Martial is . . .
Martial (c. 40CE - c. 104CE) was a first century CE Roman poet. He was brilliant, witty, a master of language, and a complete suck-up. Any arguments about art being better served through distance from power have to account for Martial, who is among the dozen greatest Latin poets, and who was also the sort of person for whom the word "sycophant" does not adequately express enough loathing.
He is most famously the author of a several poems about the Roman Games collected into a book, De Spectaculis. It is profane, exuberant, disturbing, and very funny.
Martial (1968 - ) is a man midway through his three-score and ten, who possesses an often overwrought prose style which was developed for his own amusement.
I have a lovely wife and an exciting life, with quite a bit of travel off of the beaten tracks. As for my profession, I have described it as:
" Organizations of all types (NGOs both international and local, donors both government and foundation, businesses and corporations both local and multinational) operating in conflict zones or potential conflict zones need to know all about the context. They usually have a lot of information, but don't know how to process or organize it.That's what I do: conflict context analysis. Using my field's jargon, we call it "Peace and Conflict Impact Analysis" (PCIA - the "Peace" was added after people decided the acronym might not be appropriate. Seriously). I do analysis of contexts and potential impacts on the conflict. I also teach others how to do it. "
And as for this De Spectaculis, I have introduced it as "a child of dark night", which might lead some to think that I am often depressed, and I would be if history were not among my avocations. Context, you see, matters. And so I am amused more often than not. Even horror can make you laugh if approached from the right angle - and because to do anything else is to give over victory to spiritual death.
I live just outside of Boston in Somerville. Every day I am in town I walk under the height of Prospect Hill from which the first American flag was flown on January 1st, 1776. I think constantly about the promise of that long ago day when a mad group of fools raised that flag of rebellion against the tides of history. The neighborhood below is one of the most ethnically diverse in the region, if not the country, and wave upon wave of immigrants from four continents have washed up in Union Square, climbing Prospect Hill as their first step toward the American Dream. This tends to lend me a certain perspective.
In other words: I know what I'm fighting for.