Djelloul Marbrook

The wall plaque explained that in the Third Century AD Roman society had become sharply divided between a small upper class and an increasingly large poor class with not many in the middle.

We were standing in The Metropolitan Museum’s magnificent Greco-Roman gallery, three of us, before this plaque when a young man asked, Sound familiar? He walked away before getting an answer, but the elderly lady and I, also an elder, continued the conversation the young man had started.

I certainly know how they felt, the woman said. They? The patricians, she said. Do you know, she continued, 60 percent of France’s population is now Muslim. They’re taking “us” over and we don’t even notice. And now we have a Muslim president giving away the store.

Actually, I offered, France’s Muslim population is more like 6.3 percent, although it’s hard to tell because the French census doesn’t ask anybody their religion. And President Obama is a Christian.

We chatted a bit longer, but it was clear I had offended her convictions, which she insisted the museum’s effort to educate us affirmed. I never did discover how she felt about that menacing chasm in Roman society between the rich and the poor, because she had been clearly focused on the plight of the patricians.

She had sounded to me quite well educated. As I sat down under the stern but reassuring gaze of Emperor Antoninus Pius, honored for his concern for the poor, I thought of the Germans in the 1930s. They were well educated and accustomed to democratic government and yet they traded their democratic republic for one of the most oppressive and deceitful regimes in the history of the world.

Why? Because they preferred Nazi lies to the confusing and demanding truth. The Nazis made everything simple, and so millions died, including many of the Aryan Germans, some of whom approved and some of whom didn’t.

I see a great deal of e-mail whizzing into view these days that reminds me of Germany. It’s impervious to discussion or to truth. It revels in the increased purchase of firearms and falls upon the president’s every statement and action as if it were proof of a worldwide conspiracy to bring down the American republic. It can’t be corrected, because it is impervious to correction. It doesn’t care if it’s right or wrong, because its intention is to prevail, to bully everyone else into submission. In short, I see a great deal of Nazi e-mail.

In due course the purveyors of this neo-Nazism will turn on the Jews—although, for now at least, they’re content to pose as Israel’s defenders because they hope Israel will be the instrument of the Apocalypse—but for them the Muslims are the new Jews. They need someone to hate, someone to blame for whatever scares them.

Israel keeps electing governments that threaten to accommodate the neo-Nazis, so I conclude that the major lesson its voters have learned from the last hundred years of history is the virtues of blitzkrieg, a staggering irony.

Somewhere on that superbly articulated plaque appears a mention of the fact that it is Rome’s privileged class to which we owe our own knowledge of Rome’s accomplishments. I wonder if we can say the same of our privileged class. Does it finance movies, encourage the arts and literature? Yes, to some extent. Does it obey the laws? Not much. Does it revere our heritage as a republic? Not much. And yet, it is by the courtesy of this class’s generosity, that the old lady, the old man and the young man stood there and read that plaque. And yes, young man, it sounds familiar, and recent. —DM