Rome, AD ... Rome, DC?

Of course we are the New Romans, my mother used to tell me that when I was a child way back in the 60's! I guess that's why I always kind of rooted for the legions when watching Spartacus. Of course when the author writes we are the most dominant country in the world since ancient Rome he is not quite accurate. We are MUCH more dominant then Rome ever was.

Of course there are many differences as well. The cause of the fall of the Roman Empire has been debated for centuries, but what is often overlooked is that the Empire in the East lasted another thousand years. If we avoid becoming a true Empire, and for that you need an Emperor, we might last even longer.

"While America is yet to have a non-white president, Rome boasted an emperor from north Africa, Septimius Severus."

I hate to see bad history like this. The original inhabitants of North Africa are Caucasians, or whites (although I believe they would have spoken a Semitic language, and not an Indo-European one). Look at photos of Berbers the next time you get a chance. The Romans also held much of North Africa, including Egypt and Tunisia (or what used to be Carthage!) as provinces in their empire. Thus, it may be more likely that Septimius Severus was descended from Romans who came from Italy to North Africa, just as Cleopatra was a descendant of the Ptolemaic Greeks who set themselves up in Egypt after Alexander's death. There were also a number of prominent Romans in later centuries who were born in Iberia: should we then call them Hispanics? :)

At any rate, crossing the Sahara to West Africa where all the Negroid, or black persons were, would take large caravans of camels--I don't believe that the volume of trade was large enough in those years of the Roman Empire to bring enough black people to North Africa to have a significant effect on that region's demography. Later West African kingdoms would benefit greatly from the trans-Saharan trade in gold and salt: Mansa Musa (in what is now Mali) would be famous in the 14th century in both the Islamic world (he brought enough gold to Mecca to affect prices for a generation!) and in Christendom, where early cartographers placed him on maps as the ruler of a rich kingdom. (These pre-European West African kingdoms often declined because of trade drying up, their own despotic rule, or attacks from their Arab neighbors!)

Jared Diamond has included a section in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel entitled "How Africa Became Black." I don't like Diamond's geographical/enviromental determinism (preferring the more important role of culture as espoused by David Landes or Victor Davis Hanson), but it's still interesting reading: the same article can be found online at http://www.discover.com/archive (just do a search by title or author).

"America's mythologising of its past - its casting of founding fathers Washington and Jefferson as heroic titans, its folk-tale rendering of the Boston Tea Party and the war of independence - is very Roman. That empire, too, felt the need to create a mythic past, starred with heroes. For them it was Aeneas and the founding of Rome, but the urge was the same: to show that the great nation was no accident, but the fruit of manifest destiny."

What a stretch! The 'Myth' of our founding fathers is well documented fact not epic poetry.

Need one mention former US protege Saddam Hussein or one-time CIA trainee Osama bin Laden?

I am SO tired of people making this claim.

First of all, Saddam got most of his military equipment from the Soviet bloc, and his financial aid from the Arab world. He was a Ba'ath SOCIALIST who never ceased to make both anti-Israel and anti-American statements, even before the Gulf War. Saddam never traveled to the US (In fact, he's only the left Iraq once during his rule, for a brief trip to France). People seem to think we hold people in two extremes:people we "hate" and people we "like". These people are always telling us to stay out of other countries' business, which is mostly what we did in regard to Saddam pre-Gulf War. (Yes, I know the CIA gave him satellite photos, but that hardly makes him a US "protege". It'd be much more accurate to call him a Soviet or Arab protege.)

Secondly, for a good debunking of the "CIA trained bin Laden" theory, read Peter Bergen's "Holy War Inc." Even if the CIA offered bin Laden aid, he surely would've rejected it if he knew it was coming from the US.

Other than that, though, the article makes some good points.

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