Day Late and Dollar Short - Claude Rains, Shaw, and G.W. Bush

Bear with me as I take you into a thicket. I must mention first that Turner Classic Movies is running its 31 days of Oscar program this month. Second, I noticed that last night they were running the film version of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. I had seen a bit of this years ago and decided I was going to finally see it all. (A person has got to watch more than the election returns on MSNBC - and with a remote, I can switch channels).

Claude Rains does a great job as Caesar and Vivian Leigh is pretty darned good as Cleopatra (even if I thought I heard an echo of Miss Scarlett...). Rains's Caesar comes across as a pretty lick fellow. Then somewhere between watching Vivian Leigh in Egyptian costume and hearing election returns a word pops up in my m mind - caesarism.

Being more than a bit dozy, I got on this computer and searched Wikipedia for something on caesarism. Not much good, for what Wikipedia gave me was an entry for Spengler's Decline of The West. I never read Spengler - he was pretty much out of favor when I got to college. Well, Wikipedia had this to say about Spengler and caesarism:

Caesarism is essentially the death of the spirit that originally animated a nation and its institutions. It is marked by a government which is formless irrespective of its de jure constitutional structure. The antique forms are dead, despite the careful maintenance of the institutions; those institutions now have no meaning or weight. The only aspect of governance is the personal power exercised by the Caesar. This is the beginning of the Imperial Age.

Hmmm, my sleep deprived brain leapt to Bush and Cheney. For all the hand wringing over the-less-than-dynamic-duo's fascist tendencies, fascism never seemed like a good fit for them. Fascism required too many ideas and Bush never seemed congenial to ideas.

Looking for a bit more on caesarism, I looked to Yahoo search. Which lead me to Presidential Caesarism: the Executive versus the Bureaucracy from Balkinization. So I find that someone else made that leap to Bush and caesarism.

Then I went back to Claude and Vivian while Obama stormed his way around the Chesapeake Bay.