What
he fails to say is that the common man as cannon fodder, and victims of a
shattered economy suffer the most, while the Oligarchy, who benefit most from
the expansionism, seem to survive intact, due to beneficial government policies
initiated by the political pawns of the Wealthy.
Avoiding America's
Decline Starts at Home
Are we Rome?
Is America like the Roman Empire - you know, declining and falling, and
all that?
No less than the comptroller general of the United States, David Walker,
answers yes, citing "striking similarities" between America today and Rome then.
And while it's tempting " at a
time of falling bridges, faltering currencies and failing foreign wars"
to spot ominous parallels, one huge difference exists, which happily is still
in our power to control.
Walker, head of the
Government Accountability Office, has been warning for years against
unsustainable financial deficits. But he went much further this month when
he described Washington,
D.C., as a "burning
platform," adding to the litany of woes: "declining moral
values and political civility at home, an overconfident and
overextended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility
by the central government."
So yes, the idea is in the air - as it always has been in the
West. Why? Because the
Roman Empire was the greatest
politico-military achievement of all time. For the
better part of six centuries, one city in Italy
managed to control much of Europe, North Africa and the Middle
East.
Given that historical footprint, it's
little wonder that Rome
is always popping up in culture, as well as politics. A just-opened movie, "The Last Legion,"
recounts yet another tale about the fall of the Western
Roman Empire, in A. D. 476.
And it was exactly 1,300 years later, in 1776, that two
Rome-inspired events took place. THE FIRST, of course, was the American
Revolution and the subsequent establishing of a new republic. The
founders were English-speakers, but as they looked around for political
inspiration, they settled on the ancient Roman Republic,
even dredging up such Latin-derived official titles as president, senator and supreme court justice.
SECONDLY, 1776 brought a wistful note, as well. By coincidence,
that same year, Englishman Edward Gibbon published the first volume of his
monumental series, "The History of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire." Gibbon's
erudition and poetic pessimism had a massive effect on Western
historical consciousness, bolstering an already powerful human instinct: to
search the past for clues about the future.
The latest such past-as-prologue effort comes from Cullen
Murphy, whose new book, "Are
We Rome?: The Fall of
an Empire and the Fate of America,"
argues that then-now comparisons are indeed valid. Reflecting the times in
which we live, Murphy emphasizes the issue of military ambition; the Romans
in their day, he observes, believed that they were uniquely destined to
manage the world. And they were - for a while.
OK, so there are many similarities, of which we should be
mindful.
Now here's the big difference: As with any empire, the Roman Empire was always a multicultural construct. That
is, for all those centuries a few million Latin-speakers managed to conquer
and control other populations, who outnumbered the Romans by perhaps 25 to 1.
And when Roman military might failed, the empire fell. It was only
natural that the various conquered peoples - Britons, Germans, Egyptians - would all then go their separate ways. What
was left of Rome, politically, was the idea of Italy as a
distinct entity. And so today, 16 centuries later, there's an Italian state,
with its capital in Rome,
composed mostly of Italians. Multicultural empires may fall, but unicultural countries endure.
So what's the lesson for America? What is it
that's still within our power to control? Our overseas military prizes will
come and go; it's this country that we must keep. To be blunt, we are better
off having let go of the Philippines
and Vietnam, and will be
soon enough with Iraq.
Because the fate of America will be determined right
here, on this continent. For as long as we can protect our
border and our sovereignty, while preserving our language and culture, there
will always be an America.
James P. Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday.