A Letter to Amarillo's New Mayor

April 27, 2023

Dear Mr. Cole Stanley:

As I sit down to write this letter, we are a week away from Amarillo’s mayoral election. Judging by the number of yard signs, conversations with my neighbors, and Facebook comments, I expect that you will be the next mayor of Amarillo. It’s been a controversial election this year, which means, unfortunately, you’ll be entering office under a dark cloud. 

You may wonder why I—the son of a farmer from Umbarger who grew up to be a poet—am writing to you on the eve of your election. What do I stand to gain in greeting you now? 

There are a couple of reasons. First, I’d like to offer you a gift. I know that in politics, gifts often come with strings attached. That goes back at least as far as ancient Greece—history’s first democracy—where gifts were offered and received with the expectation that a gift would be returned eventually. A gift bound the recipient to the giver by a debt of gratitude. At its best, a community of citizens forms bonds with one another through a giving of ledgered gifts. Imperial Rome, a successor to Greece’s glory, imagined gifts as “circles of response” that “bound officials and the Roman people to the generous emperor, cities to their provincial governors, and provinces to the capital.” These kinds of gifts held the empire together with strings of debt, but those strings were long, and sometimes the emperor wasn’t so generous. Occasionally the provinces weren’t grateful either, like the city of Jerusalem about the time Jesus came along. I mention Jesus because I know you’re a church-going man, as am I. Jesus turned Rome’s idea of giving and debts of gratitude on its head. He established a kingdom where all debts were forgiven, including those quid pro quo favors. The apostle Paul said, “Owe no one anything, except to love each other…” Peter Leithart, a Hillsdale alum, explains that Christianity “freed people from those onerous personal [and political] bonds by defining gratitude as right use of the gift rather than gratitude as return.” To be properly grateful is to use the gift rightly.

Anyway, all this philosophizing about gifts because I want you to know the intention behind my gift to your office. In 2019, before her second term, I gave the office of the former mayor a painting of an alley and dumpster that local pastellist Bethany Fields had sketched. I’m sure you understand the humor about dumpsters in Amarillo. It’s a beautiful painting though. Bethany noticed the light one morning in her Wolflin alley as it filtered through all those elm trees, and she was compelled to capture it as only she could, by rendering the changing light in dust. The dumpster was incidental, but beauty can stop a person in her tracks. The philosopher Plato said that encounters with beauty make a person pregnant with ideas. The moment will grow and take form and eventually a person needs to give birth; will labor to create something. Bethany needed to paint the alley, even with no reasonable expectation that someone would buy her painting. The municipal government may be rightly concerned with the mundane decisions like roads, trash removal, and water infrastructure, but a well-ordered city can be as beautiful as a painting. I hope that Bethany’s painting is still in the mayor’s office on your first day. 

My gift then had no obligation of gratitude attached. As a matter of fact, until this week, I had never met the outgoing mayor. I didn’t even live inside the city limits during any of her terms. The gift properly received was to use the gift rightly, to consider the beauty of a well-ordered city.

The gift I am sending your office on May 16th is a copy of The Aeneid written by the Roman poet Virgil under Caesar Augustus.

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Be glad you aren’t Caesar Augustus. His adopted father Julius had overturned 480 years of Rome’s republican government when he became emperor. A good many Romans were upset. Forget civic centers and lawsuits, Julius’ own friends stabbed him, literally, in the back. Imagine trying to become the new leader following that controversy. Rome erupted into civil war, but eventually Augustus won back the throne. However, just because Augustus sat on the throne didn’t mean he had the people’s trust. Maybe you can sympathize; you’re ascending the steps to city hall under a cloud. And beyond trust, there were parts of Rome that didn’t even want to be Rome anymore. Morale was low.

Sure Augustus commanded quick, decisive military action. The Roman empire was already vast, but he expanded the borders south to include Egypt and all the way to the northern coast of Spain. But he also understood the Romans needed to want to be Romans. They needed to be proud of their history and where they came from. They also needed to have an idea about who they were as a people. What were the virtues that made them Roman? This wasn’t something that could be forced upon citizens. This needed to be given as a gift, something in which they could take pride, and something they found beautiful.

Augustus knew Romans needed a mythology, or a story they could tell about themselves. He looked to the Greeks, whom he had finally and completely conquered, as an example of a culture with a unifying mythology. Everyone knew the story of The Iliad where the Greeks had used the giant, wooden horse to conquer Troy. The Iliad and its sequel The Odyssey were written by the Greek poet Homer. They were great stories and Greeks were proud of them. That, Augustus decided, is just what the Romans needed.

The emperor began entertaining poets at his palace. A group of poets who called themselves the Neoterics, or New Poets, regularly read poetry to Augustus. Among them were poets we still read today, like Ovid, Horace, and Virgil. 

Virgil hailed from Mantua in the northern provinces of Italy. His family farmed there. Julius Caesar’s civil wars had conscripted Virgil’s family land, forcing them to find other occupations. Virgil eventually arrived in Rome with ambitions to be a poet. By Caesar Augustus’ time, Virgil had written two major works of poetry. The first was Eclogues— a series of conversations between shepherds about provincial, rural life under the rule of Rome. Then he wrote Georgics, a long educational poem meant to teach best farming practices; although it’s clear to see that Virgil longs to be away from the vain ambitions of the city, living a simple life, tied to the seasons of the land and the livestock. Virgil spent several nights reciting the Georgics to Augustus, and the conversation progressed. Virgil of course knew the Greek myths told by Homer. He knew them by heart. What transpired in those conversations on Palatine Hill is lost to history, but Caesar saw Virgil’s potential to write the new mythology of Rome. 

There was no shortage of stories from which Virgil could have drawn. For example, the city of Rome was founded by Romulus who killed his twin brother Remus in an argument over the city boundaries. Those twins, lost in the woods as infants, were raised by wolves, growing to be fierce warriors. That’s an entertaining story—which inspired a kind of ruthless will to succeed at all costs— but Augustus didn’t think Romans needed to be reminded that they were founded on a fratricide. That would be like founding a city named after Cain. Instead, they needed a story that inspired a piety in the citizens, a certain duty to each other and the empire. A story must be told about a virtuous hero, so Romans could become and remain virtuous people.

The idea struck Virgil, and over the next several years he composed the epic poem The Aeneid. It has war and romance, a trip to the Underworld, divine intervention, treachery and courage. At the center of it all, there is Aeneas who is chosen by the gods to lead a band of Trojan survivors. Aeneas endures shipwrecks, temptations, and more war on his way to Italy where eventually his descendants would found Rome. He’s tempted in Carthage by a beautiful queen to settle with her and begin a civilization there. He’s tempted again by some of his fellow Trojan citizens who founded a city that could have been called New Troy with all of their customs and his old friends. How easy it would be to settle in either of these places, set down the sword, and build a life. Yet Aeneas foregoes each of these temptations. He is the example of what Augustus saw as piety, the duty to your people—even those not born yet— and to the gods. Anytime he forgets, a god will arrive and remind him. When he travels to the Underworld, his dead father reminds him yet again that he is destined to lead a great empire.

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Many years ago when the late billionaire T. Boone Pickens still headquartered his oil company in Amarillo, he made the comment that it was difficult to hire good help from outside the area. “It's not easy to move people to Amarillo,” he said. “It's kind of like the moon. You move people here and they start thinking about how they can leave.” Eventually, he lost confidence in the city and pulled up stakes. A popular bumper sticker at the time read, “Turn out the lights if you’re the last one to leave Amarillo.” 

We have the perennial concern that a bigger metropolis will drain our young talent as they graduate, after we spend our tax dollars educating them. In fact, the two largest items on our city tax bill fund education. Of course, part of the answer for keeping young people here is economic development; they need jobs once they graduate. Another more abstract concern is morale. They need to want to stay. How does a mayor propose “morale” on the council’s agenda?

We’re hardly the first city to face this question. I suspect our answer lies in beauty. Sure, Amarillo could be made to appear more beautiful. The murals and renovation are a step in the right direction, but they’re merely lipstick and rouge. There is the deeper encounter with beauty that stops a person cold, compels a man or woman to stick around, to make, to create life. What vision stopped Bethany in her alley? The average Amarillo citizen hurries to toss away his trash during a commercial break, or grumbles that the dumpsters haven’t been emptied this week and simply misses the gift of beauty that’s there, waiting for him. When I despair, I wonder if Amarilloans can no longer perceive beauty. Do we nurse a spite for the gift? Can we only perceive it if it can be commodified and packaged and advertised as beautiful? Or else we’ve replaced a sensitivity for beauty with the novelty of the kitsch or the shock of the transgressive; one would like to say trash doesn’t exist, the other would praise our waste. That can’t be true though, can it? I refuse to despair.

I learned a kind of courage from reading poetry like The Aeneid. Not to take up arms, but to lead and inspire. There’s a moment when Aeneas has watched his friends be swept away in a storm, and even as he grieves their deaths, he realizes it is his responsibility to lead the survivors to shore. I read poetry from ancient and great civilizations because those cultures were able to create something that has lasted for thousands of years. A poem which has inspired a hundred generations of human beings in different languages and geographies might be a valuable thing for the young leader of an ambitious city.

That might work for ancient people, you might be thinking. Those people believed in crazy creatures like cyclops and a dozen gods living a soap opera drama on Mt. Olympus, but that would never work in Amarillo. People now would never believe a story like that. People now want facts and statistics. They need policies, transparency, and clear communication.

No doubt. Even in Augustus’ day, there were well over a million people in the city of Rome, let alone Rome’s world encompassing empire. Again, forget civic centers; imagine finding the funds for the Colosseum. Imagine the sewage infrastructure of the ancient metropolis. There were no water treatment plants; no dumpsters and truck schedules. Despite lead pipes and an occasional cholera outbreak, the city seemed to be managed well. Set our troubles of raising a police force against raising an army to put down Egypt. All that to oversee, yet Augustus thought it worthwhile to have conversations with poets. 

Furthermore, Augustus never commissioned Virgil to write The Aeneid. He simply had conversations with him about it. The project took several years, and Virgil was known to travel with Augustus throughout the empire, finding inspiration in far corners of the Mediterranean world. Virgil latched onto the idea and produced one of the most important stories that’s ever been written. And the effect worked. Citizens all over the Roman empire knew the story and could quote passages of it. “The celebrity of Virgil’s works in the Roman world was immediate and lasting.” You can find people referencing that work throughout history. The emperor Constantine cited Virgil over 300 years later; kings and queens have quoted him. You can bet our founding fathers knew it, too. Guess who wrote the phrase E pluribus unum.

For that reason, I’m sending you a copy of The Aeneid as soon as you take office. I know you’ll be inundated with things to read. Becoming mayor is a sharp learning curve. Every person you meet will recommend a leadership book or budgeting theory. I hope you take the time to read it, maybe even discuss it with someone, and remember the circumstances which bore it. Not for practical leadership tips—though there are plenty—but for the image of a man attempting to act with virtue despite the temptations to take an easier route. It’s a beautiful story.

Also, it would be a smart move to engage the arts in Amarillo. On your website, you mention that you would like for Amarillo to “shine from north to south and east to west.” That we should make a good impression on visitors to the city. Trash removal is an aspect of making the city more beautiful. But I don’t remember a time when any mayor of Amarillo entertained poets, story tellers, songwriters, or artists. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Good artists have an obsessive quality about them. Once they get hold of an idea, they have to see it through and make something. Remember Bethany painting her alley. Who knows what a sculptor might make if she thought the people of her city took her seriously. 

Maybe, just maybe, a poet here is stewing on an epic that will stir the hearts of Amarillo’s citizens. Maybe even the hearts of people beyond Amarillo.

Sincerely,

Seth Wieck

P.S. If you’re looking for a candidate for Amarillo’s Virgil, I recommend Wes Reeves.