Then and now

Thursday, July 31, 2003

True to my cracked-record refrain that columnists ought to carry on a running dialogue on things that matters, not just serve up further budgets of their personal "kitchenmaid' s chatter," as Europeans call it, I've been trying to make head or tail of a recent contribution of one of the most eminent among us, and so formulate some kind of pertinent response. The column drew my notice just because it seemed so out-of-character for this columnist, a proudly avowed liberal, i.e. almost by definition omni-tolerant in his opinions and the very soul of moderation and geniality in expressing them. So it was a bit of a surprise, finding him so matter-of-factly alluding to the likes of "the oaf in the White House." The column was titled "The Rogue State." I couldn't help thinking, by analogy, of "The Rogue Column." Was it, that was to say, an isolated aberration? Or something more serious, in which case it should perhaps be, dismayingly, "The Rogue Columnist." He began, unexceptionably enough, with the well-known Santayana quote that those who don't know the past are condemned to repeat it. But it soon emerged that, for him, as for most modems, "the past" isn't the sum total of the ages but just sort of the day before yesterday. "History" is the likes of those sixteen words in the State of the Union speech, ballooned to world-historical significance. George Bush the First figures as sort of the Dark Ages, while the Cold War's downright antediluvian-before the flood. And for "literary allusions" we get pop stuff like Tom Hanks and baseball. Our columnist, like Pat Buchanan, is upset that America is at the crossroads (Republic or Empire, as Buchanan starkly put it), and seems to be taking the wrong turn. Buchanan, at least, knows enough real history to recognize the inescapable analogy to the quintessential empire, the Roman. Rome found itself at that selfsame crossroads, and took what, to moralists and isolationists, then and now, is very much the wrong turn. Not long ago, television treated us to a reasonably accurate look at Julius Caesar. Here's Julius off conquering Gaul, over great odds, while back home his political foes nitpick his every move on the floor of the Senate: He's abusing those poor, blameless Gauls! It's an unnecessary war anyway. Why are we there? Caesar ought to be recalled at once, censured, condemned to at least political death. It all has a curiously, troublingly contemporary ring. Thoughtful historians generally agree: Caesar's conquest and Romanization of Gaul was one of the most fateful and fortunate events in all history. It assured the very survival of classical culture, of the glory that was Greece and the law and order (if nothing else) that was Rome, after the Empire's fall, the balkanizing of Italy, the Dark Ages. Gaul became France, from which the preserved seeds of classical culture spread throughout Europe and then the world. By our columnist's definition, none was ever more of a "rogue state" than imperial Rome. Whatever the reason, like modem America, republican Rome emerged as more powerful, technologically more advanced, than the rest of the world put together. The Romans didn't just one day decide to acquire an empire. They did it, like the British, in a fit of absentmindedness. They found they just couldn't live as an island of order in a chaotic world. They had to shoulder the responsibilities that went with their power. It was an odd kind of "world conquest." Having bailed out Greece the Romans virtuously went home. The Greeks lapsed right back into their old way, squabbling among themselves. So the Romans came again, and this time they stayed. Not too unlike America in Europe after 1945. The king of wealthy Pergamon bequeathed his country and people and treasury to Rome. Out of one side of their mouths countries growled about Roman intervention, while out of the other they begged for it, rather like Liberians, Haitians, and others about America today. Roman citizenship was prized, like American today. St. Paul made the most of his, benefitting from Roman culture while doing his bit to destroy it. Literal "conquest," "roguery," was as unnecessary for Romans as for Americans. People, then as now, voted with their feet, becoming Romans or Americans merely by changing their address. Buchanan's right that while American world-hegemony'll be good for the world, it won't be good for America. But already Buchanan's America no longer exists, just as simple, virtuous, agrarian republican Rome no longer existed after the Punic Wars: the World Wars of the ancient world. Nostalgic Cato, like Buchanan and our columnist, just couldn't see it. Caesar could, and acted on his vision. And doubtless the Catos hid their incomprehension of the new, and of those struggling to face up to it, like Caesar, behind the gratuitous likes of "that oaf." It may be argued that America has no glorious culture to preserve and pass along; that the "pop culture" we're indeed spreading is the very opposite of culture in the larger sense, the High Culture. But that's letting ourselves be fooled by superficialities and appearances. The depraved pop culture, so deplored by foreign and American critics of all political stripes, is ephemeral; "as the flies of a summer," already passing away even as it appears. And the same technology that spreads the plague of pop culture likewise makes possible the preservation and propagation of real culture. One need but think of the symphony orchestras cropping-up in Chinese cities, of the many oriental performers bringing Western classics back to the benighted masses of the West. Or of English poetry, neglected in England, taught in schools in India, actually appreciated. As with Rome, the cultural center converts the provinces, but then grows cynical, feckless. As with Caesar's Gaul, the provinces pick up the torch. In short, under that glitzy veneer of porn and hard rock and McDonalds popularly termed "Western culture," true Western culture survives and even spreads, under the aegis of the "rogue state," that raw power seldom explicitly flexed because implicitly so ever-present. Rome rose to the challenge, pacified the world and bequeathed it centuries of incomparable culture, which have been called the happiest period in all history. Will America do half as well? Or will the nay-sayers carry the day, convincing America that power itself is immoral, and to exercise it as a solemn responsibility is to be a "rogue state," of which all the world lives, not in admiration as we once fancied, or even resentment and envy, but in sheer terror? Will they beguile us to leave the fate of the world to the UN and its kindred talking-shops, who're sure to play by the "rules," like the 1930s appeasers?

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