Few sagas provide more startling revelation of how sordidly human nature can composite itself with power than that of the Borgias in Medieval / Renaissance Italy. This clan of corrupt aristocrats intrigued, committed serial homicide, launched bloody wars and hopped beds of willing and unwilling partners like criminally horny cottontail rabbits. Or, as Wikipedia lists the dark forays:

...Adultery, simony, theft, rape, bribery, incest, and murder (especially murder by poison).

Invitation to holiday gatherings at the Borgia hearth must have provoked more alarm than sugarplum visions.

But one clue to how this singular family maintained such resilient hold on Italian - and, so, European - structure so long is the crime of "simony" on the indictment list. Simony is bribing access to holy office, something the Borgias did so well, as evidenced by a Pope and even a saint (!) bearing the familial crest.

Simply, Lucretia, Cesare and all the rest were so perversely successful for so long because they had at least the trappings of God on their side. With a set-up like that, who needs a lobby?

Sometimes this mechanism - religious faith as the sole purview of the high-born - pops up today, and it's easy to see its brand in the C Street cult that operates so occludedly among conservative Washington elites. If you believe some of the breathless accounts of this 80-year-old conclave, "The Family" seems almost a button-down Manson Family with visionary approach only a little less blade-driven messy.

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Watching Sunday morning news panels is always a mixed blessing. These days, I'm more aggravated than informed by extended roundtables with Gas-Bags of the Moment.

Idly watching "The Chris Matthews Show", the mostly Boomer guests communed over the import of Woodstock, now that the 40th anniversary of this much-ballyhoo'd music and arts faire is upon us, shifting decades of mythic weight jellied with cellulite of lumpy nostalgia.

Richard Stengel of Time Magazine piped up with:

...It turned out that the - that the counterculture was an anomaly. Everybody who was there, everybody at the time felt like, you know what, the country is changing in a very big way, and that what was the counterculture would become the main culture, and what was the main culture would be ostracized. That didn't happen. Generation X, millennials don't embrace those values. The Woodstock generation was an anomaly, and nobody realized that at the time.

That's an almost-sound observation, except Woodstock was not of a generation. It was of a moment. I remember playing tennis a couple of years after the signature event with a guy named Tony from the wilds of Philadelphia, who'd carpooled in a beat-up, postwar VW bug to within miles of Woodstock, then hiked the rest of the way in time for a drenching rain that turned the rolling cow pasture into a vast bowl of mud, dung and warm bodies. Like everyone else who'd been there, and many, many more who weren't but waxed thick about the experience anyway, he'd pepper each thumbnail critique of every performer with some incantation along the lines of: "There was nothing like Woodstock, man..."

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