The Dying Empire Blues
Back in uni, I’d gotten a chance to study Classical History with a unique type of professor. The fellow was everything some annoying “RETVRN” poster could want for a classics professor: to him, Rome was the pinnacle of civilization and its later decline and extinction would mark a dark age from which mankind would take centuries to recover—of course colored with a Nietzschean rebuke of Christianity for bringing “shame” to or somehow “degenerating” the Empire.
It made the fact the guy was Jewish even funnier. He’d like the lovechild of Bernie Sanders and Alan Dershowitz: a genuine alte kaker. The guys with greek statue profile pics would love him, up until they get a glimpse at him.
The class itself was entertaining; although the AC had broken down and sitting in a sun-soaked classroom for an hour at a time while your elderly professor droned on was a recipe for some of the best sleep I’d ever had. It’s a real shame, too. I enjoy history when I get the chance to study it. There is one memory that stands out, however, and it was around the start of the semester: we were read the Lament for Ur—an ancient bit of poetry mourning the destruction of one of Humanity’s oldest cities.
“O city, the lament is bitter, the lament made for you. Your lament is bitter, O city, the lament made for you. In his righteous destroyed city its lament is bitter. In his righteous destroyed Urim, the lament is bitter, the lament made for you. Your lament is bitter, O city, the lament made for you. In his destroyed Urim its lament is bitter. How long will your bitter lament grieve your lord who weeps? How long will your bitter lament grieve Nanna who weeps?”
—The Lament for Urim, 39-46
The Ancient Mesopotamians, our professor explained to us, developed a cynical culture over the years. The seemingly random flooding, as well as raids from “barbarian” tribes, led them to believe they lived in a world of suffering—ruled often enough by capricious gods who were unafraid of crushing man whenever they felt.
Often enough when it comes to the “Fall of Empires” we think of Rome; specifically, we think of barbarians sacking statues and mass violence. Little attention is given to the far less thematic death: a slow sinking, a lament howled at uncaring winds. Perhaps there’s some peace in the image of Rome physically burning; if the slate’s wiped clean, there’s no one to mourn. We think of the Rome of paintings and plays, and not the Rome of reality.
The American Century is over. I’ve been reflecting recently on what that means—to be born at the end of the Empire. Did any Roman wander through the desiccated streets of his polis and think: “Yep, this is the end. The party’s just about over, and I’m getting here just in time to hear the music stop and the cleaning crew come in.” The barbarians aren’t burning the city down, but you can still feel the decline. You know it’s coming.
America’s Julian
“Tell the emperor that my hall has fallen to the ground. Phoibos no longer has his house, nor his mantic bay, nor his prophetic spring; the water has dried up.”
—The Oracle of Delphi to Emperor Julian the Apostate, likely apocryphal
It feels silly enough to compare Trump to a Roman Emperor—unless we’re talking Nero, maybe. Yet in the MAGA movement’s brand of militant conservatism, I can’t help but wonder if they’ve slotted themselves into a historical position not dissimilar to Julian the Apostate’s attempts to “repaganize” the Empire. Of course, by the time he came around I imagine it was too late to reverse course and I doubt restoring the old Pagan gods would’ve been enough to prevent the Empire’s decline. The narrative that “Christianity” was responsible never held water for me.
Regardless, Trump and his movement form an interesting parallel. The very term pagan descends from the Latin paganus which was more or less a term for “rustic” or “rural” peoples of the Empire. It’s likely enough that the urban citizens of Rome, long having been accustomed to Christianity, saw Julian and his followers in similar terms as we see the MAGA movement—a bunch of angry hicks who can’t get with the times. Desperate to restore a glorious pagan past. The mee-maws and pep-peps in flyover country today are the spiritual descendants of Maters and Paters of declining rural villages.
“Just you wait!” They likely croaked. “Emperor Julian is gonna make everything right again! My kids will sacrifice a sheep to Apollo and finally talk to me again!”
Being on the political Left, it’s often enough that in discussions of America’s decline, you’ll hear a resounding: “Good!” And I can’t fault others for echoing the sentiment. Look only to the genocide in Gaza—gleefully supported by the Biden administration—to see that claims to us being in any way a “moral Empire” or overseer of a “rules-based order” are bunk. And yet regardless, I feel some melancholy all the same. Not for the Empire, but its Citizens.
“But!” The newly appointed Bishop says, “Rome was a blight on the world! Think of the poor people of Gaul that were massacred in Caesar’s mad quest for power! Think of how many of your fellow Christians they persecuted! Roads littered with the crucified! It’s a Pagan Empire! Irredeemable!”
And yet I was born to that Empire a citizen all the same. Torn between Christ in Heaven and Caesar in Rome.
I’m used to pounding pavement around the neighborhood. And once you leave the enclosure of suburban housing, I meet creeping poverty with every step: more people sleeping on the street, more graffiti, more trash, dilapidated RVs, and every kind of indignity foisted on man by a broken economic system. The earliest Christians emerged from the slaves and poor of the Empire while their distant cousins, the Socialists, emerged from the working poor of Europe. In time, Christianity spread to all other social classes in much the same way that “Socialism” became a thing for respectable middle-class Social Democrats.
Neither side truly conquered the other—much of the radical spirit of Christianity had been tempered when it graduated into the ruling ideology of Rome. The Social Democrats of Europe, today, have seemingly supplicated themselves to Capital. Yet what’s one to do when they’re caught between worlds? My parents are workers, and I’m a worker myself, but I had a fairly typical upbringing for a White kid born in a suburb—benefits of an old Empire that my generation will never inherit. My counterpart in Rome wouldn’t be an aristocrat, but likely a plebian from a family of plebians, with a passing knowledge of Plato.
I was born not a slave, and so the radical dismantling of Rome isn’t something I can ever wish for in my heart of hearts. Yet neither am I an aristocrat and so the rule of the slavocracy is yet still foreign to me. To my right, I spy the pagans longing for an impossible turn to a mythic past. To my left, I see my Christian brethren cheer for the Goths to sack Rome itself, and drive the final nail into the Empire’s coffin.
Here I stand, alone. Call it the Dying Empire Blues.
What’s Next?
I once heard someone say that people think of Revolutions as going dangerously fast down a narrow highway when in reality they’re just pulling the emergency break before a sheer cliff.
Is the cause of Revolution inherently destructive? No doubt, it contains a destructive element to it, but the goal has ever been to sweep aside a broken political system so that something new can take its place. Revolutions occur only when you can see the cliff approaching and need to take drastic action—to revolt is not to die, but to drastically try to prevent death. When the people of Paris were starving, it was clear that the Ancien Régime was intolerable to life.
Those who declare that Revolution, or the idea that any kind of destruction is necessary for creation, is an intolerable thought to have betray a kind of naivete or cynicism. There’s a time for going through “the proper channels” and there’s a time when said channels have become so impacted with the muck and grime of decades of corruption that the only possible chance at justice is to go beyond them. I’ve seen secondhand how HR exists to protect companies from liability first and solve problems never. Yet just as foolish is the man overeager to shed blood as a first resort.
That the Gazans were so willing to try every method before striking at their occupiers—from legal to passive resistance—has only fueled the world’s sympathy for them. That Israel has made it clear that there is no alternative, no compromise, and no peaceful resolution to the conflict has revealed what they are to the world. Even though many in the Palestinian camp knew that non-violent protests (such as the March of Return) wouldn’t work, they tried anyway. The failure of non-violence didn’t destroy the Palestinian cause, but had made a final confrontation with Israel one wherein they could rally the peoples of the world to their stand. There are no alternatives.
But again, we’re talking about Dying Empires here. It would be the height of narcissism to mention the Gazan plight and not confess to America’s involvement in the ongoing genocide. Or worse yet, exclaim that the world must mourn America’s internal decay as much as the people living within it do. What leg do I, a citizen of the Empire, have to stand on when I can see what horrors that Empire is committing? To this, I can only comment on the immense shame and disgust I feel towards “my” government.
The people of Palestine are not alien to the American people—it’s our government that has become alien to us, and which directs the present genocide if only through sheer bureaucratic inertia. We’ve become, in a sense, captives to our own institutions. We’ve built and maintained a prison of our own making, and we’ve not yet learned how to deconstruct it. The machinery of State has disciplined us like dogs, so much so that we have to relearn liberty.
That’s part of the Dying Empire Blues too, I suppose. At home, you get decay and degradation. Abroad? Well, the Empire is building more crucifixes for a thousand innocents—and there’s no salvation in it. It’s not going to do a thing for the Citizenry. It’s not going to build housing, lower the cost of goods, or do a single whit of good for us. It’s a desperate gambit to keep the oligarchy alive; pump more money into the Slavocrats.
Perhaps when the situation decays further, we may have a new revolution. Sweep aside the old and build something new. Though I doubt it’ll be led by today’s self-professed “revolutionaries”. Men who are all too eager to start a fire don’t have the constitution to build bridges. We have plenty of angry men, but men without love of anything—not even hearth and home—aren’t the builders of a new society.
Maybe we’ll be swept aside, and a hundred years from now some new civilizations will inhabit the ruins of our cities. They’ll say: “This was once America, and her expanse stretched from Atlantic to Pacific.” Or maybe our memory will only be kept alive by the roaches. I couldn’t tell you.
Regardless, it’s a tiring reality. We’re denied on one side permission to mourn, and on the other we have pagans trying to resurrect the “old ways” when they’ve long since decayed. What’s to be said of the poor Christian torn between his faith and loyalty to a Pagan Empire? He’s doomed, perhaps.
A block from where I sit, a halted construction site collects litter and tags. A homeless man is screaming at the sky. And a man is hanging his Trump flag outside of his home. Ur has yet to fall, but the storm clouds are gathering. Who will mourn us?