The New Dark Ages.

Our government is flooding the airwaves. It is a clear strategy. Before a reaction can be formulated to one news segment another begins. Before the implications of roving bands of Gestapo-like police forces shipping alleged illegal immigrants to foreign gulags, without trial, can be considered, those police forces are joined by the National Guard to place cities governed by the political opposition under effective martial law. At the same time, the country's president, family and allies, rake in billions of dollars from businessmen throughout the world seeking favors.

You might ask (I might ask myself), then, why am I reading Thompson's The Medieval Library (1939)? Why would I be refreshing my memory of how there were 28 major libraries in the mid-4^th century B.C.E. city of Rome and 100 years later there might have been one. In a world in which we each are bombarded by stimuli, to begin with, anything an old fashion book might have to offer, no matter how wise, can only come much too late to answer any particular affront. It is made inconsequential in a moment by a executive order or even a social media meme.

It was the beginning of the “Dark Ages” — the mid-4^th century B.C.E. Books (actually scrolls, in those days) and even a few institutional libraries continued to exist but they were rare. Personal libraries were formed from the remains of late classical libraries in a manner not unlike the public library book sales so common in our own recent decades. The agents of wealthy bibliophiles would sift through ruins, as well, at every opportunity, in search of volumes. Upon their owners' deaths most volumes that were not destroyed moldered in a corner of one or another dilapidated building.

In the midst of all of this, the lands of the west were ruled by men marginally literate if at all. The Roman Empire had fallen into the hands of the barbarians. The pagan schools were disappearing along with the libraries. Those that replaced them were under the auspices of a new Roman professional class known as Christian clerics. They were monastic and cathedral schools. It would be centuries before the subjects in their libraries would expand beyond Christian histories, books of monastic rules and ritual practices, hagiographic biographies, etc.

But those libraries did come in time to include recovered texts in classical Greek and Latin — languages that no one any longer spoke as a first language. Their presence in the libraries was controversial and cherished. Together with classical texts recovered by Muslim scholars, they would be a major factor in the advent of the Renaissance nearly 1000 years later.

The exceptions to the above rules were the academies within the major cities for the maintenance of the secular laws. These were largely pagan laws but highly functional and absolutely essential for the maintenance of order and of trade. The professors and students in the academies might be pagans (early during the Dark Ages) or Christians.

Even in the Dark Ages there needed to be laws. In cities, anyway, where business was still transacted, still vitally important. Though the powerful might brush them aside, chaos was the price of doing so. Foreign traders would avoid the city too intent on turning trade into pilfer, tariff into extortion. Local artisans would lose business and have to close up shop.

There is more than a passing argument that the United States has been in decline for half a century now. A short period of time compared to the decline of the Roman Empire but then our history is lived in a world that proceeds at an ever faster pace.

The new barbarians are led by a tiny ultra-Wealthy elite who have recruited their numbers in order to be electable. Wealthy elites and their servants being far too few to win elections, plans were made, over decades, to coöpt disaffected groups through whatever means necessary. Once sufficiently in power, the plan was to use democracy to dismantle itself.

The new administrative class for the Ultra-Wealthy is not dominated by Christians. The Christians are now generally counted among the barbarians. The administrators do, however, commonly claim to be Old Testament Christians in order to justify the neutralization of “heretics” who would resist their seizure of the vast wealth and power of the country. Also in order to maintain the numbers to get elected again should it prove necessary.

The members of the new administrative class who gather under the umbrella of the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have diligently done their reading in law for many years. Intending to pervert the law, in pursuit of wealth and power, they have made themselves exceptionally well versed in the law.

While they have done this they have captured the astonishing new technologies of our time. The disaffected citizen is no longer a private man or woman of rumored name and vague description. Every detail of their life is on file. Their face is digitized from thousands of encounters with security cameras. Facial recognition computer programs can recognize them from all others.

A small but essential minority — the Democrats in Congress of various ability, their staffs and names like Mark Elias, Democracy Forward, Legal Aid, the American Civil Liberties Union, etc. — identifying with the general population, has also spent long tedious hours in libraries reading heavy tomes of law, science, etc., building up stores of functional knowledge, and now find themselves the last hope of a people courageously fighting back with smart-phone videos and social media memes.

In the Dark Ages, the people would eventually rise up if things got too bad. We are in a new Dark Age, of sorts, similarly tyrannical and plague ridden. For all of our libraries — all of our books physical and digital — we effectively have no libraries, no books, if the hurricane-force winds of our time and place make it impossible to read them.

Human nature having changed little, many are demanding we rise up. But the powers of the tyrant have grown enormously. His weapons are truly daunting. He is taunting us in hopes that we will rise up and he can give his tyranny the color of law. There is only one power that can overcome this tyrant. It is himself. And he is doing a fine job of it (with the help of our essential minority). But it will take time. And we will have to accept that we live in a changed world. We, too, will have to change.

Also from the Virtual Vanaprastha:

• Donald Trump and the Donald Trump Show starring Donald Trump. July 6, 2025. "Fate gave him a large inheritance, mediocre business prowess and the wiles to realize that his genius lay in opportunism, self-promotion and the ability to manipulate others."
• Harvard and Columbia: What Stephen Miller, Russ Vought and the Heritage Foundation Know. June 2, 2025. "beginning with the stock market crash of 1929, they discovered that not all of the Progressive activists that had supposedly been swept away had actually disappeared."
• Shelving the books in a dying democracy. March 24, 2025. "I only now begin to shelve books, in fits and starts, with the scenes I am seeing replaying over and over as I do."
• Public Health Alert: Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025. February 17, 2025. "It is now running rampant through the body politic furiously working to hollow out its institutions and shift taxation..."
• Be sure to check out the The Donald Trump Show Hyperlinked Index Page to browse the episodes to date.