Media Distraction: Blues, Greens,
Or the Boston Red Sox

Media Distraction...

…the idle and slothful commons…among them some who have no shoes…. These spend all their life with wine and dice, in low haunts, pleasures and the games. Their temple, their dwelling, their assembly and the height of all their hopes is the Circus Maximus….Among them those who have enjoyed a surfeit of life…often swear…that the state cannot exist if in the coming race the charioteer whom each favours is not first to rush forth from the barriers, and fails to round the turning point closely with his ill-omened horses. Ammianus Marcellinus, Book XXVIII: Valentinian, Valens, Gratian

We have all associated "bread and circuses" with the Roman Empire, although our understanding of it dates back to the early Empire and the late Republic. Entertainment was still the big media business in the fifth century; in fact it was one of the most important businesses of Empire after military defense. How it came to be requires a little historical background.

The Romans had been faced with a dilemma in the late Republic; it is a dilemma we are beginning to face now: superfluous people. When the Roman legions conquered an empire, which was something Romans back home were unprepared for, a number of things followed. First, there was an influx of all the riches of the conquered lands. Second there was a flood of slaves, all the unfortunates swept up in the wars of conquest and after. Third, there was the rise in commerce made possible by the new wealth and the unified control of the whole of Mediterranean civilization--and beyond into western Europe and western Asia.

The large numbers of slaves brought back by the nobility and officers in the army to man their landholdings, created conditions in the west (in Italy, Gaul, the Balkans, Spain and North Africa) where large numbers of peasants were displaced during the late Republic (opening up more land to large estates, and so on). The displaced yeomen had nowhere to go but the cities, and nothing to do but be discontented--unless they were bought off. This was the situation which created the bread and circuses complex, i.e. politicians like Caesar and Crassus used their wealth and power to provide food, wine, even pork and oil, to the citizens of Rome, and kept them happy by offering them gladiatorial shows, wild beast contests, and chariot racing, all of which cost considerable amounts of money. But money was easy to come by when the empire was young. Caesar went from deeply in debt to one of the wealthiest men in Rome because of his conquests in Gaul. The politicians who could most effectively buy off the hordes were also the ones who ended up with the power.

The nobility were always afraid of the Roman mob, which was one of the reasons why they preferred to retreat to their estates when possible. However, as Marcellinus' account makes clear, there was an easy way to buy the favor of the 'idle and slothful' commons. There were times when Roman leaders in the late Empire tried to curry favor with the mob with only "circuses," however, and that was a miserable failure.

The usurper, Attalus, ruling Rome as a client of the Goths when they surrounded Rome in 409, offered wild beast shows and pageants in the Colosseum in honor of his coronation, but the mob wouldn't have it because he couldn't feed them: the grain ships from Africa refused to dock, because the Goths controlled the port of Ostia.

That was when someone in the crowd began to shout, "Put a price on human flesh!" If they couldn't get grain, maybe they could eat slaves. Even the usurper didn't allow that, but the cry does give some insight into those "idle commons." The resulting near-starvation caused the Visigoths' to sack Rome in 410; they sacked it in frustration, because they couldn't hold the city without any food; they were hungry themselves.

The basic problem was: empire created large numbers of superfluous people. During the height of the Empire, the two hundred years from Caesar to the end of the "Good Emperors" marked by Marcus Aurelius' death in 180, the Mediterranean world saw a major expansion of commerce that employed most of those surplus persons, and even made some of them rich.

By the fifth century, however, commerce had been contracting for centuries, because the empire couldn't physically manage any greater expansion after Hadrian, so it began to contract (no more surplus wealth and new sources of slaves), and then there were civil wars, disease, and the consequent fall in population, especially in the west.

The solution adopted by Diocletian and Constantine, both military men, had been to regiment the entire empire, but that still didn't solve the problem of the idle populations in the cities. Grain shippers were forced to ship grain; bakers were forced to bake bread, and so on, generation after generation (they were born into their positions and couldn't escape them) in order that the dole should be maintained and tax revenues paid. By the same token, aspirants to high office were forced to provide entertainment, to keep the media machine going: to keep the cities happy.

Teams were sent out into the wilds of Germany to trap bears and into the North African deserts to trap lions. Whole regions of North Africa were stripped of wild life for games that were held not only in Rome, but in every significant urban center in both the eastern and western empires. The list only in the west is long enough: Carthage, Cirta and Hippo in North Africa, Treveri, Massilia and Tolosa in Gaul and even in smaller towns like Arles and Nimes; Mediolanum, Ravenna and Neapolis in Italy; Sirmium and Siscia in Illyricum and so on.

Wild beast shows became more important early in the fifth century when gladiatorial games were outlawed by the Church; after all, gladiatorial combat had been fights to the death by professional slaves who had not been condemned to die. The church found them too violent, although the threat of death was always present in the animal shows, one of the things that made them exciting to their audiences, but at least there were other aspects to them, as well. The games didn't have just the big, dangerous beasts, but as many exotic ones as could be found, like hippos, crocodiles and ostriches.

The necessity of the games, is illustrated by a number of accounts (not just one) in which municipal authorities kept the games going even in the midst of sieges by invading barbarians, even when the Vandals, for example, broke down the walls protecting Cirta (in North Africa), and took the city. The authorities feared that the "slothful commons" would erupt in riots if the games were cancelled. Virtually everyone in the city of Cirta was killed or enslaved by the Vandals afterward: one way to deal with a superfluous population, and perhaps one reason why grain yields supposedly increased under early Vandal rule. The point, however, was that the games kept the peace; without them there might well have been revolution.

The format for a wild beast show, known as a venatio, went roughly as follows: the exotic animals were shown first, without predators, then predators--lions, panthers--were introduced to the crowd of impala, let's say, or ostriches, or hippos. Of course the predators had not been fed for a day or more before the games, so they were very hungry. So the crowd would see the thrill of the wild hunt magnified many times over, and in a small space, but when the big cats killed, their handlers prevented them from eating and goaded them to kill more. When the big cats had slaughtered enough (judged by the master handler of the beasts, who could sense if the crowd was getting bored), the rest of the prey (if there were any left alive) were herded off for another day, and new predators, perhaps northern bears, were introduced into the ring. The two groups of predators would have the fresh kills to fight over, and if they preferred not to fight (enough meat for all of us, some pacific bear might feel) then again the handlers would goad them towards each other and force them to fight.

The goal of the game was to end up with only a few of the fiercest animals to face the men, after the big cats, or bears, had finished off all the others. Then, the surviving large toothed, big clawed animals would turn on the handlers; this was the moment the whole crowd waited for. Man against animal. (The bullfight has obviously been derived from this, although a variant of it also goes all the way back to bull dancing in Minoan times on Crete). Men, usually equipped only with lances, would face lions, or bears. These men were disproportionately drawn from the North African tribes; most were captives and enslaved, although there was an account of a high-born Roman who fought the animals, as well. The men were well-trained, but they had no protection. They fought dressed only in short kilts, wearing no armor. Their only protection was their skill and their chosen weapon.

Before the high point of man against beast, in which the man usually won, there was usually a break in the venatio, when the infuriated and frustrated lions or bears would be driven off the field so that condemned prisoners could be forced on to it, or tied to stakes at its center. The beasts would then be driven back into the arena and goaded to maul and dismember the prisoners, but again, not to eat them. Big cats and bears are unlikely to fight well if they have just fed. They would again be driven off to their cages, the arena would be cleaned, the scattered body parts would be raked up and fresh sand would be strewn to cover the gore. Only then would the beasts be ushered in for the last act.

Yes, sometimes the bestiarii (that's what they were called) would be killed and the lion or bear or tiger would be left standing; that was almost as satisfying to the crowd as their favorite chariot team coming in first.

Venationes were staged in the coliseums, chariot races were staged in race courses like Circus Maximus. In Constantinople, the chariot races continued long after the venatio was no longer possible, long after Rome had fallen; after all, you didn't need a continuously renewable supply of horses and chariot racers; it was a more sustainable entertainment, not a continuously depleting one. There was danger, death and violence in the chariot races, too. Racers fought each other, caused their competitors to crash, tried to disable each other's horses, and so on. Perennial winners became urban heroes.

In both capitals (Rome and Constantinople) the racing colors of the teams became organizing gang colors in the cities. Since Blues and Greens were the perennial favorites in both cities, blue and green gangs controlled the streets, and fought each other for turf. Remember, there were no established police. There were urban cohorts, and vigiles which were essentially fire brigades, and there were military forces like the Praetorian Guard, which could be called upon if there were widespread, politically threatening disturbances, but actual law enforcement was in the hands of the people. That meant, in the fifth century, in the hands of the gangs.

While there were no newspapers, no radio, no TV, there was a news system of a sort; it was the entertainment offered in the coliseums and the race courses; it was, of course, propaganda for the rulers, since they appeared in the Imperial box, or as serried ranks of officials appearing around the place of honor, giving the power of Empire a visual presence. Officials wore uniforms of a sort, long robes, or paenulae, that were embroidered with special borders and emblems signifying their particular office, as well as military belts, highly ornamented, and brightly colored cloaks, so serried ranks of them would be quite impressive. At large gatherings there were also the panegyrists like Ausonius and Claudian, who offered panegyrics (or paeans) of praise to their patrons.

By the fifth century, there were also the churches, and the bishops played highly political roles instructing their flocks, and sometimes, as with St. Ambrose, putting the rulers in their place. Theodosius (the Great) supposedly had to do public penance at the cathedral in Mediolanum (Milan), for preventing the destruction of pagan temples, as represented in the following decree issued in 382:

We decree that the temple shall continually be open…and now is for the common use of the people, and in which images are reported to have been placed which must be measured by the value of their art rather than by their divinity…16.10.8 Theodosian Code, 382.

Instead he was forced by Ambrose to decree in 391:

No person shall pollute himself with sacrificial animals…no person shall approach the shrines, shall wander through the temples, or revere the images formed by mortal labor, lest he become guilty by divine and human laws. 16.10.10 Theodosian Code 391.

It was this decree that enabled Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria to unleash a mob on the Serapeum, the greatest shrine in Egypt, a shrine to the bull Apis; it housed the great library as well; temple and library were largely destroyed in the battle in which pagans tried to defend the shrine and Christians attacked. Christians prevailed. It is certain that news of the destruction of the Serapeum spread all over the Empire, fed, probably, by sermons in churches. As a consequence, other temples were converted into churches, their images destroyed, and many temples were simply torn down. This was how news spread in the fifth century.

There was also an instance, in Antioch, when Emperor Theodosius set the stage for an unlettered monk to plead for the city's forgiveness on behalf of the bishop. (Antioch had rioted and overturned the Imperial statues in 387, a treasonous crime, which could have resulted in a punitive city-wide massacre on behalf of the Emperor). Theodosius chose to receive the pleadings of the monk, through the Bishop, instead of listening to the city's commissioners, or its pagan philosopher. By doing this, he gave the church power superior to that of the civilian officials or the (until then) honored philosopher. Theodosius was a Christian, but not a fanatic (he had wanted to preserve the art in the temples, after all). What he saw, however, was that the church was the most vital institution on the horizon, and through it he could more directly communicate with his subjects than he could through the more formal hierarchy of government officialdom. Communications and entertainment merged for believers, who didn't go to the games and races, or at least were urged to avoid them, judging from the sermons and letters of Salvian and Augustine, for example; instead believers went to church, especially to the high holy days and to events like the adventus, sometimes presided over by the Emperor, or assembled officials. These were celebrations for the installation of relics, for example, of newly discovered or recovered martyrs and saints. They were expected to protect the city, and/or the empire from its enemies. This was the period when relic production began to be important for the church, especially in the West.

Another, very different form of communication was theatrical productions, and some of these were covertly political. While Romans during the height of Empire probably preferred ponderous tragedies impressively staged, with realistic sets, they also had the mime and pantomime. By the fifth century, mime was frowned upon by the Church; it was satirical, iconoclastic and graphic sexually (Emperor Elagabulus in the third century had insisted on real sex acts). Nevertheless it apparently survived at least into the 6th century in the east, because female actors did not appear in the other forms of theater, and yet Empress Theodora, Emperor Justinian's wife, began her career as a star actress in Constantinople. She had to renounce her craft when she married Justinian (527-565). To give an idea of the breadth of theatrical performances in the Empire, there were at least 125 permanent theaters built, most built long after the few plays had been written.

Only a few comedies survive (27), by Terence and Plautus, written in the late Republic. However, comedy, in the form of mime, was largely improvised within certain rules, making use of certain stock characters, which enabled comment on current events. The stock characters included a loud braggart, a foolish old man and a swindler or drunkard. These evolved into a knave, a glutton and a stupid husband. Fools had shaven heads and wore patchwork tunics, while the others wore whatever was in fashion. Unlike the pantomime, the actors did speak, and they did not wear masks. Because mimes were critical of the church and satirized Mass and the cupidity of priests, as well as being coarse and vulgar, the emerging church did everything it could to discourage and repress mime, refusing communion to its performers, and eventually even to its audiences. Yet mime apparently persisted in medieval Europe in the traveling troupes that performed in marketplaces and open spaces in the towns.

What is important about mime is that it was one of the few sources of information and opinion we know about in the fifth century that was not necessarily supportive of the status quo. In the pagan period, however, it had occasionally been sponsored by, or attended by Emperors. When the empire became Christian, mime lost official favor, but it had always been mildly subversive.

A mime performance would strike us today as being more like a circus than a play, however, since it also included beast shows, tightrope walkers and acrobats. As with other forms of Roman entertainment, it was often violent and coarse, although not usually dangerous to its performers.

Today we have a much greater range of entertainment, and yet, if you look below the surfaces, some similarities will be revealed.

We do not have wild beast shows, or gladiatorial shows, but we do have football, baseball, basketball and hockey and races of all kinds. In a way, modern games play a similar role to the games and races in Rome. Entertainment diverts, often from real everyday troubles. That may be why American cities are more willing to raise money, and forego taxes, in order to finance stadiums for their "ball clubs," than they are to feed the poor or house the homeless. Roman amphitheaters and coliseums set aside separate boxes for the Emperor, or high local officials; American stadiums have skyboxes for the very wealthy, or large corporations.

While Roman citizens identified with one or another chariot racing color, and organized their cities around those loyalties, we have whole regions expressing loyalty to a baseball or football team, like New Englanders as sturdy fans of the Boston Red Sox; they also express collective rivalry and resentment of New Yorkers because of their insufferable Yankees.

Roman Senators and Emperors and lesser officialdom "gave" the games, races, etc. to Romans, Carthaginians and so on, in order to mollify the mob and to gain its loyalty. Moderns have discovered, however, that they can make large amounts of money on the teams and can also gain support through sponsorship of teams, or stadiums while doing so. As I pointed out previously, the Texas Rangers was George W. Bush's first successful business venture, because he became known throughout Texas for promoting the state's unofficial team. It wasn't that he made money--he collected it for building a new stadium--but that he became associated with the local big league team. Another Republican who has also parleyed sports into a political career is Mit Romney, the current governor of Massachusetts, formerly known only for putting on the Winter Olympics in Utah.

And then, of course we have Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwartnegger, actors who parleyed their acting fame into political careers.

Of course our entertainment media are much more extensive and various than was available even at Rome's height. Most games, races and many plays were staged in Rome for its various seasonal festivals, but we have hundreds of entertainment channels on TV, and of course they go on 24/7 as we now so elegantly put it. You need never have to entertain yourself.

But, ask yourself: how many of our entertainment and news outlets are any less subservient to power than were the media in the fifth century? When mass anger boiled over against a general, Stilicho, who had controlled Emperor Honorius for years, even the sugarcoating of his panegyrist could not protect him; he was executed by the Emperor, who also approved a pogrom against foreigners and Jews, because Stilicho had been a German. When mass anger finally began to ignite over the torture in Abu Ghraib, when the details of how the Bush administration hyped intelligence to lead us into Iraq and how Republicans used fraud to enrich themselves and help their friends, then the mass media began to cover the stories--the way it did not until then. It had ignored stories of the British memo detailing Bush's plan to "fix" intelligence around its war policy, and had instead carried stories about a "runaway bride."

When 60 minutes's Dan Rather and Newsweek ran stories that revealed, respectively how Bush had avoided duty in Vietnam, and how guards at Guantànamo had abused the Quran, the response of the administration's allies was predictable: attacking the stories' veracity, because they had been inaccurate in minor details. What was more revealing was the response of the news organizations: 60 Minutes retracted the story, and went on to fire some of its top executives responsible for it, because Viacom, a mass media conglomerate and the network owner, wanted to remain on the good side of the administration.

Meanwhile, Newsweek was vilified by the rest of the press, and later retracted its story, even though the Pentagon itself announced (on a Friday afternoon when few pay attention) that there had been abuse of the Quran in Guantànamo, and in other US military prisons; it just hadn't been flushed down the toilet.

There have been well-documented stories, too, of how the networks have pulled stories for fear of offending their sponsors, or their owners, like the 1995 story that would have run on 60 Minutes on big tobacco company Brown & Williamson's knowledge of the addictive and harmful effects of cigarettes, and its collusion in covering up the evidence; after all CBS and its owners had substantial ownership interests in the corporation. One of CBS's lawyers told the show's producer, "The corporation will not risk its assets on the story."

There are a multitude of stories on murders, on celebrity trials like that of Michael Jackson, but very few stories on the widespread use and the terrible effects of depleted uranium, both on Iraqis and American soldiers. Why? Because the media understand why they exist, just as the circuses and chariot races existed in the fifth century, for the purpose of validating the system: government, corporate "free enterprise, free (corporate) trade" and the current disposition of power and wealth that favors them. To do that, government power, and government access is essential.

We do have public media in the US, public TV and public radio, in part subsidized by the government, in large part paid for by subscribers and "sponsors." In many other countries "public media" means government-controlled media. In Venezuela, there are four private TV networks and one government-controlled network. At least as of this writing, the private networks have been allowed to continue to exist and prosper, despite their unconcealed hatred of the government led by Hugo Chavez. What you have in a country like Venezuela is an information system that is almost entirely adversarial: the private networks vent anti-government news day in, day out; the government controlled network heralds government successes, and gives an outlet to Chavez's 3-hour speeches and the favorable comments of his supporters. It is probably only a matter of time before Chavez attempts to curtail or close down some of the private networks. What may prevent him from doing so is not only fear of international public opinion, but the realization that the dwindling middle class can still turn out in the hundreds of thousands to protest such an action, and could still have some effect on the inflow of international investment. The high price of oil may insulate him somewhat, however, since Venezuela's government is minting money from its oil production (nationally owned for decades).

I bring up the Venezuelan case, because our own "news" media has been more and more recast in similar terms. According to Bill Moyers, for example, the reason that his program, NOW, was attacked by the Republican head of the CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting), was that it was not going along with

the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

In fact, a survey by the Congressional Research Service led Congressman Conyers to conclude that the newer, and less regulated private cable news media preferred to run "inconsequential stories" to those that would show the government in a negative light. Meanwhile, information has surfaced that government departments are substantially involved in producing feel-good stories that appear to be news stories, although they are really government advertising, despite laws prohibiting government from such activity, and that many local stations have run these stories without attribution. Further, the Bush administration has been caught paying news commentators, presumably to encourage their already pro-Bush sentiments. It even (temporarily) scandalized the Washington press corps, by planting a former male escort as a newsman in presidential press conferences, so that he could lob the president soft and easy questions when he was being hounded by unpleasant ones.

We look back at the Watergate era, and the role the media played in it with some nostalgia, but this is a different era, and control of the media is very different than it was in the 1970's. Back then there were four broadcast TV networks, to be sure, but media consolidation had not yet taken place. Today, seven huge global corporations control the vast majority of media outlets, from book publishing to movies, to radio and from TV channels and cable outlets to sports teams, and Internet corporations. The smallest of these corporations, News Corp has revenues of $17.5 billion, the largest, GE, has revenues of $134.2 billion, although a substantial portion of that is from its industrial products and its defense-related industries. Which points up an interesting fact: GE, the largest US defense contractor, also owns NBC, as well as CNBC, MSNBC and Universal Pictures. It is hardly likely to be critical of war policy, then, is it?

Since the 7 media mega-corporations have common interests in protecting their huge properties and in maintaining government cooperation, it is unlikely that any of them would go out of their way to present a critical view of power, either of government power, or of corporate power. In other words, on a much larger scale, they again play the role that panegyrics and the games played in the fifth century. News Corp, for example, has much to gain by government favor; with a more cooperative Federal Communications Commission under Bush, it is allowed to buy up more TV outlets and more newspapers in the same cities, thereby gaining more and more power in those "media outlets." This same corporation has also established a modus vivendi with the Communist government of China, thereby gaining access to the huge and growing Chinese market, while providing channels for pro-government entertainment and propaganda.

To gain some idea of the comprehensiveness of these media giants, look at one that few have ever heard of: Bertelsmann. The German-based company owns Random House the largest US and world book publisher, which also includes Doubleday, Bantam/Dell, Knopf and Crown; it owns RTL, the largest TV company in Europe, Gruner & Jahr, a largely European magazine division, BMG one of the biggest music companies in the world, Arvato one of the largest printing and service providers, and Direct Group which owns, among other things Bertelsmann Book Club in China. Other media company subsidiaries may be more familiar: Viacom owns CBS and UPN networks, over 35 TV stations, MTV, Showtime, Nickelodeon, BET, Paramount Pictures, Blockbuster Video, over 175 radio stations, Simon & Schuster, and vast billboard holdings.

While the media corporations claim that they provide objective news and information, their readiness to parrot the government line on Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction and links to Al Qaeda, their relentlessly up-beat reporting of the Iraq war, do seem to indicate otherwise. News (mostly on the Internet) that President Bush had to be persuaded by British Prime Minister Blair not to bomb Al Jazeera's TV headquarters in Qatar (a US ally), points out how critical the pro-government role of the corporate media can be. Al Jazeera is a truly independent news source on the Middle East; it does not subscribe to either a pro or anti-American point of view, but it has offered images of the destruction wrought by US and allied forces, and has provided a medium for the videos of terrorists and Al Qaeda not as an advocate, but as a news outlet. The President reportedly wished to eradicate them. Another indicator: Fox News, owned by News Corp, refused to run an ad against the extremely conservative Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, even though it says its news is "fair and balanced." On the other hand, it has run advocacy ads for the Republican-sponsored Medicare reform act. Another example: the Democratic National Committee gathered many small donations to put up billboards chiding a Republican Congresswoman for her remarks in Congress to Congressman Murtha (a retired Marine officer with many medals for heroism) impugning his patriotism. The billboard company owning almost all the billboards in the district (Lamar) signed a contract for the ads, but then retracted it, citing the ad's content, and refused to carry the advertisements.

While Internet promoters have heralded the democracy of the world-wide web, and have pointed to it as an answer to the consolidation of the conventional media, recent developments make it much less likely that such a subversive source of information and entertainment will long endure. In a 6 to 3 decision on June 27, 2005, the US Supreme Court ruled in National Cable & Telecommunications Association vs. Brand X Internet Services, that large cable companies like Comcast and Verizon did not have to share their cables with other service providers, as the Telecommunications Act seemed to require, but rather that cable was not a telecommunications service at all, but an information service that did not come under the telecommunications act. The arguments written by Clarence Thomas may be tortured, but the results are clear. The court handed the large corporations the means to control Internet access on cable, and it is likely that the FCC, author of the ruling from which the court derived its arguments, will rule that DSL, the digital service offered by telephone companies will likewise be exempted from the common carrier provisions of the telecommunications act, and satellite, as well. After all, DSL does the same thing as cable Internet. The arguments are technical, but clearly the large media corporations have gotten their way, and if they, in future, wish to restrict access to all but paying members of the web, or to only "acceptable" sources of information, they will easily be able to do so, through filtering technology, which is now becoming more and more sophisticated.

In other words, because of the control of the FCC by the Bush administration, because the administration was essentially a mouthpiece of the interests of large corporations, and because the FCC under its Republican chairman ruled in favor of the large media conglomerates, the one source of independent information that everyone has touted as a great boon to US and world democratic ideas, will soon be as much under large corporate control as is every other communications medium. After all, who really wants to go back to dial-up?

No wonder that members of the putative opposition party in the United States were reluctant in 2005 to take bold and populist ideas, such as getting out of Iraq as soon as possible. After all, the media conglomerates and their corporate allies have substantial interests in continuing the war, or at least in maintaining US control of large parts of the occupied country. Under the circumstances, even if the war is increasingly unpopular, taking an unambiguous stand against it could work to the disadvantage of presidential "hopefuls" like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. They might not even be covered by the media giants, their ads might be rejected by Fox, and we might not even be able to read about them on the "world-wide web."

If this seems far-fetched, let us consider the control of information in the late Empire and what effect that had on the Empire's survival. In the fifth century, about the only possibly independent sources of news was word of mouth. When Rome was sacked in 410, the nearest thing to a contemporary account was written by Saint Jerome, in anguish that his city had been violated, writing about it almost a year later; he lived in the desert, in Syria, and he heard about it from refugees. By the time of Jerome's account, the Empire was going about its business almost as if nothing had happened. The Visigoths had left Italy in search of food in Gaul, and eventually took over a large swathe of that province in the Southeast, centered on Tolosa (modern Toulouse). It was long after Alaric's sack, and even after the much worse sack of Rome carried out by the Vandals in 455 that Sidonius wrote a fulsome panegyric for Emperor Avitus, and then another--to regain favor--when Majorian succeeded Avitus' disgrace. Sidonius's poems and many other official documents of the period hardly reflect the chaos that was ongoing in the western Empire. To put it in contemporary terms: it is as if you had only the government manufactured "news stories" coming out of the Bush administration's departments, had only the officially sanctioned soldiers' accounts in Iraq, telling of their "successes," and thanking the president, but you had an inkling that things were going wrong, because you spoke to refugees from the carnage.

In the fifth century, the effect of this news black-out was to continue business as usual, trundling on to 476 as if the Empire would last forever. Since the only politically active people in the system were the Senators and comparable elites, any unrest among the masses was inchoate and easily suppressed. I noted earlier the incident in the East, when Emperor Theodosius agreed to listen to a monk plead for Antioch, thereby winning an imperial reprieve for the city, but another city, Thessalonica, in northern Greece, did sustain an imperially ordered massacre, in retaliation for its impudence. Just to spell it out so there is no ambiguity, Emperor Theodosius ordered his army to march to Thessalonica and to massacre its inhabitants, to punish the city for anti-imperial demonstrations. So, it is not surprising that people did not rebel, even when the western Empire was everywhere crashing around their ears.

I hope something like Thessalonica would not be possible in our era, but one reason it is not, at least so far, is that people are politically more aware and active, and they still do have access, sooner or later, to information about what is going on. During the last years of the USSR, attempts to control the information available through the media to its citizens resulted in a paradox that helped to bring down the Soviet empire--because it was in the 20th century, not the 5th. By the late 1980's, Soviet citizens did not believe anything their media told them, and tended to believe the opposite: if the government said it was winning the war in Afghanistan, people believed it was losing, which turned out to be true; if the news media said it was uprooting corruption and graft, citizens knew that graft was getting worse. What the people didn't know was that the overthrow of the USSR would impoverish the whole system, that the "free market" would leave the vast majority of them much poorer. And ultimately, with Putin, any "democracy" they have gotten is probably going away.

The scary thing is that the people who may want to influence Americans through manipulated media have probably learned from the Soviet debacle. Our system of information control is so much more sophisticated and subtle than the Soviet system. If there is censorship, it is not official; it is private, in the control of those seven media conglomerates. That excludes the media outside "the mainstream," like the "blogosphere," the news magazines that hang on with slender budgets, and small presses who publish books like this one, maybe even a few radio stations. In the Soviet system there were the samizdats passing from hand to hand. Now, in the US, there are blogs and radical newsweeklies. As I pointed out above, however, even the Internet is not safe from government/corporate control.

But, if government can cover up its mistakes, and persuade most people through continually repeated distortions in the media, then it will be attempting to follow the fifth century model. An egregious example: Saddam supported Palestinian terror groups, but opposed al Qaeda because it threatened his secular regime; so it was easy for administration sources to fudge: they said he supported "terrorism," and therefore al Qaeda, and said he probably was implicated in 9/11, which then provided one of two justifications for attacking him.

The other claim broadcast by the compliant media, that Iraq had or was developing WMD's was made up out of forgeries and selective reading of questionable intelligence, but large majorities of the nation were convinced that both claims were true until years after the war had been launched. It is easier to mislead people when they are only half-listening anyway. Our media tends to lull the vast majority of people into apathy. Even if it weren't designed to put us to sleep, or keep us at home and "privatize" our lives, this characteristic of the mass media has proven very politically useful.

We can only hope that reality will intrude into our media, that manipulation will not prove possible in the long run, and that people will wake up. Indictments of top White House aides, investigations of intelligence distortion, of corruption, and of outright incompetence will come out in the media, here and there, and may yet catch people's attention. Americans are not yet as beaten down and ignorant as were the mass of people in the fifth century. Let's hope we can stop the oligarchs before they become so.

For more complete chapters, click here.