The Real Truth Behind the Denny Blair Resignation

Grazing airy electron opinion, the firing of Denny Blair — especially him of most High Court title — is surely a blog-seduction most likely to touch-off tremulous surface fanning and gasps, whetting unfettered gossip: All fluttering to those inmost whisperings and intimate doings in the sacred precincts of our Imperial Court.

Well what I get is all Imperial Court. I feel like I am channeling Constantinople in 1043 dealing with Irini Doukaina (Cafavy, here). Oh, you did not know how much power women marshaled in 11th and 12th century Byzantium? Perhaps you might want to consider how advanced a “medieval” civilization could be.

Yet they were dealt a bad hand. The Latin West (our ancestors!) seeded such infamous defamation of everything Byzantine that Byzantine reputation still has not recovered. Truth is that Romaioi (what Byzantines called themselves) were an amazingly compassionate and complex civilization compared to every other place on earth. They invented the hospital, social welfare, equal judicial rights for all … and the fork! And only in Constantinople could a woman be emperor. Really.

What I am trying to say is that we begin to look a lot like late modern Byzantines.

In this sense:

We are also compassionate and complex, sophisticated and advanced, and yet we are also plagued by what above all plagued Byzantines: Court politics. Vicious and divisive politics in the 11th century imperial court so undercut the ability of Constantinople to meet non-state threats that the Empire almost fell.

But we are worse than Byzantines. The politics of America's Imperial Court makes the world of Constantinople look prudent, modest, and restrained.

Continue reading “Reference: Michael Vlahos on Imperial Court”