<< Whether or not you agree with the sentiments being expressed, you have to admire someone willing to raise two fingers (or, in America, one) to the establishment by using their own rules against them. >>
The solitary finger gesture - though certainly holding it's place of honour within the broad context of American culture - is by no means an American invention or monoply.
The earliest written reference that I have been able to unearth is in the Latin literature - though I suspect that this most forthright form of communication may even predate the written, and perhaps even the spoken, word.
I would not be surprised if scholar's one day unearth earlier pictorial evidence of this from as far as 30,000 years ago in the original graffiti: the caves of
Lascaux,
Altamira or
Chauvet.
As you contemplate the gesture - perhaps even forming it yourself - it may bring you into closer communication with your earliest ancestors than any word that you are currently capable of speaking.
But you will find written references going back as far as Roman times - prior even to the birth of the Christ, the Christian Saviour.
My favourite is the tale of a gentleman in the Roman arena - I believe the story is from Juvenal - from around 200 - 100 B.C. -
At the moment that the hungry lions were released into the arena, the gentleman is said to have calmly turned to the Emperor's box and displayed the "medium unguium" -
The middle finger.
Take a moment out of your busy life to visualize the scene.
The smells - roasted peanuts, wine, dust, musk, perfume and urine.
The sounds of the crowd all around you. The hawkers, selling their wares
The people touching, seated next to you.
The man below you whose death you came to see.
What was his name, again?
Hat's off to the guy -
Never saw that one before.
He was one guy who really knew how to go!
At that moment, in a sense, I suppose that that man was the freeest man in the entire Roman Empire.
What more could the Emperor do to him?
Feed him to the lions?
Freedom's just another word, for nothing left to lose . . . And then - then it was all over.
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"Duas tantum rex anxius optat, panem et circenses."
"The people long anxiously for two things, bread and circuses."
Juvenal
In ours, the most overfed and overentertained nation in the history of the earth, Juvenal's words ring as true as on the day that they were written.
Words that have outlived the very language in which they were written.
Of course, there has been progress in human relations.
Instead of just bread, we have supermarkets with over 30,000 items - and growing.
And growing.
And in place of one circus, we have many - over 60 channels worth.
With a wide choice of professional spectator sport.
Or, if you prefer, a nightly ringside seat to a variety of military misadventures overseas. All in our name.
Sometimes I almost long to return to the clarity of an earlier era.
Epaminondas
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Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories.
Polybius
History, book 10, 36
circa 200-118 B.C.
