Panem et Circenses on the South Lawn

A cage is rising on the South Lawn of the White House. The event — branded “UFC Freedom Fights 250” — is set for June 14, a date chosen to coincide with Flag Day, the nation’s anniversary, and, as he conspicuously declined to mention, the president’s own eightieth birthday.  Renderings show the scaffolding cresting over the historic West Wing and Oval Office.  The padded canvas, one account dryly notes, is light-colored — the better to show the blood.

Symbolic language speaks louder than words, and so let us read the symbol with the seriousness it deserves. A man entrusted with the stewardship of a republic might have marked its 250th year with a reading of the Declaration, a Te Deum, a moment of public gratitude. He has instead chosen to erect, before the people’s house, an arena for what the late Senator McCain once called “human cockfighting.” Once banned outright in many states, the cage is now to loom over the seat of executive power like a roller coaster bolted to a cathedral. 

This is not new. It is, in fact, very old. Panem et circenses — bread and circuses — was the diagnosis Juvenal offered of a Rome that had traded its civic soul for spectacle. The arena was where a decadent empire taught its citizens to mistake domination for greatness and cruelty for entertainment. We are not meant to deliberate; we are meant to be amused, and to cheer.

What does it say of our leadership? It says, with perfect candor, what its governing creed has always been: winning, fighting, conquest, the strong man over the prostrate one. The dignity of the human person — the first principle of every page of Catholic social teaching — does not enter the calculation, because the calculation has no room for it. The spectacle is the message. And the message is beneath contempt.