Title Track

I don’t think I’ve ever explained the title of my blog. I don’t know if I need to, but I do like to show off how smart I am, so I figure I’d might as well.

I’m a sucker for classical references. (See the “I do like to show off how smart I am” comment above.) I’ll allow Wikipedia to explain:

During the Roman republic, the river Rubicon marked the boundary between the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul to the northeast and Italy proper, controlled directly by Rome and its socii (allies), to the south.

In other words, Italy was the Roman “Homeland.”

Governors of Roman provinces were appointed promagistrates with imperium (roughly, "right to command") in their province(s). The governor would then serve as the general of the Roman army within the territory of his province(s). Roman law specified that only the elected magistrates (consuls and praetors) could hold imperium within Italy. Any promagistrate who entered Italy at the head of his troops forfeited his imperium and was therefore no longer legally allowed to command troops.

(There's a gap between these excerpts, but I forgot how to indicate that in MLA style. So much for that $100,000 English degree!)

Exercising imperium when forbidden by the law was a capital offense. Furthermore, obeying the commands of a general who did not legally possess imperium was also a capital offense. If a general entered Italy while exercising command of an army, both the general and his soldiers became outlaws and were automatically condemned to death. Generals were thus obliged to disband their armies before entering Italy.

Eventually, someone had to come along and break that rule. In this case, that someone was Julius Caesar.

In 49 BCE, perhaps on January 10, Julius Caesar led a single legion, Legio XIII Gemina, south over the Rubicon from Cisalpine Gaul to Italy to make his way to Rome. In doing so, he deliberately broke the law on imperium and made armed conflict inevitable.

From that daring defiance of “political norms,” you might say, we get the following expression.

The phrase "crossing the Rubicon" has survived to refer to any individual or group committing itself irrevocably to a risky or revolutionary course of action, similar to the modern phrase "passing the point of no return."

“Passing the point of no return” is often used in political rhetoric. We’re told that once X happens, there’ll be no going back. For instance, we were told that once ObamaCare took effect, “death panels” would be established to decide the fate of your Dear Old Granny. (You might even call this an “Obama-scare tactic.” If you were a total dork.)

Conversely, we Minnesotans were told that passage of the conceal-and-carry gun law would transform our state into a shooting gallery reminiscent of the Wild West. I’m still not crazy about that law, but I have to admit that the nightmare scenarios sketched out by my fellow Leftists and Liberals have not come to pass.

Terrible consequences are attached to a proposed change in public policy in order to discourage people from supporting that change. Opponents argue that the new policy represents a dramatic shift in the direction of society that will lead us down an evil path. These are usually exaggerations or outright falsehoods meant to distract us from more plausible outcomes of the change.

But the primary deception is inherent in the rhetorical device. It’s the insistence that the change is irreversible. In reality, very few government policies fall into this category. Even Prohibition was repealed, and that created a massive new division of law enforcement, the Bureau of Prohibition. Despite all the effort the federal government put into Prohibition, it abandoned that crusade as soon as the law was revoked, and, since then, the social stigma of drinking has significantly declined.

So, even if the new policy is a disaster, it can almost always be reversed. This should be the default assumption in our society. We live in a country where huge buildings are built and then torn down a few years later, only to be replaced by something bigger and more disposable.

I’m not sure why the “There’s no going back” argument carries any weight with us. It may be our progressive vision of history, the belief that society only moves in one direction: “forward.” That would seem to preclude the possibility of undoing anything that achieves official approval. But it ignores the many failures that fall by the wayside on the Road to Utopia.

However, we may have finally reached that point of no return with respect to some very important markers. As I’ve written many times before, resource depletion and climate change are two issues in which reversing course may not be an option. There’s no sign of any energy sources capable of fully replacing fossil fuels, and humanity may have already condemned itself to an inhospitable future on this planet.

But, on the bright side, there’ll still be plenty of time for me to blog about all this death and destruction!

Then what does it mean to “ride” the Rubicon? I think of it as riding the fence. In most cases, I reject the assertion that we’ve reached a point of no return, and I reserve the right to take my time to make up my mind. This usually means doing nothing, but, in our crazy, fast-paced, instant oatmeal, get-things-done-yesterday world, I think doing nothing is underrated.

It’s also a subtle jab at myself to get off my ass and start “walking my talk.” I hypnotize myself with arguments for and against, maintaining an illusion of indecision, when all I’m really trying to do is make excuses so I don’t have to do the hard things, the things that I already believe are the right and best things for me to do.

The main inspiration for the title, though, was a book written by Mike Ruppert. I started the blog in the fall of 2005, after I’d mostly gotten over a mild-ish nervous breakdown that started in February of that year. (Yeah, I’m not sure what a “mild-ish nervous breakdown” is either. For me, it meant sleeping 4 hours a night instead of my usual 7-8 and being exhausted and freaked-out all the time because I thought civilization was about to collapse into a Mad Max-type situation.)

This breakdown was triggered by learning about Peak Oil in an extremely alarmist way. Mr. Ruppert had a website at the time, From the Wilderness, that fed my paranoid fantasies. It was the ultimate in “doomer porn,” full of articles that reinforced my belief that nefarious forces were operating behind the scenes to guarantee a bloody apocalypse for the World As We Knew It.

I donated a few hundred dollars to the website and bought his book, Crossing the Rubicon, a hefty tome that details his criminal case against the George W. Bush Administration for causing 9/11. I read it and found it (Shocker!) very convincing.

By the time I started the blog that fall, I’d stepped back from the brink of apocalypse. I still didn’t like humanity’s chances of dodging the Peak Oil bullet, but I could at least entertain the possibility of hope long enough to get a good night’s sleep. I remained on the 9/11 Truther bandwagon though, so I was totally down with referencing Mr. Ruppert’s book in my blog title. It took at least a year for me to let go of my faith in the “inside job” narrative.

Not that surprisingly, Mr. Ruppert committed suicide a few years ago. He seemed to be a highly intelligent person given to paranoia. I was sad to hear of his death, but I knew that, in the end, he made the only “rational” decision left for a Doomer. From my time in that headspace, I know how suicide can seem like the only humane and honorable way out.

I think going down the Doomer rabbit-hole is a big reason why I started blogging. It was such an extreme emotional rollercoaster ride that bouncing back from it must’ve given me the confidence to post my writing online. (At the time, it felt like a big risk.) But I was eager to get off the rollercoaster. Apparently, Mr. Ruppert wasn’t able to do that.

“Riding the Rubicon” could also mean riding that rollercoaster of emotion and indecision, being suspended between safety and danger, sick of the status quo but not yet willing to upset the balance of power. Whatever definition works for you, I’d go with that.