one dialogue after the next, it’s either an underlying or a substantial theme to which the brilliant author makes reference. It’s either peripheral to his subject or unavoidably central to the discourse itself. It’s a subject by which many, though certainly not all, of the dialogues are at least in part inspired. As prevalent as it is prurient, the theme arises in such works as Symposium, Phaedrus, Laws, and others where it repeatedly demands one’s disquieted attention. In these above listed works, the theme of pederasty is downright explicit, but in all others, one can’t help but feel as though this love of boys is restively turning at the back of Socrates’s head. One fears that at the end of a conversation with Gorgias, he’ll change from a rhetorical to an erotic garb.

So far as his mind is concerned, it’s one that proves, from one moment to the next, as capacious as it is lascivious. Travelling across the flourishing breadth of its scope, one can’t fail quickly to stumble upon his thoughts and his love of boys. His mind, ever in adoration of the ephebic male youth—especially when it concerned his beloved Alcibiades—is never at a distance from his heart. Though avowedly opposed to rhapsodes, he speaks rhapsodically when talking about the relations that exist between men and boys. Ostensibly, of course, these relations ought to be Platonic and chaste, but the homosexual bent of human nature giggles and winks at so innocent an idea. Smiling, it knows too well of our pretensions to philosophical sublimity, always in conflict with our biology, and that passion, rather than reason, is the master of all men. Therefore, in short order, this venial bond between boy and man becomes a venereal infatuation from which we can’t be detached. What was mutually constructive becomes painfully exploitative as the man overpowers the youth—both in body and in mind. The ravaged juvenile, now a damaged adolescence, becomes another pagan victim in this pursuit of boyhood love.

Even when it comes to our great philosophers, sexual liberty and moral depravity tend to go hand in hand. It’s an attachment to which not even our most brilliant of thinkers are immune. This, we confess with great sadness, is a carnal truth and an ethical shame and has been so for all time. And though we fancy ourselves at once a fully liberated and harmlessly depraved people in this modern day, pederasty still falls outside the latitude with which our sexual expression and freedom is treated. It is, so to speak, outside the bounds of genteel discourse, much more so outside of those of acceptable sexual intercourse. Yet any proselyte of Plato or disciple of Socrates is made to hasten over those innumerable passages in which the former depicts the latter “philosophically” lusting over boys.

Ultimately, the question is this: is pederasty, the now unlawful but previously banal love between men and boys, an impediment to our appreciation of the works of Plato as given through the mouth of Socrates? Having imbibed Plato’s astonishing catalogue of work, are we to swallow a purgative specifically to rid us of the filth? Are we to ingest the good and reject the ill? It’s not without a nauseating feeling in the stomach and a heaviness in the bowels that I respond with an affirmative yes to all of the questions above. Though dissonant with our modern sensibilities and contrary to our every endeavor to protect our youth, we can love Plato and Socrates—albeit in a strictly Platonic and Socratic way. If only they could do the same.  

Thanks to the protestation of at least one individual (though probably he spoke for an arousable few) Nike is rescinding from its production lines the so-named “Betsy Ross” shoe. I’ll admit, from an aesthetic and an historic standpoint, I initially thought this revocation a wise move on the company’s part. After all, our founding mothers—a charming group among whom Ross most assuredly ranks first, though Abigail Adams lags not far behind—were known more for their fidelity to the burgeoning nation than for their forward fashion sense.

Mind you, America wasn’t then what she’d become today—sartorially self-conscious to the point of crippling excess. There was only one aspect of vainglory to which she aspired, and that was to the latter of those two separable words. Glory—rather than vanity—was all that mattered in the life of a blossoming state. Glory was the ideal of which she most was desirous in all of its forms: glory for God, for country, for family, and then lastly for self. Glory was the raiment in which she hoped always to find herself dressed.

That said, the eventual donning of that glorious garb would take some time. This country, which I affectionately engender to be a “she”, was still overwhelmingly dependent on the Old World, though decreasingly so, for not only litigious and commercial concerns but for cultural matters as well. One of the few items to have escaped taxation, haught Anglican culture was a vital import to our colonies barren of original refinement and native taste. America was also devoutly religious, at times self-depreciatingly puritanical—a combination that admits very little in the way of ostentation and flair. Nowadays, we flip that order by depreciating religion in the process of exulting ourselves.

Style was rather a decadent Catholic inclination than something in which Protestants found an appeal. One need only contrast the exuberance of the Renaissance—with its pagan infatuation with color and form—to the iconoclastic austerity of the years of the Reformation from which the parents of our founders emerged. The one was enamored of fashion, the other of discretion.

In early America, a confluence of many things (most notably her fledgling revolution) was causing a diminution in sartorial concerns. And so, theirs, our founding mothers, endured a wardrobe of austerity, of frugality, and of a lack of pomp, a dress ever under the officious eye of an unpretentious Puritanical creed. It was a style into whose seams a cross-stitch of religious humility and national necessity was sewn, the latter of which was born of the shots of a revolutionary war, the former at our founding.

It certainly was a drab affair when compared with that to which the citizens of Paris were exposed. Across the sea, in the precariously pompous court of Louis XVI (upon whose largesse, one ought not to forget, we desperately relied to prosecute the final stages of our war) haute couture and sumptuous splendor abounded in the uppermost class. There, the very manifestation of ostentation found no better home. More than that, as the population by which the elites were surrounded starved, they were happy to maintain themselves in their full and regal display. Indulgent to the point of their own demise, court fashion under Louis’ reign came very near its greatest appearance and its last breath. The sight of powdered wigs atop royal heads became an invitation to contempt. While the dainty and perfectly-coiffured hair pieces became invidious to the average eye, the radical Whigs—Jacobins, Montagnards, Girondists, and the like—grew restless and wanted them guillotined off.

Style rested in the absolute complacency of its idle repose at such commodious chateaux as Versailles and Landreville. All the while, the frightfully unstylish sans-culottes (named, as it were, for the absence of a certain knee-high accoutrement) hungered, fumed, froze, and plotted in the streets. France’s own revolution was but minutes away, a radical departure from the status quo at whose height of terror many a pompadour would roll.

But, so far as we’ve concerned ourselves with Betsy Ross and the early American style of which she was both producer and product, a departure to the blood-soaked streets of Paris is not one we can now make—however fascinating the misadventure might be. We return, rather, to America, but not to that country as it existed in the middle of the eighteenth century, but to that as we know it at the outset of the twenty-first—to that of our own day.

Much to my encouragement, I realized that it wasn’t the actual style in which Betsy Ross herself was clad that Nike was attempting to capture and promote. The company, for all its ingenuity, wasn’t trying to re-establish the literal essence of 1776, though that surely would be something to behold. After all, who among so sartorially sensitive a population as is ours would voluntarily agree to don the feminine footwear of the pre-industrial age? A shoe so unconducive to the foot and to locomotion would leave many an athlete injured and even more antiquarians amused. No, Nike wasn’t planning to swap its over-priced trainers for wooden heels, its gossamer tights for cumbersome clogs.

Instead, Nike was going to release as a limited edition, Independence Day original its aptly-named “Betsy Ross” shoe. It was to be a tri-colored Air Max 1, a shoe of enduring attraction by which every self-acclaimed “sneaker head” and foot aficionado, as I prefer them to be called, is besotted. In this iteration, it was to be a particularly patriotic shoe upon whose heel there’d be pictured the flag for which Ross is so deservedly famous. As for the rest of the canvas, it was to be red and blue painted upon a backdrop of white, a celebration of the three colors that course through our veins.

Hers, though an antique, is a flag of which all Americans—assuming our education fails us not—have an immediate and abiding knowledge. For a country forever enamored of its founding and the exceptionalism that is that founding’s consequence, the Betsy Ross flag retains its relevance from one generation to the next. Unflappable yet supple, quaint yet resilient, incarnadine yet innocent from one moment to the next, it’s a flag to whose increasingly numerous stars and determinedly fixed stripes we’ve pledged our allegiance for hundreds of years. We’ve done so since that time at Yorktown when the English decided it best finally to retire from our shores. After so many years, they’d seek better fortunes and more pliant subjects under the crimson cross of their beloved St. George.

The Betsy Ross flag, the direct forerunner of the present standard under which we now stand (or kneel, depending on your feelings about the government that day), was crafted during a time of obvious danger and unease. One mustn’t forget that what Ross did was both valorous and traitorous—her valor growing in inverse proportion to the fact that she was by her every movement and by every legal measure a traitor to the crown. After all, she was creating for a rebellious horde of putative patriots and ungrateful “English” citizens a unique and peremptory flag that would delineate an entirely new country.  

The flag itself was simple. More than that, though, it was virile, honest, graceful, and true. In these and other ways it was very much like the men and women for whom it punctured the sky and waved. At the risk of too deeply delving into its vexillological meaning—a study toward which Ross herself was largely disinclined—it was composed of but two parts: a canton at its upper-left corner at whose center thirteen stars encircled the blue beneath, and a field comprising seven red and six white stripes. Luminous, the stars in the coming centuries would wax but never wane, an advantage unknown to the night. Eventually, these stars would multiply to number fifty in all. This tenuous constellation, soon to be a country around which a solar system of nations would deferentially revolve, would add thirty-seven new lights to its west.

While we haven’t yet completely forgotten our history as I’ve hastily outlined it above, we’ve taken it upon ourselves willfully to misremember as much of it as possible. Betsy Ross and her eponymous flag are victims of our distinctly American amnesia and our new onset of self-hate. As such, the Betsy Ross flag—a clear triumph of our nation’s incipient struggle for liberty and an enduring homage to our past—was deemed incompatible with the purged patriotism of a seemingly innocuous Nike shoe. The flag, Nike declared in so many words, is no longer to be considered a precious image of which we can be proud, but a specious symbol for which we ought to have no tolerance.

Why, you might ask? Slavery, so goes the argument, at least as it’s given by the former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Kaepernick, emeritus athlete and ubiquitous activist, rightly points out that slavery existed contemporaneously with the introduction of the Betsy Ross flag. Ergo, by the illogic of the left, the flag is no good. And, being that it’s no good, it really ought to be censored from appearing on the back part of a shoe (especially when said shoe is produced by the company for which Kaepernick is a spokesman—though surely, having been involuntarily retired for at least four years, his value is incommensurate with his wage). By and large, the men over whom that flag waved were (by dint of circumstance and of lamentable, though ultimately personal, choice) slave holders. Thus, all that they did was wrong and all that that flag represents an unforgivable sin.

The likes of Washington, Monroe, Hamilton, and Jefferson fought to perpetuate bondage when they might’ve inaugurated a newfound freedom for all. At best, they connived and at worst they advocated for the continuation of slavery for decades to come. It’s for these reasons, so goes the misbegotten Kaepernick line, that their achievements and the flag that was their symbol should be reverenced not. Certainly, their memory and the flag by which they’ve long been represented shouldn’t grace the back of an All-American shoe.

We mustn’t forget that behind this now forsaken All-American shoe is an All-American company. More than that, for no company is it a requirement that patriotism be compulsory. As consumers and citizens, however, we mustn’t make the mistake of cheapening our history by too highly valuing Kaepernick’s and Nike’s politically-correct tripe. We mustn’t accept his protestation and the company’s acquiescence that utterly have no worth. Betsy Ross and her flag are not only integral to this country, but fundamental. Hers is not an image of the promotion of slavery, but of the practice of intrepidity, not of thralldom but of freedom, and Nike missed an opportunity to celebrate those grand ideals for which her flag stands and stood.