Vanity Fair June 2007
Excerpted from Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, by Cullen Murphy, to be published this month by Houghton Mifflin.
President and emperor, America and Rome: the matchup is by now so familiar, so natural, that you just can’t help yourself – it comes to mind unbidden, in the reflexive way that the behavior of chimps reminds you of the behavior of people. Everyone gets it whenever a comparison of Rome and America is drawn””for instance, the offhand allusion to welfare and televised sports as “bread and circuses,” or to illegal immigrants as “barbarian hordes.” If reference is made to an “imperial presidency,” or to the deployment abroad of “American legions,” no one raises an eyebrow and wonders what you could possibly be talking about. Invoke the phrase “decline and fall” and thoughts turn simultaneously to the Roman past and the American present.