My one Lindsey Graham story

This is not a political post—at least not in the sense of partisan politics and policy debates. I have opinions about all that stuff, but for today: de mortuis nil nisi bonum.

One evening early on in our marriage, Sarah and I were walking down Main Street in downtown Greenville. As we crossed Broad Street in front of the Peace Center, two men in suits passed us in the crosswalk and headed uphill, talking and nodding as they went. I glanced at them and didn’t think anything of it, but after a few steps Sarah said, “Did you see that?”

“What?”

“That was Lindsey Graham.”

I realized that one of them had looked familiar. I looked back and watched Graham and the other man walk on, still talking. We had just walked past a United States senator.

Not much of a story, but the incident stuck with me. I’ve told it in class ever since to illustrate a specific point when I teach ancient Rome in Western Civ.

After explaining the expulsion of Rome’s Etruscan kings, the creation of the Republic, and something of the divide between patricians and plebs and patron-client relationships, I put a picture of a Roman consul entering a Senate meeting onscreen. It’s a Victorian engraving and despite including some good details it’s not well composed artistically, so the subject of the picture is not immediately apparent. I ask the class who the most important person in the picture is. They’ll often guess one or other of the senators because they’re seated. I then point out the consul, his signs of rank, and especially his retinue: clients, political allies, advisors, soldiers, slaves, even some bearded Gauls.

That’s when I tell my Lindsey Graham story. It would have been unthinkable in ancient Rome, even when the republic was strongest, to pass a man of that importance on the street without noticing, without seeing his gaggle of attendants and hangers on.

That little incident offers a useful contrast and helps build an understanding of Roman social life in my students’ imaginations. It’s also a good reminder—as much as I love the Romans—of what an American republic is supposed to be like. We have neither monarchy nor patricians and plebs, but as political culture and politicians themselves have become progressively more imperial, complete with retinues and armies of bodyguards—seriously, look at the vast apparatus used just to move the president, ostensibly a fellow citizen, by car—this ideal, however imperfect and never fully realized, is worth remembering. As long as a national politician can walk down the street more or less unnoticed, as even such Caesarian presidents as Jackson and Lincoln would and did, something of that republican culture still lives.

I suppose this did turn out to be a political post, though about politics at a more fundamental level.

As for Lindsey Graham himself, he was undoubtedly a devoted son of South Carolina. I was surprised to learn that, having been born in Central, where I spent some time during my Clemson years, he lived in Seneca, town of more than a dozen redlights. For all I know we could have sat in traffic near each other many times long before that crosswalk encounter. RIP