We are the Hollow Men
We are the Stuffed Men
Leaning Together
Headpiece filled with straw.
So this is the way the world ends.
So this is the way the world ends.
So this is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
-- T.S. Eliot
Turning and turning in the widening gyre;
The Falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely, some revelation is at hand….
-- W.B. Yeats
____________________________
Slouching Toward a New Rome --
(I had a conversation with a friend of mine regarding the soon-to-be-announced ‘troop surge’ as proposed by President Bush. The discussion ran to ‘what if’ scenarios.
He said, “Will, we have two choices. Either pull out now, and allow the place to collapse into civil war, or we can put the troops in, and postpone it for a year and a half.”
I said, “There’s that third alternative – the one you haven’t mentioned.”
His eyes got wide. He said, “Yeah?”
“Yeah. We can put in a HUNDRED and twenty thousand troops, and eliminate the problem completely.”
“And what would we become then, Will?”
I paused for a moment.
“Rome,” I said.
Rome collapsed after 465 years of regional dominance as a republic, and 520 years of known-world dominance as an empire. The transition between republic and empire was a short but bloody civil war which occupied nearly every legion and reached every social strata.
Everyone compares America to Rome – for the wrong reasons.
Our history as a nation spans some 230 years. In that time, we’ve become the greatest single power since Rome, and had the ability (note, I did not say ‘have’) to create a genuine peace in the world after the end of World War II.
We squandered that opportunity, first by invoking the worst foreign-policy we could, and then by failing to capitalize on what was left when the largest and most-feared of our enemies collapsed.
Because of our foreign policy, we created more enemies than we could possibly kill, absent the use of weapons which everyone has agreed should never be used.
Because of the failure to fill the void left with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we’ve allowed many of the former clients of that nation to fall either into despotism or squalor – perfect breeding grounds for the kind of person who managed to organize and strike at us in 2001.
They struck at us, in the end, because of our failed foreign policy, our dismal failure to capitalize on the collapse of the Soviet Union, and our even-more-dismal record of retreating behind our oceaned-borders and believing with all certainty that Nothing Could Reach Us.
Rome, in 49BCE, had been upended by the constant squabbling in the Senate. The factions could not agree on proper sanitation, let alone anything important. Julius Caesar, having been forced to answer the Senate’s demand that he resign, recognized something which the Senate itself did not – that Rome was simply too valuable to the rest of the world to be allowed to fail.
Caesar traveled first to Ravenna, to give the Roman senate time to change its mind – then marched on Rome, violating the most-sacred of Rome’s republican laws – that no general may enter Italy at the head of an army unless returning to lay down a command, and may not enter Rome itself under any circumstances.
The end of the story is rather well-known – Caesar defeated Pompey at Pharsalus; set himself up as dictator-for-life, and was assassinated on the senate steps by those closest to him by people who still held to the Dream of Republic.
This created a power vacuum which took a civil war to fill. In the end, it was one of Caesar’s relatives, Octavian, who finished the job of bringing the republic to an end by assuming the mantle of emperor.
By the time this had happened, the average Roman didn’t care. He or she was happy enough that the whole thing was over – they didn’t really know nor find it necessary to remember that Romans had once overthrown a king in order to end the type of despotism which an imperium might bring; they were largely concerned with the food supply.
In the end, they were actually happy to have a strongman like Octavian put himself on the throne and call himself Augustus.
The Roman republic didn’t end because it wasn’t a good idea. It ended because everyone – great and small alike – forgot the meaning of the letters “SPQR” carved in stone at the Milvian Bridge: Senatus Populusque Romanus – The Senate, and the People of Rome.
The republic fell because the people forgot that it was the Person in the Mirror, eventually, who ruled.
Augustus, for his part, didn’t call himself king – he maintained the trappings of a senate, and pretended for the most part that they still mattered – so the people got the opportunity to hang on to their republican delusions, even though Rome was no longer a republic.
In the end, it wasn’t the republic which was remembered - -it was the empire.
It was Empire which enabled Rome to be the most-remembered Body Politic in history.
It was Empire which built the roads. It was Empire which, as Augustus said, “…found Rome a city of brick, and left it a city of marble.”
Today, America is in trouble.
It’s been argued that the ‘American idea’ went out the window with the Great Depression and Social Security, or at least upon the creation of the welfare-state in the ‘60’s. Individual liberty requires individual responsibility. Liberty requires thought. The average American wants neither – and is willing to surrender liberty to end the stalemate.
The Constitution has served us well, but it’s in need of a 21st century overhaul. The bureaucrats and courts make most of the decisions, and the factionalized-press spoon-feed us what we need to ‘know’ about our elected officials (and hence, make the de-facto decisions for us regarding who is or is not worthy of our support).
America is at the end of its republic.
Our government is us, and we’re not willing to learn, nor are we willing as a nation to act, upon the factions which are splitting this nation in two right in front of our eyes.
The advent of a dictator – in whatever trappings we might envision – is all too real a possibility. I’m willing to bet that as long as he behaves as Augustus did – leaving the majority of the trappings-of-government in place, and pretending they still matter – and as long as he allows the public to hang on to their delusions-of-democracy (as well as their plasma T.V. and their barbecue) – the whole thing will go off with a whimper; not a bang.
History is on my side with this analysis. The examples from Rome to present-day are easily cited. The transition from republic to empire is not so much a question of ‘if’. The question, apparently, is when.
I’m betting it’s soon.
