1,387 Deaths from Trump Virus today alone, almost 166,000 all-time. If we hit 1,400 it will be the greatest one-day toll since July 29 and before that you have to go back to May 27 to get more than 1,400. We are a nation of the sick, the dead and dying, the unemployed; we are pitied and mocked, preyed upon and laughed at. We are a nation in ruins.
...what interested the Americans i.e. the Revolutionaries]...were examples of once-free states [and their] descent into autocracies of power...
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But the greatest example they knew of the descent from freedom to autocracy was the most distant from them in time but so familiar to them as to be contemporaneous in their thinking. This was the fortunes of ancient Rome.
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It was in the Roman art world that one finds the visual expressions of the Americans' concerns. They lie in the artistic achievements of their contemporary, the celebrated Roman engrave and print maker, Giovanni Battista Piranessi.-Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 2017 preface.
