THE LATIN HERITAGE WE SHOULD CELEBRATE
Happy Latin Heritage Month! Or Latino! Or Latinx! The post-American liturgical year continues: We begin with Black Heritage Month, continue into Latinx month, celebrate “Indigenous Peoples Day” (which rose sadly from the ashes of Columbus Day), rejoice during Asian Month, and then at some point crescendo into Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Day and of the holiest of all holidays, Geoge Floyd’s Memorial Day. And then we get to do it all over again.
God forbid we celebrate Mayflower Day or Anglo-Saxon Heritage Minute. It was actually 400 (!) years since the Mayflower’s landing last year, but you haven’t heard a peep about that. Nope. We must only celebrate what breaks us asunder, not what unites us. And by all means possible – through destruction of monuments, the undoing of holidays, and poisonous curricula – we must erase the founding heritage of America.
But even a purist such as myself can compromise for a special kind of Latino festival or to be precise – a festum Latinum. We ought to celebrate the underlying Latin heritage at the basis of our Western civilization, our Roman heritage.
Let’s leave the name Latin Heritage Month, but since nowadays English is an oppressive colonialist construct, we may call it Mensis Hereditatis Latinae.
Surprisingly, the Left has not been able to destroy Rome just yet. We are not allowed to admire Victorian England (“Imperialists!”), or the Carolingian Empire (“Genocidal Christians!”), or the Hohenstaufen Reich (“Proto-Nazis!”), but somehow the occasional toga party is still OK.
Perhaps it’s because Rome had been dead for so long, it can no longer be killed. As H.P. Lovecraft observed, “And with the passing of strange eons, even death may die.”
Like the Roman God Janus, the unsightly face of Rome is clear enough: Slavery, gladiatorial games, violent conquest, crucifixions. All common ancient world conventions. Yet the sightly face of undying Roma still shines forth to illuminate our own civilization: Our poetry, our architecture, our meticulous grammar, our legal system, our tradition of juries, attorneys, and equality before the law; our longing for a republic of serene fathers conscious of the common good, our invocation of justice that is above the law, and our souls oscillating between the gravity of duty and the temptation to simply enjoy.
Compare that to a taco.
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