Twilight

America celebrated Memorial Day a few days ago, and the 129th anniversary of the Republic is coming up shortly. But many patriots like myself seriously doubt whether we have a republic to celebrate any more.People still ate hot dogs and potato salad on Memorial Day this year. While they drank lemonade and ate ice cream, and waved the flag, the atmosphere was more subdued than usual.

The country is bogged down in a war that even its cheerleaders in the administration know is going very, very badly. Some have taken to comparing it to Vietnam, and while that's not a precise comparison, it does call to mind Karl Marx's admonition that "History happens twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." I can't imagine a bigger farce than the notion that we're going to turn Iraq into a USA clone, or a paradigm of representative democracy and free-market capitalism. That kind of unthinking is pathetic.

We now live in a faux republic which has instituted torture as official policy, while at the same time denying that it's policy, or that it happens.We still have a semi-independent judiciary and a semi-free press, although both are constantly threatened in the crudest possible way by dwarves like Scott McClellan and Tom DeLay. We're not a fascist dictatorship quite yet, but we're working on it.

As the Fourth of July approaches, I'm reminded of Edward Gibbon's description of the Roman Secular Games -- a huge bash thrown by the emperor Philip the Arab on the occasion of Rome's thousandth birthday. These games were meant to celebrate the eternal glory of the Eternal City, but many realized that the animating genius and raw strength of the Empire had fled, and that only an empty shell was left.

Gibbon says, The limits of the Roman empire still extended from the Western Ocean to the Tigris, and from Mount Atlas to the Rhine and the Danube. To the undiscerning eye of the vulgar, Philip appeared a monarch no less powerful than Hadrian or Augustus had formerly been. The form was still the same, but the animating health and vigor were fled.

That's the U.S.A. on the approach of 7/4/05 -- a hollow shell of its former self.Just wait until the housing bubble pops and the world's biggest energy consumer realizes that the cheap gas is gone forever. This country is in for a harsh test of its character, and it's going to be found wanting.