My pal Aaron sent the following. He’s always got something cooking, and what we have here looks promising indeed. “Cabinet room circa 1795,” his email begins. “History, founding principles, etc.” Then:
The Big Guy has left. Rain beats the window panes; the candelabras exert their steady glow. In the back of the shot old Adams can be seen rummaging. In the foreground Hamilton (sharp collar) and Jefferson (expensive handcrafted sweater vest) debate.
Hamilton: “British monarchists want to destroy us. French democrats want to overthrow everything, including us. And I’m starting to wonder. Why does an army and navy, what do they—”
Jefferson: “Not just a staging ground for the same old game.”
Hamilton: “Why is a navy to keep off their navies, why is—”
Jefferson: “Their dance, their moves, and we wind—”
Hamilton: “What’s the downside actually?”
Jefferson: “The downside?”
Hamilton: “What’s the downside of not having our pants around our ankles while everyone’s playing ball? Actually.”
Silence. The rain beats; Adams mutters.
Jefferson (quiet): “A land lost. A future gone the wrong way. A country that calls itself America but it’s something else.”
Hamilton: “You have—”
Jefferson: “Not America.”
Hamilton: “You don’t—you have, you don’t get to define—”
Explosive sound, like a thunderclap. But it’s Adams. His rummaging is done.
Adams (triumphant for once, a bugle blast): “My snuffbox!”
End scene.
Aaron says Pluribus (working title for the series) promises an admiring but clear-eyed look at “the jousting intellects and personalities who gave us a country and not just an idea.” Promotional tagline: “The Revolution’s over. Now do something.” He says he’ll be checking out “books by Chesrow etc.,” by which I think he means Ron Chernow. And: “Episode titles all from classical Greece and Rome. ‘Horatio’ -- ‘Augeas’ -- ‘Capitoline Geese,’ etc. Reference illustrates that episode’s situation, and the characters talk about the reference.” He notes, “Classical discourse key to period’s educated.” The dialogue above comes from an episode that Aaron plans to call “Scylla,” followed by one called “Charybdis.”
As the email ends: “Hamilton, kid of the cast, young actor who’s fine-boned—Indian or half-something. Adams—Bradley W.? Bronson Pinchot? I don’t know who as Washington. Broad-shouldered, six-foot character actor in his 50s, needs a break. Sally Hemings, a Zendaya type. Mark Ruffalo as Jefferson, or younger Ruffalo (manbun). Mila Kunis as Abigail.”
The email arrived in my inbox on Friday. Since then he’s been sending texts. Yesterday: “Kaley Cuoco backup.” And from this morning: “Haircuts like now? (manbun).”
Gore Vidal memory. “Capitoline,” Vidal would say in luxurious fashion, accent on the second syllable: “Cah-pit-oh-line.” Light and tripping, and yet unnatural. The geese congregated in a temple on Rome’s Capitol Hill. Invaders from Gaul tried sneaking into the city, but the geese set up a ruckus and Rome was saved. Or so the story goes. About 2360 years after the alleged event, Vidal told an audience of college kids that the press or Senate or professors were Capitoline geese that nobody listened to. The students didn’t know what he was talking about, and he wrote about the misfire in a huffy manner. Educational malnutrition was what he saw, a Year Zero awareness regarding the Western cultural tradition.
But Mary Beard tells us, as you might expect, that the story about the geese is just a story. It’s useful as an example of what Rome’s writers and readers chose to believe about their nation. But that’s the angle Vidal left out. He wanted the nugget to be remembered now because it had been remembered so far. It was associated with something august and fundamental (Rome), and he didn’t look too hard at what that association might be.
Still, he had a way about him. “Cah-pit-oh-line.”