Et tu, Nantucket?
Vanity Fair editor-at-large Cullen Murphy launches Plum literary series with "Are We Rome?"
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
With his recent socio-historic bestseller "Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America," Cullen Murphy walks in the footsteps of Edward Gibbon. That path brings him to Nantucket this week to make his case for raising the question. Former editor of The Atlantic magazine, Murphy's appearance as a guest on PlumTV this weekend kicks off Plum's literary series on Nantucket, "Bookmark '07" - hosted jointly with The Atlantic through August. (Murphy is also brother to Nantucket filmmaker, businessman and local activist Finn Murphy.) Other featured books in the series include Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love," Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach," David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest," Christopher Hitchens' "God is Not Great," Edward P. Jones' "All Aunt Hagar's Children," Thomas Mallon's "Fellow Travelers," Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children" and Vladimir Nobokov's "Lolita." The series will include book discussions and lectures with some of the authors, whose appearances are still being confirmed.

COURTESY WWW.AREWEROME.COM Brother to Nantucket's Finn Murphy, Vanity Fair editor-at-large Cullen Murphy kicks off Plum TV's literary series this Saturday. Murphy will speak on his recently released "Are We Rome?"

Gibbon, the British historian, published "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" in six volumes, with the first in 1776, around the same time a foment in the American colonies was dealing something of a blow to the British sense of global superiority. Though the work's most contentious assertion was that Christianity poisoned the Roman well, it became the standard for historical analysis regarding how and why a world power loses the gems in its crown.

In true American fashion, Murphy gets right to it - taking what was subtext in Gibbons' tomes and making it the thesis of his own. Are we losing our power the way they did? And is it even fair to compare the U.S. with Rome?

"After the fall of communism and the emergence of the United States as the sole world superpower, I began noticing people using a shorthand of comparing us to Rome in the imperial sense, as if we had assumed Rome's role in the world as the greatest world power on the planet," said the Vanity Fair editor-at-large. "That put the idea for the book in my head."

More recently, while at an airport in Ireland, Murphy caught a glimpse of two Air Force One planes parked on the tarmac and surrounded by guards. They belonged to the presidents Bush - H.W. and W. - and it brought back to Murphy the idea of the Roman emperors traveling with great pomp and circumstance throughout the world.

"The idea that we're at the center of everything is still pretty ingrained. You see it in Washington, in that phrase referring to the president as the most important man in the most importatnt city in the world - well, give me a break," Murphy said. "Rome had very much that same sense of itself as the hub of the universe."

After that trip, the question of comparing the U.S. to Rome became an elephant in the terminal, and Murphy was intent to draw it out into the open.

The author sprinkled the book liberally with then-versus-now analogies (i.e. The Aqueducts are to Rome as the Internet is to the U.S.) but stressed six deadly similarities between the two powers: Nationalistic "man is the measure" certainty; the conflicts of domestic agendas with an overtaxed military; privatization of public interests; willful ignorance of world culture and affairs; immigration woes; and bureaucratic crippling.

To walk with Murphy as he regards each of these similarities is a worthy exercise in historical comparison - the net effect of which is that America is much like what Rome would have been had it enjoyed itself as a lesson.

"You could almost say we've built the fall of Rome into our political system," said Murphy, who stated that one of the biggest differences between Rome and the U.S. is that the Vox Populi of the former was completely complacent with its lot, while America's culture has stressed constant improvement.

"A big lesson of Rome is that the status quo can't be flash-frozen," Murphy said "Striving to make life 'better than this' is part of our social compact. Americans see America as a work in progress, in a state of constant reinvention. We've changed far more in the past hundred years- even in the last 50- than the Roman world changed in the centuries before and after Rome's fall."

As a footnote to this dynamic state of self-improvement, Murphy offers Winston Churchill's famous quote about the U.S. "The United States can always be trusted to do the right thing, once it has exhausted all the other options."

"America is a creative and adaptable country and when finally a problem is too great to ignore, our history is that we do face it, often imperfectly and belatedly, but we do try to do it," said Murphy, who does his best at the end of the book to offer solutions on how to avoid bloating ourselves to death, including improving our energy policy, lessening the number of our military bases abroad and focusing on education, specifically that which takes global affairs into account.

Murphy makes this case based on the belief that the American way of life should be preserved for the good it has brought to the world, despite its faults - much like ancient Rome.

"The degree of stability that Rome brought about for such a long period of time hadn't ever been seen before; it was a very positive thing. Order doesn't have to be perfect to be wonderful. Just on the grounds of stability and relative peace, the achievement was quite remarkable," according to Murphy. "That said, you're not going to hear me argue that we would have been better off had Rome stayed in power, the way it was. If that had been the case, we would be missing things like rights for women, the notion of a broad middle class being the best basis for society, the notion that there should be some equity of the distribution of wealth, the notion that the people governed should have some say in their government. … For its time, Rome represented a distinct improvement on what had come before, but we represent an improvement on that."

That being the case, the most obvious next question is, of course, what's wrong with being like Rome? What's wrong with having power passed to someone else if someone else can do it better? (After all, it's not like the "fall of Rome" led to the end of humanity, or even the end of Rome.)

"I would say there's nothing wrong with having imperial power pass from our hands - that it might be good," Murphy said. "There are plenty of other strong, wealthy and perhaps even wise countries that could pick up the responsibilities for keeping order in this place or that place. We don't have to do it all. We have extraordinary responsibilities at home."

Murphy emphasized that one of Rome's biggest faults to be avoided was trying to "freeze" the status quo.

"We should be wise to understand that such power is not permanent and invest our treasure in things that will last for the long-term, like the educational system and the health-care system. Over the long run, that will serve us better than trying to hold onto the situation where we are the top dog of the world. Maybe we will be for a long time, but it's better to have that as a secondhand consequence of good behavior than as the thing we are trying to achieve at all costs," he said.

"If we were to turn some of our treasure and willpower into other tasks at home, we might look up in 200 years and realize that we are one of eight or 10 powerful countries in the world. If our people our happy, prosperous, equal and upright, and if the values we have are regarded as worth emulating by people throughout the world, we haven't lost a thing. We may even have become a force for good things more than we are right

now." I

When: Sat., July 14, 8-10 a.m. Where: PlumTV, Channel 22 Cullen will return for additional

public events throughout the summer. Stay tuned to PlumTV for more information.