The ethnic origins of General David Petraeus are apparently Dutch, which is a shame because there’s something sonorously classical about the family name of the commander of the US forces in Iraq. When you discover that his father was christened Sixtus, the fantasy really takes flight. Somewhere in the recesses of the brain, where memory mingles hazily with imagination, I fancy I can recall toiling through a schoolboy Latin textbook that documented the progress of one Petraeus Sixtus as he triumphantly extended the imperium romanum across some dusty plain in Asia Minor.
The fantasy is not wholly inapt, of course. General Petraeus was the star turn in Washington this week, testifying before Congress about the progress of the surge by US forces in Iraq. Some evidently see America’s wearying detention in the quagmire of Mesopotamia as a classic example of imperial overreach of the kind that is thought to have doomed Rome. Who knows? Perhaps 1,500 years ago one of the forebears of General Petraeus was hauled before the Senate to explain the progress of some surge of Roman forces to defeat the insurgents in Germania.
The US is indeed in the middle of another gloomy ride around the “America as Rome” theme park of half-understood history lessons. The pessimists, equipped with their Fodor’s guidebooks, their summer school diplomas, and their DVD collection of Cecil B. DeMille movies, are convinced it’s all up for the people who march today under the standard of the eagle, just as it was for their predecessors. They see military defeat abroad and political decay at home; they watch as far-flung peoples chafe at the dictates of imperial rule and as the plebs at home grow metaphorically hungry from misgovernment. The only real uncertainty in their minds is who will play the Vandals and lay waste to Washington?
Oh come now. Surely this can't be so difficult. Historical analogies are rarely exact. America doesn't have to be a physical empire. Radical Islamists, at least, see us as dangerous cultural imperialists, our invasive brand of hedonism as something to be severely curtailed if not eradicated outright.
Must it be Vandals who sack Washington? Why shouldn't America decline and fall from within, victim to her own fecklessness and complacency? While we busily export pop culture and crass consumerism, in our schools the teaching of our own history and the Enlightenment values that gave rise to our Constitution and Declaration of Independence are under attack:
The Robert Weissberg article to which George called our attention, "The Hidden Impact of Political Correctness," is very disturbing. It says that professors, even tenured professors, have decided to stay away from facts that may annoy black students who are quick to report "racism" to the authorties. And it's not just negative things about blacks as a group that might set off these easily offended students. Anything that might mitigate the vision of America as pure evil is also offensive. So even to point out that counting slaves as 3/5 of a person for purposes of the census was something actually aimed at diminishing the power of the slaveholders is dangerous. As is pointing out that the Constitution outlawed the slave trade after 1808, making slaves so valuable that they could not be put at risk at dangerous jobs, which instead evidently went to the Irish! In other words, historical truth has to be sacrificed to an unnuanced black/white vision of history.
This means that young blacks are being cultivated to an inauthentic relationship to truth, facts, and history, reminiscent of Hegel's master/slave analysis, in which the slave can know the truth, but the master must be flattered and gratified with lies. Either that, or they are learning to use their power to keep down the truth.
Gerard Baker thinks America invincible because she has few external foes? More likely, an increasingly divided nation that neither understands nor is willing to defend its cultural heritage will be pulled down from within by fractious special interest groups egged on by the culture of entitlement.
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