“Pepsi,” joked one of the other students.
“McDonald’s.”
“IPods.”
“Funny, but trivial,” said Torrent. “Soldier Boy, you tell us. What would last?”
“Nothing,” said Reuben immediately. “They respect us now because we have a dangerous military. They adopt our culture because we’re rich. If we were poor and unarmed, they’d peel off American culture like a snake shedding its skin.”
“Yes!” said Torrent. The other students registered as much surprise as Reuben felt, though Reuben did not let it show. Torrent agreed with the soldier?
“That’s why there is no comparison between America and Rome,” said Torrent. “Our empire can’t fall because we aren’t an empire. We have never passed from our republican stage to our imperial one. Right now we buy and sell and, occasionally, bully our way into other countries, but when they thumb their noses at us, we treat them as if they had a right, as if there were some equivalence between our nation and their puny weakness. Can you imagine what Rome would have done if an ‘ally’ treated them the way France and Germany have been treating the United States?”
The class laughed.
Reuben Malich did not laugh. “The fact that we don’t act like Rome is one of the best things about America,” he said.
“So isn’t it ironic,” said Torrent, “that we are vilified as if we were like Rome, precisely because we aren’t? While if we did act like Rome, then they’d treat us with the respect we deserve?”
“My head a-splode,” said one of the wittier students, and everyone laughed again. But Torrent pushed the point.
“America is at the end of its republic. Just as the Roman Senate and consuls became incapable of ruling their widespread holdings and fighting off their enemies, so America’s antiquated Constitution is a joke. Bureaucrats and courts make most of the decisions, while the press decides which Presidents will have enough public support to govern. We lurch forward by inertia alone, but if America is to be an enduring polity, it can’t continue this way.”
Even though Torrent’s points actually agreed with much of what Reuben believed was wrong with contemporary America, he could not let the historical point stand unchallenged—the two situations could not be compared. “The Roman Republic ended,” said Reuben, “because the people got sick of the endless civil wars among rival warlords. They were grateful to have a strong man like Octavian eliminate all rivals and restore peace. That’s why they were thrilled to have him put on the purple and rename himself as Augustus.”
“Exactly,” said Torrent, leaning across the table and pointing a finger at him. “Of course a soldier sees straight to the crux of the matter. Only a fool thinks the turns of history can be measured by any standard other than which wars were fought, and who won them. Survival of the fittest—that’s the measure of a civilization. And survival is ultimately determined on the battlefield. Where one man kills another, or dies, or runs away. The society whose citizens will stand and fight is the one with the best chance to survive long enough for history even to notice it.”
One of the students made the obligatory comment about how concentrating on war omits most of history. At which Torrent smiled and gestured for Reuben to answer.
“The people who win the wars write the histories,” said Reuben dutifully, wondering why he was getting this sudden burst of respect from Torrent.
“Augustus kept most of the forms of the old system,” Torrent went on. “He refused to call himself king, he pretended the Senate still meant something. So the people loved him for protecting their republican delusions. But what he actually established was an empire so strong that it could survive incompetents and madmen like Nero and Caligula. It was the empire, not the republic, that made Rome the most important enduring polity in history.”
“You’re saying America needs to do the same thing?” asked Reuben Malich.
“Not at all!” said Torrent, acting out a parody of horror. “God forbid! I’m just saying that if America is going to ever matter to history the way Rome does, instead of being a brief episode like the Sassanid or Chaldean empires, then it will be because we spawn our own Augustus, to rule where right now we only buy and sell.”
“Then I hope we fall first,” said Reuben Malich. He knew as he spoke that he should have confined this comment to his Arabic notes. This was the trap Torrent had led him into, by showing him respect; yet, knowing he was being exposed and would surely be cut apart for it, he could not hold silence—because if he did, the other students would be sure this soldier longed for empire, just as Torrent apparently did. “America exists as an idea,” Reuben said, “and if we throw out that idea, then there’s no reason for America to exist at all.”
“Oh, Soldier Boy, you poor lad,” said Torrent. “The American idea was thrown out with Social Security. We nailed the coffin shut with group rights. We don’t want individual liberty because we don’t want individual responsibility. We want somebody else to take care of us. If we had a dictator who did a better job of it than our present system, then as long as he pretended to respect Congress, we’d lick his hands like dogs.”
The whole seminar recoiled from his words, though not because they thought he was wrong; it was because he sounded like some kind of neo-conservative.
“Again,” Torrent reminded them, “I’m not advocating anything, I’m only observing. We’re historians, not politicians. We have to look at how polities actually function, not how we wish to delude ourselves into thinking they ought to function. Our short-term politics trump long-term national interests every time. Can’t fix Social Security, can’t fix the tax structure, can’t fix the trade deficit, can’t fix outsourcing, can’t fix anything because there’s always campaign money involved, or demagoguery that blocks the way. Between the NRA and the AARP, you can’t even do things that vast majorities already agree need to be done! Democracy on this scale doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked for years. And as for that American idea, we flushed it away with the Great Depression, and nobody misses it.” Then he grinned. “Except maybe Soldier Boy.”
Princeton University was just what Reuben expected it to be—hostile to everything he valued, smug and superior and utterly closed-minded. In fact, exactly what they thought the military was.
He kept thinking, the first couple of semesters, that maybe his attitude toward them was just as short-sighted and bigoted and wrong as theirs was of him. But in class after class, seminar after seminar, he learned that far too many students were determined to remain ignorant of any real-world data that didn’t fit their preconceived notions. And even those who tried to remain genuinely open-minded simply did not realize the magnitude of the lies they had been told about history, about values, about religion, about everything. So they took the facts of history and averaged them with the dogmas of the leftist university professors and thought that the truth lay somewhere in the middle.
Well as far as Reuben could tell, the middle they found was still far from any useful information about the real world.
Am I like them, just a bigot learning only what fits my worldview? That’s what he kept asking himself. But finally he reached the conclusion: No, he was not. He faced every piece of information as it came. He questioned his own assumptions whenever the information seemed to violate it. Above all, he changed his mind—and often. Sometimes only by increments; sometimes completely. Heroes he had once admired—Douglas MacArthur, for instance—he now regarded with something akin to horror: How could a commander be so vain, with so little justification for it? Others that he had disdained—that great clerk, Eisenhower, or that woeful incompetent, Burnside—he had learned to appreciate for their considerable virtues.
And now he knew that this was much of what the Army had sent him here to learn. Yes, a doctorate in history would be useful. But he was really getting a doctorate in self-doubt and skepticism, a Ph.D. in the rhetoric and beliefs of the insane Left. He would be able to sit in a room with a far-left Senator and hear it all with a straight face, without having to argue any points, and with complete comprehension of everything he was saying and everything he meant by it.
In other words, he was being embedded with the enemy as surely as when he was on a deep Special Ops assignment inside a foreign country that did not (officially at least) know that he was there.
Princeton University as an alien planet. Reuben Malich as the astronaut who somehow lost his helmet—and spent day after day gasping for air.