Caesar had very little regard for the dirty, huddled masses that Rome reigned over, but he did know how to distract them from their collective misery; by staging free, public circuses and providing some bare-minimum grain rations to the citizens. Distracting the plebes with just enough to keep them all from storming the gates worked for nearly 1,000 years.
Louis the XIV and Marie Antoinette thought the same thing...right up until they could not.
And now we have the Clown Prince of Queens; the twice impeached, thrice (so far) indicted, former television actor who has been distracting everyone for years now with his faux-billionaire persona; from the Apprentice to Birtherism to the Central Park Five. Cries of revenge is what the masses want to see in this age; “You’re Fired!” and “Hang Mike Pence” came across wonderfully with these masses; and Witch Hunts and Laptops and Barbie ruining everything; nice Nazi’s on both sides and stand by and stand back. The masses love it all.
Here’s the thing. The masses are going to love it when the guillotine gets erected for him, too. They want blood and don’t really care whose it is. Off with everyone’s head is where he brought them and it will be fun to watch it all go full circle. Madame Defarge has her knitting needles all sharpened up and ready to go.
They don’t care about the Mango Mussolini any more than Nero cared about his own burning city. So yeah, Charles Dickens could have been talking about Rome and Washington D.C. when referring to what was going on in Paris and in London… “It was the best of times and it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom and it was an age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief and the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light and the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope and the winter of despair.”
Thank you Mister Leanus, my 10th grade English Lit teacher for making us read A Tale of Two Cities.