The parallels with the rise and fall of the American Empire are unmistakable –
The parallels with the rise and fall of the American Empire are unmistakable: NAJ graphic
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
This is where reading AND watching makes a difference.
Way down in Texas this week, Donnie Trump showed how afraid he is of losing control of Congress by making a false campaign promise to bribe the American people after the fact with a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” – if only they would turn out and vote Republican in the midterm elections and prevent the Democrats from gaining the power to challenge him in the House and Senate.
“If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them,” Trump said, “I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.”
It’s just another corrupt act by a corrupt president, using his office in the White House for personal gain and power. It’s become so common it falls on deaf ears across the land.
No way was I going to watch the Trump-Republican midterm convention in Texas.
But in my regular nightly movie viewing, I had just watched “The Fall of the Roman Empire,” an American epic historical film that came out in theaters in 1964 staring Omar Sharif, Sophia Loren, Stephen Boyd, Alec Guinness, James Mason, Christopher Plummer and Mel Ferrer. It was based on Edward Gibbon’s 1776–1789 six-volume series “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” which I read a long time ago.
The parallels with the rise and fall of the American Empire are unmistakable.
The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Barbarians by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, 1890
In the end, even though they know the new emperor Commodus (Christopher Plummer) is selfish and bad, much like our Congress today, the Roman Senate declares the new Caesar a god. His sister Lucilla (Sophia Loren) and General Livius (Stephen Boyd), who challenged Commodus, and are sentenced to be burned alive as human sacrifices to the new deity as Roman citizens drunkenly celebrate.
Livius fights Commodus in a duel for the throne, but Commodus orders his loyal advisers to melt down every golden statue in the city and uses the gold to bribe the people in the streets and the Northern Army led by Livius to lay down their arms and embrace him as Caesar.
Commodus ends up dying in the duel, but having lost faith in Rome’s ability to reform, Livius departs the city with Lucilla as Commodus’s advisers fight over the throne, offering competing bribes to the army in an attempt to gain military support.
As the credits roll, a voice-over epilogue points out that the Roman Empire did not fall immediately. But indicates it was internal corruption that led to its eventual collapse, closing with a quote from historian Ariel Durant.
“A great civilization is not destroyed from without, until it has destroyed itself from within.”
Fall of the Roman Empire 1964 Trailer
A golden statue of Trump: NAJ screen shot
Trump’s gold fetish, his defiant and obsessive drive to create a cult of personality around himself, his grand ballroom and triumphal arch, are nothing less than a selfish narcissist’s way of trying to become an emperor-god like a Caesar of Rome. And a majority of the American people are drunkenly going along with it.
Trump’s grand White House ballroom: NAJ screen shot
Trump’s Triumphal Arch: NAJ screen shot
As I was writing this, I was hearing this song in my head from my friend RB Morris in Knoxville, Tennessee. It was covered by John Prine and Marianne Faithfull.
That’s How Every Empire Falls
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