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In the Salon book section, Gary Kamiya has written a review of Cullen Murphy’s book Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. If you read the review, you may want to buy and read the book. Cullen Murphy is the managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly. In his new book, you learn more about Rome and more about America and the comparisons and differences between them. There are frightening similarities between the two great empires, one of the ancient world and the other found in our current iteration of America. No empire since Rome has ruled the world like the United States of America can lay claim to today. There were other empires of course, such as the Ottoman Empire that came down during WW I and there were the European Colonial Powers such as Spain, France, England, Portugal and of course Germany who, under Hitler, tried to insert its thousand year Reich, which came up a bit short by about 990 years. But at the Close of WW II, the United States displaced all other pretenders to the throne and became a power that matches or exceeds what Rome established in the ancient world. Both the Roman and the U.S. empires rule/ruled not just by their military might, which was unassailable (until Iraq revealed a kind of character flaw in our military), but also through their/our culture, language, arts, science, sports and technology which were/are important elements to their/our domination and both cultures were great problem solvers, though with a vastly different vista: pre-industrial Rome didn’t worry about global warming, but then, come to think of it, neither do we. We tell the world what we are interested in doing and if they don’t like it, well tough shit. Murphy reminds us that we have many other things in common with Romans in their heyday, not the least of which is that the citizens of each ruling empire had/have little interest in the world outside of their empire and of course the transition for Rome from Republic to dictatorship is happening today in America before our very eyes, with few people astute enough to see or believe it. Many writers, such as Chalmers Johnson, think that it will be impossible to reverse what we have created, for it has both military and economic modes of justification and rides smoothly on automatic pilot.

Several years ago, I read Edward Gibbon’s book “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Not a particularly easy read, but I sloshed through it by a combination of “books on tape” and then reading the various chapters when I got home to see if my understanding of the verbal read matched what Gibbon was trying to convey in his book. I do not recommend this for a “books on tape” mode of acquiring the material. Gibbon’s first volume of his massive work was published in 1776, a year well known to all Americans. He is generally accepted as the first modern European historian and whenever there is a serious discussion of Roman History, as historian Hugh Trevor-Roper has pointed out, Gibbon’s book is indispensable and central. Gibbon is generally credited as the first scholarly historian who tried to write objectively about a history that, to his surprise, everyone was interested in. Although his book was popular, he didn’t do too well on the royalties part of it, because the idea of a copyright was not in vogue, so his books could and were brought to America and published here without any compensation given to him. Sort of like what the Chinese are doing to Microsoft today.

It is odd that today, the Roman Empire and its history seem equally if no more important to us then ever before, yet for different reasons than those which appealed to our Founding Fathers. When Gibbon’s books first appeared, particularly in America, his works were examined and appreciated. But the Americans of that time, just beginning their revolt against England and King George III, were more focused on the period of the Roman Republic (roughly from 510 BC with the overthrow of the monarchy and 27 BC when Augustus assumed control) and the period of Rome that Gibbon’s described (roughly 62 to 472 AD), was the part of Roman history that was to be avoided, by carefully thinking about the structure of the new Republic. And, you cannot read Gibbon’s works without appreciating that one of the main components of Rome’s downfall was the militarism that the empire adopted and found increasingly difficult to fund and support. Then too Rome suffered from a series of bad Emperors and bad decisions, perhaps permeated by an ancient version of Reaganism. Nevertheless, Greek and Roman history were widely studied in the period of our new Democracy and appreciated as a serious component to the one’s knowledge of the world and one’s sense of sophistication and achievement. Indeed, in those days, the world still lived with the idea that there was more to learn by serious study of the past, rather than doing something new and innovative for the future: the age of reversing that trend and putting the future in front of the past would not begin in earnest until the century after the American Revolution. And, it would take the ascendancy of science to bring all that about. But that of course, is quite another story.

But today, things are different. The interests which many modern writers have in Roman history is not focused on the period of the Republic of Rome, but the very period that Gibbon wrote about, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire; the current lively debate is whether the American Empire has now entered a period of decline for reasons that we share with ancient Rome. Authors like Cullen Murphy and Chalmers Johnson have written on the many comparisons that exist today between Rome and America and Romans and Americans. Chalmers Johnson, in his book “Nemesis:The Last Days of the American Empire,” points out how Rome, besieged by the need to feed a large external army and the disintegration of domestic rule, collapsed under its own weight and its inability to finance and feed its largess in both domestic and military operations. As he deftly points out, the Romans had far better and more experienced commanders in their military ranks than we do in our “Commander-in-Chief” of today, including his inexperienced military chieftains. His conclusion is that America has become so militarized, with such a need to feed the military-industrial complex, that this version of America cannot be reversed and a state of bankruptcy is in our future. His advice is to get a place in Vancouver, settle down, retire and take out Canadian citizenship.

Cullen Murphy would apparently look upon Johnson as a “declinist,” someone who accepts the idea that America has reached its zenith (Murphy himself is probably in that camp). Of course, this is a rich time in which to view the two Americas, the one which was born in democracy and still claims to live by it, with the other verging on a state of military dictatorship within perhaps a hair of becoming permanently transfixed in that state. We have two divergent camps, one of which is easily identified with the neocons and their vision of Pax Americana (oddly enough, Pax Americana was replete in the neocons website Project for the New American Century, but a repeat visit on my part, using their search engine turned up nothing for “Pax America or Pax Americana”), which, like Julius Caesar’s view of Rome, looks at the republic and the powers of congress as an obstacle, something in the way of making good decisions. That is one reason why the neocons admire Israel, who, according to their view, can act decisively, without hesitation and execute with precision. The other camp is more like Cicero, who believed in government and thought that the key to the future, the way out of the troubles of Rome, was to get better people into government, not change government or ignore its institutions. This was the very solution that FDR applied in recovering from the depression and getting through WW II: he focused on getting good, talented people into government. It would be doing the current iteration of the Republican Party too much of a service to equate them with Julius Caesar, although I can live with the Cicero-Democratic Party connection.

It will be hard to select a future leader who will not do a better job than George W. Bush and all the miserable cronies he has brought into government. Certainly this is a period of steep intellectual decay insofar as our government and our national dialogue is concerned. No one would pretend that George Bush could match Julius Caesar in his ability to articulate a justification for pursuing the “military option.” And Bush has given us a fresh insight about how fragile our democracy really is; all you have to do is find a sufficient number of enemies, paint them all into superheros and voila, you have the makings of a functional military dictatorship. In case you haven’t noticed, we do not follow our constitution insofar as war powers are concerned and until congress takes back what it gave away after WW II, we will have no hope of gaining back a true democracy as laid out by the Founding Fathers and as described in our constitution. George Washington himself, as well as James Madison, warned of the dangers to our democracy by having a standing army. Well, today, we have a standing army, a floating army, a flying army, an underwater army, four divisions of a military operation that surrounds the globe with more than 700 bases throughout the world! And we have drones and then too we have the Blackwater Mercenary Army, a new force that we will have to deal with in both foreign and domestic military and security operations. So perhaps if George Washington viewed our situation of today, he might say ” I told you so,” and a more recent President, Dwight Eisenhower might say the same thing. In order to stop counting up our enemies, we have to first stop creating them.

RFM