Saturday. September 19. The Year 2026. A Forecast high of 94 F. The filthy rich will take their money and hide. There'll always be someone they can buy. And yes an empire dies when a secretary of defense relies on testosterone shots and judges his soldiers by the rigidity of their erections rather than their spines.
Edward Gibbon never for one minute believed the Roman Republic would survive. His reason for thinking this was that once the Roman Republic had expanded into a massive empire, its collapse and transformation into an autocracy was the natural, inevitable result of what he called "immoderate greatness." In modern parlance "Kiss business man arse and bend over for billionaires and you loose your republic." John Walking Stewart could have told you that when he had to run from Hyder Ali, Sultan of Mysore.
Worth wondering how Gibbon might describe the world as it is today. His great history addressed the Roman Empire rather than the Roman Republic. His account began in the year 98 with the establishment of Emperors rather than elected consuls and he ended the history in 1590, a hundred and fifty years after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans which happened in 1453.
Gibbon chose the year 1590, the year the ruthlessly efficient, architectural genius Pope Sixtus V died, because he wanted to explore how the 15th and 16th Century Popes in their efforts to rebuild the ruined City of Rome had reappraised the Roman Empire and by so doing they had allowed themselves to enter a Renaissance, they'd given themselves hopeful look into the future. Edward Gibbon went on to suggest that by 1590 Rome was no longer a shadow of the glorious past cast on Europe, indeed by 1590 Europe was marching to a new drummer that became the Age of Reason.
The other view describes an interstitial, a between spaces, where hope exists but can't be reached until something desperate happens.
