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... This reminds me about a story of a poor Indian farmer who could only afford to buy one loaf of bread every week to feed his family. On the other hand his master could afford to buy many loaves plus meat, vegetables, rice and cake. Things [got] worse; the farmer was mad at his master for sleeping with his daughter and refused to plant the wheat crop to punish his master, causing the price of bread to double, [then] treble. The poor man could not afford a loaf and his children died of hunger. The master [was] still rich, complained about the inflationary price but bought a loaf of bread every day. The farmer's wife got mad at her husband for not making any money from selling the crop, so she went to see his master and asked for a loan. He agreed but on the condition that she would have to go to bed with him. So the wife bought two loaves of bread, vegetables and rice and a cake with the money. At the dinner table, the farmer told his wife that his decision not to grow wheat was wise, after all. The wife smiled and told him to enjoy his dinner because often decisions have unintended consequences.

Americans need a higher threshold for horror. Tragedies sometimes must play themselves out, and the losers must be allowed to lose. Whole peoples can go bad, and sometimes it is necessary to prevent them from doing evil by winnowing their ranks.

These stories about Rome's enemies and its shortcomings did not belittle Rome. Instead, they made it even bigger: it was an empire that managed to overcome and triumph over great difficulties and setbacks. In a way, the same tradition is preserved in present American journalism and contemporary history, where writers go to great lengths to detail American problems and to ultimately show the triumph of the "good American empire". This history is more convincing, especially in a culturally permeable world, because it does not rule out competing visions, and therefore it sounds real. Furthermore, with the final Roman victory, it proves the ultimate greatness of Rome because it was able to overcome all its troubles. The same did not happen in China, where the official history covers all but convinces few ...

"Southerners thought of themselves as an oppressed people, the descendants of Scots-Irish immigrants driven out of their Celtic homelands by the English, flying the X-shaped cross of Scotland's patron saint in the Confederate battle flag, redolent of Scotland's "Lost Cause". The self-pity of the South pervades American popular culture, from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, to The Band's bathetic song, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. It is best known in the cover version by Joan Baez, an old civil rights campaigner. Such is the pull of identity politics."