all that 'empire' stuff form last year

The Boston Athenaeum has archived lecture series online and I noticed the author of a book I had seen a while ago, Cullen Murphy on his book Are We Rome?. What a better way to get the thrust of the book without having to wait until I wade through the seven other books I'm currently trying to read?

The author had a lot to say and a fascinating body of knowledge to draw from, and convinced me that the book is worth reading if just for that - a lot of interesting things about Roman cultural identity and the histories they looked back on to form it, details of society that we don't see, etc.

Comparing of the United States and Rome he highlighted a lot of parallels and gave meaningful background to them. Then he started down the road of "we are Rome and will fall like her because the government is too weak" and how we can learn from Rome how to make sure the government can 'work in concert' when it needs to, has enough power, ie is centralized, well-funded, etc... never addressing the obvious contradiction between demanding exhaustive governmental authority and criticizing an apathetic citizenry, and never addressing the danger of corruption in our own government despite mentioning some ripe parallels in the Roman system.

For 30 some years, the current generation has been beating this same drum, concurrently demanding ever-expanding governmental authority and complaining of abusive leadership, never admitting that the two go hand-in-hand. It seems that those that are running our world would sooner hand society over wholesale to bureaucrats, politicians, and the would-be emperors they harbor than concede that their may be some tiny flaw in their government-panacea ideology. If we are talking about emperors, this sounds like new clothes to me.

I was also surprised that he didn't explore the possibility that Rome began to fall as soon as the Republic was compromised, that the gains of the Empire were like the flight of a rocket whose engine has given out - the crash destroys it, but is not the true cause of the destruction. He didn't broach the subject of an American parallel to this might be the greatest danger of all; that the abdication of authority and responsibility to a centralized power, be it emperor or bureaucracy, creates a system ripe for the picking by any megalomaniac. That may be the true lesson from the fall of Rome; maybe we can avoid that fate.