Novum Imperium Romanum, Part I

I haven't posted in awhile. I will attempt to make up for it with a series of posts... well, at least three ;-)

Between the articles I've been reading daily and history books (The Climax of Rome by Michael Grant), I really want to on how I think this country is becoming the Roman Empire. Before I do that, I want to take the time with this post to say how I think this idea of us being Rome is in itself a phenomenon that never goes away. Plus, when used by the Left today, usually they're wrong and don't have a grasp of history.

First, I find it humorous that the Left under Bush the Younger thought us similar to the Roman Empire. Their mantra is that Western history is passe and that we don't need to study it. "There's nothing you can learn from studying the history of the West that you can't learn from anything else." Actually, according to liberals, the West is unique because of it's violent, bigoted, greedy history, etc. And of course this assumes that you want to study history at all, which as we all know is not that important anyway. We've advanced to a postmodern understanding of man where pretty much any discipline is valid: I know I learned life lessons when I studied the history of country music.

So rejecting history, why is it then that these same people turn to back to Rome? And they have: remember that phony Julius Caesar quote that made the email rounds in 2002 (http://www.snopes.com/quotes/caesar.asp)? Supposedly, Caesar or Shakespeare or whomever warned us about leaders (aka Bush) "who bang the drums of war"? It was totally ok to reference the classics then. Too bad Barbara Streisand never had one of her assistants actually check the veracity of that quote.

More recently there is the silly 2007 book, Are We Rome? by Cullen Murphy. One of the history adjuncts here at Marymount actually assigned this book to his European history survey course. (As a side note, this was a really stupid assignment. The students had to find a review in an American paper and compare it with one in a foreign paper for biases. Leaving aside the problem of how to find these articles, what does this have to do with the first half of the survey course of European history? It's not even an academic book.)

So why does the Rome analogy always come up? Well, first of all, there's a lot of debate as to why Rome collapsed. It took so long and there were so many factors that you can almost take any cause and make it appear to the main factor in Rome's decline: economics, military, environment, decadence, immigration, and the list goes on. I'm sure you could make Elvis impersonators the cause if you stretched it. There's little doubt what caused the Aztec or Nazi empires to collapse: conquest from the outside.

Second, everyone's heard of Rome. It permeates our culture; and not just classical buildings in DC. "Oh yeah, Bush was totally like Joaquin Phoenix from Gladiator." Nobody would really make a comparison to the collapse of the Hittite Empire (the who?).

So it's a standard trope that everyone uses, including the Left when it suits them. In my next installment, I will show how recent comparisons of Rome to our military were off the mark.

By the way, I want to conclude by acknowledging that the Right makes those same comparisons. Usually coming at it from the angle of immigration or decadence. I'm more sympathetic to that point of view, but every time Pat Buchanan makes a reference to our overstretched military antagonizing others like Rome, I gag a little.