Bob Dole and the fall of Rome - 9 June 1995

I wonder if anybody today reads Oswald Spengler? I suppose I ought to wonder first how many people have ever heard of him, for he died 60 years ago and he was only in his mid-50s, but in the early years after the First World War, his name and the general drift of his message, were as famous to ordinary people who never read him as say, Billy Graham is today.

Spengler was a German mathematician with a hankering after a reputation as a philosopher. He was a schoolmaster until he turned 30 when he picked up a small inheritance and settled in Munich, as it turned out, a rather ominous choice, for it was there that he began to draft the work that in the Depression and actual famine that overtook Germany over the First War, brought a dramatic inspiration to the small but noisy movement started by an émigré Austrian ex corporal named Adolf Hitler. Spengler's work was entitled The Decline of the West and it was published in Germany just before the final collapse of the German armies. It got to England and the rest of Europe in the early '20s. Its thesis sent a shudder through the intelligentsia of Europe. Spengler maintained that a nation, a civilisation, was an organism like a human body and it went through a natural cycle of birth, growth, vitality, decline, decay and death and that Western civilisation was far gone along the road to decadence. It would soon be overrun and conquered by some of the nations of Asia, which at the time we called 'the yellow races'.

Long after the Spengler book had gone through many printings and a best selling career, his doomsday theme was attractive to a wide range of writers who were uncomfortable with the frivolity and raging materialism of the roaring '20s, and the prosperity – called the Coolidge prosperity because it was identified with the president who immortalised the line: The business of America is business.

D.H. Lawrence wondered: "Oh American, The sun sets in you. Are you with the grave of our day?" There are always, of course, in any great nation, professional doomsayers, but there seems in this country to be a cycle that's run high, wears itself out and then returns about 25 years later.

Once the Second World War was over, I never thought to hear again any mention of the "yellow peril" but in the late 1960s when the United States was wriggling its way into an involvement in Vietnam – taking over where the French had been beaten and left – behold, the American Secretary of State, no less Mr Dean Rusk warned everybody of a new yellow peril called 'the domino theory', which said that if we let the North Vietnamese have their way in the South – which they did – then communism would knock over every neighbour in turn so that we should soon see a Burmese communist state Thailand gone, India and so on.

I hate to say that looking over the map today, he wasn't very far wrong, except for India. But the Vietnam War absorbed so much passion for and against, so much social upheaval, especially among the young, that everybody at the time – and we're talking about the late '60s – thought that foreign policy was the great American blunder and that once out of Vietnam we could return to our traditional virtue and prosperity.

But suddenly there appeared a book and it's my equally sudden rediscovery of this little book that seemed God sent as a commentary, not on the 1960s but on the America of the 1990s, the America that a leading presidential candidate said last week was being debased by a film industry run amuck in a nightmare of depravity. The book I have in front of me is called 'The Decline and Fall' by Edward Gibbon, and Roger Price who is/was Roger Price – he was a cartoonist who did doodles on television – but in this book he took contemporary photographs, mainly of political figures and popular idols and captioned them with sentences unedited untouched from Edward Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman Empire. It's a very funny book and it's no joke. What it does, what it did at Christmas time in 1967, was to say that mobilising American wealth and technology to fight the Vietnamese barbarians might be a very rousing exercise, but what it was also doing was taking our minds of what was wrong with the homeland. In other words, Gibbon and Price were sweetly announcing the idea that America was then in 1967 well on the way to the domestic rot that destroyed imperial Rome.

To appreciate the aptness of this thesis, you have to recall Gibbon's four principle causes of the ruin of Rome: One, the injuries of time and nature. Two, the hostile attacks of the barbarians. Three, the use and abuse of materialism. Four, the domestic quarrels of the Romans. Flying in the face of the Pentagon and any state department, Gibbon concluded that much the most potent and forcible cause of destruction was the domestic quarrels of the Romans and next the abuse of materialism. This takes in their quarrels over principles, their loss of principle, their succumbing to excessive comfort at the expense of the poor, their insatiable love of luxury and their defence of sexual debauchery as an expression of liberty. Do the symptoms sound familiar?

Gibbon and his collaborator Roger Price make them so, with some wonderful pictures. Some are just freakishly unbelievably apt, as a scornful close-up of the great boxer who changed his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali and was converted to Islam, the caption says: "A life of prayer and contemplation had not chilled the martial activity of Ali." But in the main you are made to recognise the variety and complexity of Rome in its decline and forced to wonder at the damning coincidences with our own time and place. You see President Johnson's daughter cutting her wedding cake, which looks the size of the Empire State Building. The Romans had their mystic rituals – a brutal picture of a foment squabble between American, blacks and whites – their freed slaves enraged by their former servitude claimed the possession of the country. The military expeditions far beyond the borders of the empire – could he mean Vietnam? – all things became adverse to the Romans, their armour heavy, the waters deep. The barbarians on the contrary were enured to encounters in the bogs.

Do you remember the Hells Angels, who terrified small villages by hurtling in on their motorbikes and raping girls and assaulting the wandering old? They affected to strike terror by a peculiar and barbaric dress, the long hair of the Huns, their cut off short sleeves. About the swinging hippies, he commented on the absence of inspiration and the mimic arts of imposture. As for recognising a general decline in the arts, Gibbon notes the certain symptoms: enthusiasm masquerading as vitality freakishness as originality.

So now we come to the really remarkable speech of Senator Bob Dole, the leader in the Senate of the Republicans and at the moment the easy front runner among the half dozen or so fellow Republicans who have declared their candidacy for the presidency in 1996. Senator Dole is not a speechifier. His main problem as a presidential candidate in fact, is how to impose a persuasive eloquence on a character and a public manner that is that of a patient compromiser. He's at best on the Senate floor not orating but suggesting sensible amendments to a bill that is frozen by the ice of partisanship. It's assumed here that somebody wrote this brilliant speech that he directed at the Hollywood film makers in Hollywood itself. He said he would name names and he did. "I would like to ask the executives of Time Warner a question: is this what you intended to accomplish with your careers? You have sold your souls but you must debase our nation and threaten our children as well? We have reached the point where our popular culture threatens to undermine our character as a nation".

Mr Dole, as everybody knew, was referring to violent and sexually obsessed movies and vile obscene rap lyrics. Democrats instantly said, well if that's the way he feels why is he against gun control? The assumption here, which is at least debatable, is that strict gun control will reduce crime. The evangelical right shouted hallelujah, assuming that Mr Dole was signifying his political alliance with the Christian right and many commentators made the same easy cynical comment that Mr Dole thought this bit of outrage a good campaigning line to take. The movie moguls either said with disarming frankness, but if we didn't make sexy violent films we'd lose a lot of money or the more intellectual of them waved the sacred banner of censorship.

I don't know what it's a symptom of, but I can only say that in the past 30, 40 years there has appeared one sacrosanct commandment among American and perhaps European liberals: "Though shalt not impose censorship of anything under any circumstances." I'm reminded as an historical comment merely of the Frenchmen who said: "Liberty is the luxury of self discipline." I might add, just abuse it long enough, equate liberty with license, and a man will come along and take it from you. Indeed, the saddest note about the whole Dole episode to me is the silence of the Democrats and the unattached liberals for silly reasons of pride. I suppose, they won't come out and echo Senator Dole with their applause. It's a case of the prime foolishness of any politician or true believer, which has to go on fighting the opposition when it's right.

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