A Compact Between the Ears

The head squirrel in Abattoir Hall at Enema U just sent out a letter to all the students asking for input about President Trump’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.  Every university is supposed to sign this if they want to continue receiving “preferential treatment” for university funding.  I’m not sure exactly who is supposed to keep track of all this since the current plan is to abolish the Department of Education.

I’m also not sure why I got the email since I graduated last May—again—but apparently, I’m still on the student mailing list.

For new readers, a quick note: I retired from Enema U after a long stretch teaching history. Then I discovered retirees could take classes tuition-free, so I went back and picked up a few more undergraduate degrees in various subjects. This semester, I’m back part-time in my old department, teaching a history course.  As for next semester — no idea:  Maybe I’ll take pottery…Or quantum mechanics?

Anyway, the university wants comments on this “compact,” and since no one asked for mine, I’m happy to supply them.  Let’s take this masterpiece one section at a time.

1.        Equality of Admissions.  Prohibits consideration of sex, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, and political views or proxies thereof in admissions and financial support decisions.

I see nothing wrong with this.  I spent several decades working at a state university where the only real admission requirements were having a pulse and a valid checking account.  Enema U has never turned away anyone for any reason.  If you could fog a mirror, you were welcome—and if you could dribble a basketball, you didn’t even have to fog the mirror.

2.        Marketplace of Ideas and Civil Discourse.  Requires fostering a “broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints,” eliminating units that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” and ensuring campus environments don’t disrupt instruction or libraries.

Once again, maybe because of where I worked, I never saw a problem.  My colleagues in the History Department spanned the political spectrum from Attila the Hun to Mahatma Gandhi.  Nobody ever told me what to teach or how to think.  The idea that any of us would “incite violence” is about as likely as the faculty senate starting a bar fight.

3.        Nondiscrimination in Faculty and Administrative Hiring.  Mandates merit-based hiring and advancement using objective, measurable criteria, without considering sex, race, national origin, disability or religion except as lawfully permitted.

That’s already how it works.  A search committee sorts through résumés, interviews a few brave souls, and finally ignores all of that and hires someone they can stand to see in the hall for the next ten years.  No compact can change the universal truth that universities hire people they can tolerate at lunch.

4.        Institutional Neutrality.  Requires university employees acting as official representatives to “abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events” unless the event directly impacts the university.

Here’s the doozy:  The compact says that university employees should “abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events,” unless the issue directly affects the university.  It’s kind of like enforcing an academic loyalty oath.

Excuse me?  Every faculty member and administrator is a government employee—just like the President or Congress.  And last time I checked, the First Amendment applied to all of us. This rule is not only unconstitutional and unenforceable, it’s downright asinine.  Even if the university president signed this thing in blood, no one would pay attention to it.

Frankly, this very blog probably violates that compact.  If so, I’ll add that to my resumé.

5.        Student Learning.  Commits to grade integrity (no inflating or deflating for non-academic reasons) and to public accountability (e.g., publishing grade-distributions and outcome trends).

Universities already try to do this.  Or are supposed to.  And if they are failing to do this now, this compact isn’t going to change anything.  Universities don’t grade student work, the faculty does, and I doubt this compact is going to change much at the individual faculty member level.

6.        Student Equality.  Students must be treated individually, with sex defined biologically for certain facilities and athletics, and discipline applied equally.

Why not just come out and tell the truth.  This is about transexuals in sports—an issue that is going to be solved by the state legislature and the courts—not by college deans.  Until then, having a university president sign a compact will have all the legal value of a flea fart in a hurricane.

7.        Financial Responsibility.  Stipulates a freeze of effective tuition for U.S. students for five years, posting graduate earnings data by major, refunding first-term tuition for dropouts, and for endowments over $2 million per student to waive tuition for admitted STEM students.

Sounds good — but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.  Why not require universities to revert to their year-2000 ratio of administrators to students?  Or insist that the football budget be smaller than the library’s?  Or maybe that colleges should co-sign every student loan for a degree in “Creative Vegan Poetry.”

Academia has bloated like a pufferfish, and while this compact talks a good game, I doubt it will pierce the puff.

8.        Foreign Entanglements.  Caps international undergraduates at 15% (and max 5% from any one country), requires screening for “extraordinary talent,” restricts foreign funding and mandates anti-money-laundering protocols.

Utter nonsense.  Enema U sits on the border with Mexico, so a lot of our students commute across that border.  The national average for foreign students in U.S. colleges is only about 6%.  This is a solution in search of a problem and, honestly, if the smartest people in the world want to come here to study and then stay to work, why would we stop them?

9.        Enforcement.  Universities must self-certify compliance annually, measure campus opinion, and face funding penalties if they violate compact terms.

Of course compliance will be reported—enthusiastically!  The University administration has never met a form it couldn’t complete in triplicate.  Hell, they will spend less time on this than the fake reports of the grade point averages for the student athletes.

All of this should sound a little familiar.  Back in 1947, President Harry Truman decided that the best way to keep communists out of the government was to make every federal employee swear they weren’t Party members.  Thus was born Executive Order 9835– the first national loyalty program.  Overnight, five million civil servants were suddenly told they needed to prove their patriotism, which (as any bureaucrat can tell you) is a tough thing to document on a government form.  The FBI got busy sniffing out “subversive tendencies” and the nation’s typists, janitors, and weather clerks anxiously checked their closets for red shirts.

For a while, it worked exactly as you’d expect: hundreds lost their jobs, thousands more resigned, and the paperwork multiplied like rabbits.  Fortunately, the Supreme Court eventually noticed that this “loyalty” business was getting a bit un-American.  In Wieman v. Updegraff (1952), the justices ruled that punishing people for joining the wrong club without knowing it was a due-process no-no.  Then in Cole v. Young (1956), the Court declared that maybe firing a file clerk for being a “security risk” was just a smidge excessive.

By the late 1950s, the whole loyalty oath movement was collapsing under the weight of its own paranoia.  The justices chipped away until the thing was as full of holes as Swiss cheese, and even Congress got tired of hunting for communists under every stapler.  Truman’s grand plan to purify the federal workforce ended not with a bang but with a bored shrug and was replaced by Eisenhower’s milder “security” program.  In hindsight, the courts didn’t so much strike down the loyalty oaths as quietly escort them to the exit, thanking them for their service and locking the door behind them.

Now that we’ve dissected this so-called “Compact for Academic Excellence,” I urge our esteemed president of Enema U to return it to the White House with this simple note attached:

“I am returning this paper.  Someone wrote on it.”

Things I learned Laying Laminate Flooring

My wife, The Doc, decided one day that we needed to get rid of the carpet in the hallway.  Why, I’m still not sure.  Personally, I was only vaguely aware that we even had carpet in the hallway.  If you’d asked me to describe that hallway before this project, the only thing I could’ve told you is that it’s the one room in the house with only one bookcase—a fact that probably says more about my priorities than my decorating sense

Now, I didn’t mind losing the carpet.  It’s not like I was emotionally attached to it.  Carpet in a hallway never struck me as a design statement—it’s more like the gray area of home décor, existing solely to absorb shoe dirt and cat hair.  So when The Doc announced that she wanted it gone, I nodded sagely and said, “Sure.”

Then she added the kicker: she wanted me to install laminate flooring—specifically Pergo—something I knew nothing about.  Never seen it done.  Never even met anyone who claimed to have done it.  But hey!—how hard could it be?

Famous last words.

Lesson One: The Knees Have It

The first thing I learned was that flooring is a full-contact sport.  If you ever find yourself inspired to lay laminate flooring, go out and buy the best kneepads you can find.  Don’t cheap out and buy the thin electrician’s kind that slip under your jeans—those are for amateurs who still have intact cartilage.  Get the big, bulky, soft kind that make you look like a middle-aged skateboarder.

You’ll be down there for years (well, only hours, but without good kneepads it feels much longer).  And if, like me, you once had a hurricane try to rearrange your knee and left you with the orthopedic equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle for a kneecap, you’ll appreciate every ounce of cushion.

Lesson Two: Measure Twice, Curse Thrice

Armed with enthusiasm and exactly zero experience, The Doc and I headed to Lowe’s to pick out our laminate planks.  We found a color we both liked and a helpful little chart that told us how many boxes we’d need.  The instructions said, “Measure your space and multiply.”  Sounds easy enough—until you realize the hallway in question looks like it was designed by a drunk surveyor with a love for doorways.

We had seven doorways cutting into our hallway, each demanding unique, one-of-a-kind, handmade precision cuts.  So here’s my advice: if you’re laying flooring in a long hallway with multiple doorframes, take whatever number of boxes the store tells you to buy, then add one more for good luck.  Then add another for all the boards you’ll inevitably mis-cut, ruin, or accidentally tread on in a fit of rage.

By the way, don’t panic when you notice that not all the boards in a box are exactly the same color.  In fact, you’ll probably find even more variation between different boxes—something that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the factory’s quality control.  The trick is to open all the boxes at once and shuffle the boards together like a deck of cards.  Once they’re laid down, the colors will blend nicely—or at least look like they were meant to.

Lesson Three: YouTube Will Not Save You

Before I started, I did the responsible thing—I delayed the job by a full day to watch instructional videos on YouTube.  According to those cheerful DIY influencers, laying Pergo is so easy it’s practically therapeutic.  They did it in clean, square rooms that look like architectural models.  Their boards snapped together like Legos.  Their walls were perfectly straight.  Their cats didn’t walk through wet glue.

Let me tell you—none of that applied to my house.

I learned that my walls are about as straight as a politician’s campaign promise.  Snapping a chalk line on the bare concrete floor revealed that whoever built my home must’ve been guided by a compass and a sense of whimsy.  There wasn’t a right angle in the entire structure.

So much for YouTube.

Lesson Four: Tools of the Trade

The Lowe’s salesman tried to sell me a large guillotine-style cutter that looked like something the French Revolution might’ve used to downsize the aristocracy.  I declined.  YouTube suggested I could simply score the boards with a utility knife and snap them cleanly by hand.  Lies!  Utter lies!!!

Within the first hour, I realized that most of my cuts weren’t going to be straight little end pieces—they were going to be long, awkward, curvy slices around door jambs, tile edges, and mystery lumps in the concrete.  In the end, I bought a vinyl blade for my table saw and cut every single board.  If I had started that way, I might have saved myself an entire day and a fair bit of vocabulary that I pretend I don’t usually use in front of The Doc.

Lesson Five: Concrete Is Forever

The real fun began when I tackled the transition strips—those little T-shaped pieces of molding that cover the seam between the laminate and tile floors.  They fit into a metal track that you have to screw down into the concrete slab beneath.

The instructions said, “Drill pilot holes with a masonry bit and screw into place.”  Sounds simple enough—if you’re drilling into new concrete.  What they don’t tell you is that concrete gets harder over time.  Give it forty years, and you might as well be trying to screw into Mount Rushmore.

My trusty cordless drill gave up after about ten seconds, sounding like a dying grasshopper.  I ended up buying a hammer drill and a set of tungsten carbide bits, which did the job beautifully.  My neighbors probably still think I was tunneling to Mexico, but at least the transition strips are secure. 

Lesson Six: The Real Tool List

Forget the “simple tools” suggested on the box.  Here’s what you actually need:

• ·      A good pair of kneepads
• ·      A hammer drill
• ·      Tungsten drill bits (lots of them)
• ·      A table saw with a proper vinyl blade
• ·      A multi-tool for trimming around doorframes
• ·      A string line (for discovering your walls are not straight)
• ·      Measuring tape and dry-erase markers
• ·      A rubber mallet and pry bar
• ·      Utility knife
• ·      Carpenter’s square

·      And, most importantly, patience—lots of it.

Lesson Seven: Cats Are Not Helpers

If you have cats, you already know they consider themselves the project supervisors of the household.  Ours took a particular interest in the chalk line—a fascination that ended in disaster.  Let’s just say they were not reliable assistants when it came to holding their end of the line.

Every time I turned my back, they’d stroll across the newly laid boards like runway models, scattering spacers and leaving faint paw prints of judgment.  I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure they took sides against me in this renovation.

Lesson Eight: Victory (Eventually)

Despite all the setbacks—the crooked walls, the mis-cut boards, the cats, and the noise complaints from the hammer drill — the floor finally went down.  And you know what? It looked good.

Better yet, it felt satisfying to walk down that hallway knowing that I, a man who once struggled to assemble IKEA furniture, had conquered Pergo.  Sure, it took longer than I planned, and I now have a relationship with my kneepads that borders on emotional, but the job got done.

The Doc was pleased, the cats approved (after a few test scratches), and I learned something valuable: home improvement isn’t about perfection—it’s about persistence, creativity, and learning new swear words.

Final Thought

Would I do it again? Well… ask me after my knees forgive me.  But at least now, when The Doc says, “I’ve been thinking about redoing the guest room,” I’ll know what she really means: I’m about to learn something new—whether I want to or not.

The Ball Valve

“Red” was, without question, one of the most likable people I’ve ever met.  With a head of hair so bright it could signal ships in the fog and a grin wide enough to charm a room full of strangers, Red had friends everywhere he went.  On Galveston Island, it sometimes felt like everyone knew him (and most of them had forgiven him at least once).

Now, Red had a little quirk that made life interesting: he was a habitual thief.  Not a mean one, mind you—he practiced a very selective sort of morality:  There were “us-ins” and “them-ins,” as he put it.  If you were an “us-in,” he’d gladly give you the shirt off his back.  If you were a “them-in,” well…you might want to keep an eye on your own shirt, socks, and anything else not nailed down.

I met Red when I was managing the old Jack Tar Hotel in Galveston.  A friend of mine on the police force asked if I could give Red a job—maybe to  keep him out of state prison.  He was just a teenager then, with no family, no home, and no prospects.  My friend promised me that Red wasn’t into drugs or drinking—his only real vice being a set of itchy fingers.  All he needed, he said, was a little guidance and a second chance.

Five minutes after meeting Red, I had already added my name to the long list of people who liked him.  I hired him as a general handyman at the old Jack Tar Hotel—odd jobs, a little paint here, a little fix there.  My police friend had warned me that the boy could abscond with the morning dew, but I figured that since the job didn’t involve cash or contact with guests, I could keep an eye on him and maybe straighten him out.  (I was wrong, of course—but it was a noble thought.)

Almost immediately, Red won everyone over.  He was bright, quick to learn, and willing to work hard.  Before long, the whole hotel had practically adopted him: Half the kitchen staff was sneaking him extra meals, housekeeping had donated a small mountain of “lost” clothing, and I’m fairly certain at least one of the waitresses was helping him with his “emotional development.” For the first time in a long while, Red had a home—and the place just seemed happier for it.

Of course, that warm glow didn’t last forever.  It started with the Coca-Cola delivery driver—a man with all the charm of explosive diarrhea—who liked to bark at the kitchen staff.  When he complained that a dozen crates of Cokes and a hand truck had vanished, I did my best to convince him that he must’ve misplaced them at his last stop.  I never did find the dolly, but I couldn’t help noticing that the housekeeping refrigerator was suddenly very well-stocked.

Then there was the Houston police officer who had checked in for a weekend with his wife.  After spending a bit too much time in the bar, they became so belligerent that I was about to throw them out myself.  When they finally did leave, their departure was delayed—largely because their car was up on blocks with all four wheels missing. 

Explaining to Red why his latest escapade was a bad idea was like teaching calculus to a pig—or dollar depreciation to a city council.  It makes you feel clever for a minute, but mostly it just annoys the pig.  Red would nod solemnly, look contrite, and promise to do better.  And for a few shining hours, he probably meant it.

Red had been with us about three months when we had ourselves a plumbing problem.  It was a Saturday, which meant the regular maintenance crew was off, and a pipe had burst in one of the maintenance chases between two suites.  These chases were two-foot-wide vertical shafts—forty feet tall and packed tighter than a barrel of snakes with pipes, wires, and assorted mystery cables that had been added over forty years of “improvements.”  Crawling into one required a contortionist with nerves of steel and no sense of smell.  Of course, since the hotel sat right on the beach, the place came with its own collection of “resident wildlife” that was not, strictly speaking, paying rent.

Now, one of the bad things about being the hotel manager is that when something breaks and the guy who usually fixes it isn’t around—well, “Congratulations: You’re the guy!”  So, I shut off the water, grabbed a hacksaw, and wedged myself into the chase between a busted pipe and what I’m convinced was the largest spider web in the state of Texas.  While I was sawing away, I sent Red down to the basement to fetch a half-inch ball valve.  Once I had this section patched, I could turn the water back on to the rest of the building before the guests started noticing they couldn’t shower.

Red was gone about five minutes before reappearing to say he couldn’t find the valve.

“Red,” I said, trying to sound patient, “there’s a whole box of them on the shelf against the wall. I bought them myself—I know they’re there.”

The basement of the Jack Tar was a proper labyrinth—concrete corridors, old boilers, and shadows deep enough for a Baptist to lose his religion in—so it didn’t surprise me that Red was having trouble finding anything.  I sent him back down and kept cutting away at the pipe.  By now I was soaked, my flashlight was fading, and so was my hold on my temper.  When Red came back empty-handed the second time, I confess I lost my composure.  I won’t repeat what I yelled, but the temperature in the chase went up about ten degrees and I’m fairly sure I killed most of the spiders with the volume alone.

Red was gone for quite a while after that, but when he finally returned, he proudly handed me a valve—a very old, very rusty gate valve, that was streaked with gray paint and character.  It was not what I wanted, but at that point I was in no position to be picky.  I installed it, climbed out of the chase, and turned the water back on.  Everything in that wing worked fine—except for one suite that still didn’t have water.

Figuring I needed a threaded nipple the right length to finish the job, I hopped in my car and headed to the hardware store.  As I drove past the gas station next door, I noticed their parking lot looked like a shallow lake. Two men were standing outside the restroom, watching in disbelief as water poured out the door in a steady stream.

And that’s when I realized where Red had “found” the valve.

Red didn’t stay much longer after what became known as The Valve Incident. One morning, he was just gone—no goodbye, no warning, just gone.  Most folks at the hotel figured he’d skipped town right before someone came looking for him.  I haven’t seen or heard from Red in decades.  Wherever he is, I like to think he’s found something steady to work at…though I wouldn’t be too surprised if it turned out he’s either in a state prison or in Congress!

Hitler’s Sculptor

When I first started studying history, I got lost for several months down a rabbit hole, reading books written by German authors about World War II.  Naturally, many of the books expressed an attitude that, while they disagreed with Nazi policy, they were powerless to stop its advance…All of them.  Evidently, the only “real” Nazis who weren’t killed in combat were the thirty-five war criminals executed following the various Nuremberg trials. 

Right—and my cat just won the Nobel Prize for Hairballs.

I think the breaking point came while I was reading Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer.  He gives a very plausible description of being swept along by the tide of events that I bought into…. until somewhere about two-thirds of the way through the book when I suddenly realized…. Wait!  This guy’s a lying Nazi!  After I started reading Speer’s books a little more critically, it was easy to catch him in dozens of lies in which he tried to present himself in a better light.  In my opinion, that Nuremberg execution number should have been thirty-six.

We have a similar problem assessing the artwork of Hitler’s favorite sculptor, Arno Breker.  Look at the photo to the right:  It is June 23, 1940, and Speer (left), Hitler, and Breker are standing on the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot admiring the Eiffel Tower.  Just a few years later, Hitler was dead by his own hand and Speer was writing his self-serving books from Spandau Prison.

Arno Breker, by comparison, was still producing the same kind of artwork that had glorified Nazi ideals—larger-than-life, Neoclassical sculptures that were both militaristic and vaguely angry. 

Before the Nazi era turned him into Hitler’s pet sculptor, Arno Breker’s early life read almost like the script of an ambitious art-school drama.  Born in 1900, in the Rhineland town of Elberfeld, he was the son of a stonemason — which meant he grew up literally surrounded by chisels, dust, and blocks of stone just waiting to be transformed into something more glamorous than garden walls.  After a stint studying at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, young Breker found himself increasingly drawn to the classical ideals of the human figure.  He flirted with the avant-garde crowd but never quite married into it, preferring a clean, heroic style that looked back more to Ancient Greece than to Picasso’s Cubist puzzles.

By the mid-1920s, Breker was traveling and absorbing the culture of Paris, where he rubbed elbows with artists like Pablo Picasso, Aristide Maillol, and Alexander Calder.  He picked up a reputation as a talented sculptor who had impeccable technique and a knack for monumental form — the kind of fellow who could make marble look like it was about to step off its pedestal and order a coffee.  Paris was his playground and while his art already leaned toward the monumental, it was still seen as stylishly neoclassical rather than politically loaded.  In those years, Breker was essentially a promising cosmopolitan artist, enjoying the bohemian whirl of Paris cafés and ateliers, before the winds of history swept him back to Germany and into the orbit of a very different kind of patron.

While living in Paris, Breker became friends with many influential Jewish artists and dealers.  In the decades that followed, while Breker never renounced any of those friends, there is no evidence that he ever used his influence to help those friends, either.  This is sort of the pattern with Breker:  there’s no direct evidence that he was a Nazi, but he never took a firm stand against Hitler, either.

Once back in Germany in the 1930s, Breker’s career accelerated at the speed of state-sponsored propaganda.  His muscular, larger-than-life style seemed tailor-made for the aesthetic the Nazis adored: marble gods, bronze athletes, and statues that looked like they could bench-press a Tiger tank.  Hitler took notice of Breker’s style and that was all it took:  By the late 1930s, Breker was officially the Reich’s star sculptor, showered with commissions for the new “Germania” capital that Albert Speer was designing.  His works — like the heroic Zehnkämpfer (Decathlete) and the impossibly serene Siegerin (Victress)—stood at the Berlin Olympic grounds, projecting the image of a superhuman nation, frozen in bronze and marble.  (Unlike 90% of the works Breker produced during the Nazi era, both statues still stand in their original location.)

Breker wasn’t just churning out art for show—he became part of the inner circle.  After accompanying Hitler on his trip to Paris, the perks piled up:  a villa in Berlin, a studio with virtually unlimited materials, 43 assistants, and the ear of the Führer himself.  Hitler added Breker to the list of 378 “Gottbegnadeten" (divinely gifted) artists who were exempt from compulsory military service.

Artists who had once mocked him for his classical obsessions now had to watch as he became the embodiment of official taste.  Even though Breker insisted after the war that he had never joined the Nazi Party, he was undeniably one of the regime’s cultural darlings, producing the monumental “Aryan” figures that filled plazas, government buildings, and parade grounds.

Of course, monumental fame came with monumental compromise.  Breker’s art became inseparable from the regime’s message and his statues became a visual shorthand for Nazi ideology.  While his contemporaries in Paris and elsewhere were experimenting with abstraction, surrealism, and other modern twists, Breker was chiseling out a kind of fascist neoclassicism that was all muscle and no irony. The man who had once hung out in Paris cafés now oversaw studios humming with assistants turning out state-commissioned busts of Nazi leaders.  (Breker creates a bust of Speer, right.)  His reputation — and his paycheck — soared, but so did his entanglement with a regime whose cultural “patronage” came at the steepest moral cost imaginable.

After 1945, Arno Breker’s life took a sharp turn from monumental commissions to monumental awkwardness.  Once celebrated as Hitler’s favorite sculptor, he suddenly found himself on the wrong side of history, with Allied authorities eager to figure out what to do with an artist who had been churning out bronze superheroes for the Third Reich.  He was put through a denazification trial but managed to dodge the harshest penalties by insisting that he’d never actually joined the Nazi Party.  Conveniently, many of his more embarrassing commissions had already been destroyed when the Reich Chancellery and other Nazi showpieces were blown to rubble, so there was less incriminating evidence in the landscape.  Still, the aura of being “Hitler’s sculptor” clung to him like marble dust.

Breker worked hard to rehabilitate his reputation.  When Joseph Stalin offered him a lucrative commission, the artist declined, saying, "One dictatorship is sufficient for me".

His postwar career was, shall we say, more modest.  While his reputation in Germany was radioactive, Breker did manage to get work again, often leaning on sympathetic collectors or quietly producing smaller-scale works.  Some of his surviving statues — like Zehnkämpfer and Siegerin at the Berlin Olympic grounds — remained in place, partly because they were athletic enough to pass for apolitical once the swastikas were gone.  But many other pieces that were clearly tied to Nazi grandeur were either melted down, were looted, or were left to languish in storage.  Breker lived on into the 1990s, carving, exhibiting, and defending his legacy, but he never shook the shadow of the regime that had made him famous.  In the end, his sculptures outlasted the Reich, but their survival came with the permanent footnote: “By the way, these were Hitler’s favorites.”

Even today, there is still sharp debate whether his remaining sculptures should be exhibited or destroyed.  Are they artwork or the last remaining cancerous cells of a sick regime?   Would their destruction be vandalism, acts of iconoclasm, or justice delayed?

In 1956, the people of Budapest rebelled against the Soviet domination and Hungary’s puppet government.  Marching to the City Park, they attacked the 24-foot-tall statue of Stalin with ropes, blowtorches, and sledgehammers, eventually toppling it.  Some said that the protestors were destroying history.  Others said what they did was history. 

Rome Meets Queens

Every few years, somebody pops up to tell a city’s landlords, “Hey, maybe someone poor with two kids and a minimum wage job shouldn’t have to sell a kidney just to keep a roof over their heads.”  In 63 BCE, that somebody was Lucius Sergius Catilina — Catiline if you’re on casual terms.  In modern New York, it’s Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.

Catiline wanted votes, so he promised to cancel debts, redistribute land, and hand out farms like Oprah hands out cars: “You get a farm! You get a farm! And you get a farm!”  This was easy to promise because the debts weren’t owed to him, he didn’t own the land he wanted to redistribute, nor did he own the farms he wanted to give away. 

Mamdani, on the other hand, in exchange for votes, is promising to stop your landlord from raising rent so high you need to start renting out your closet on Airbnb just to pay for your bedroom.  This is also easy to say, because Mamdani doesn’t own any of those apartments and doesn’t have to make any mortgage payments.  Mamdani doesn’t mention that one of the main reasons that rents are high is that the rent control policy the city has had in effect for 82 years stifles the creation of new housing.  The chief rule of everyone ignorant of simple economics seems to be that when you see an obstacle in the road, speed up.

It’s a matter of, “different centuries, same basic fight”: who gets to call the shots when it comes to property?  The property owners and mortgage holders?  Or the people who are just trying not to end up living under a bridge?

Picture Rome in the mid-first century BCE:  The Republic’s looking a little shaky, the Senate’s packed with old men clutching their togas, and everyone’s broke.  Small farmers had lost their land to the Roman equivalent of agribusiness—big estates run by slaves.  Aristocrats were mortgaging their futures to throw the ancient version of Super Bowl halftime shows (bread, circuses, and gladiators).  Veterans were wandering around muttering, “Wait, we fought all those wars and I don’t even get a cabbage patch?”  The political climate was hotter than a June bride in a feather bed.

Into this chaos strides Catiline, promising a tabula nova—a clean slate.  Translation:  burn the IOUs, cancel the debts, and start afresh.  To the desperate, this sounded like salvation.  To the Roman Senate, it sounded like arson—which was pretty accurate since Cataline was planning to burn the estates of his enemies.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years:  Instead of togas, it’s hoodies and instead of gladiators, it’s the New York Yankees and Knicks games…but the housing crisis is pretty much the same.  Enter Zohran Mamdani, representing Astoria, Queens.  His pitch: Housing is a human right, not a Monopoly board.  His weapons:

·      Good Cause Eviction:  No more landlords deciding rent should increase just because taxes and utilities go up… Or because they’ve bought a new yacht.

·      Rent caps:  Stop the annual ritual of tenants opening their lease renewal letters like they’re scratching off a lottery ticket.

·      Social housing:  City-owned apartments that are permanently affordable (because, as we all know, this has worked so well in the past exactly nowhere!).

Landlords scream that this is socialism, but tenants call it survival.  Politicians—absolutely certain that simply passing new legislation could repeal the law of gravity—call it sound politics.

Lets size up these two like a prize fight.

Catiline vs.  Mamdani:  The Tale of the Tape

 Let’s start with Catiline.

            Catiline (Rome, 63 BCE)                                

Big Idea           Cancel debts, hand out land

Enemies          Roman Senate, creditors, Cicero with a grudge

Supporters      Indebted elites, broke farmers, grumpy veterans

Methods         Conspiracy, maybe arson, an attempted military coup

Fate                 Died in battle, labeled a traitor forever

 

Versus Mamdani (Queens, 2020s)

Big Idea           Cap rents, protect tenants

Enemies          Real estate lobby, landlords, banks, and anyone who successfully passed Economics 101

Supporters      Tenants, immigrants, socialists, and Education majors.

Methods         Legislation, rallies, and lots of tweets

Fate                 Still in office and will probably be elected mayor.  After that, who knows?

Catiline believed that wiping out debts would restore equilibrium by freeing citizens to farm, serve, and consume.  Critics saw it as destabilizing credit markets.  Mamdani argues that capping rents and expanding tenant protections will stabilize communities, prevent displacement, and preserve affordable housing.  Critics warn it will deter construction and reduce supply while property owners convert apartments into individual condominiums.

Despite the 2,000-year gap, the similarities are hard to miss.  Romans feared debt slavery while New Yorkers fear rent hikes; this might be different shackles, but the anxiety is the same.  Catiline promised a bonfire of IOUs while Mamdani promises landlords will be put in their place.   Both got cheers from the impoverished struggling masses.  Cicero thundered about Catiline destroying civilization and landlords thunder that rent control will destroy the housing market. Spoiler: civilization and New York both still exist.

Now, the differences matter too:  While Catiline tried to storm Rome, Mamdani tries to storm Albany committee meetings.  One ended with a bloody battlefield, the other has a bill in legislative limbo—one that, in the unlikely event it ever passes, will probably be doomed to die  in a Federal Court.

While Catiline wanted to erase debts outright, Mamdani wants to freeze rents without offering a solution to how the property owners can keep paying their mortgages.  The first would have triggered a civil war in Rome, while the other would trigger capital flight and economic turmoil.

While Catiline got swords, Mamdani gets subpoenas. Cicero shouted, “How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?” Today, it’s landlords muttering, “How long, O Mamdani, will you abuse our patience?”  Catiline’s reforms died with him.  Mamdani’s ideas are still duking it out in statehouses and at the ballot box. 

The two politicians, 2000 years apart, offer us a little more than a history lesson.  Every society eventually has to answer the same awkward question:  “Is property sacred, or is housing a right?”  Rome decided that property was sacred, and though the Republic keeled over within a generation, the Empire lasted hundreds of years.  New York hasn’t decided yet.

Catiline’s ghost might whisper to Mamdani: “Careful, kid — they’ll call you a traitor to property, too.”  Mamdani might whisper back: “Yeah, but at least they won’t execute me in the Forum.”

The fight goes on, whether in marble forums or in rent-stabilized walk-ups.  And as long as people need somewhere to sleep that isn’t the street, somebody will always step up to poke the bear and say, “Maybe property rights aren’t the only rights worth protecting.”