Great review, Mr. Kamiya. A parlor game for sure. What's to say? Nothing lasts forever, and I think history moves faster these days, given improved communications. So, our 300 years might mean more than it seems, at the pace we've been going.

One definite difference between us and Rome (and other empires) is our desire/need to be loved. We want to be the popular empire, and one is ultimately the negation of the other -- you can be powerful, or you can be popular, but you really can't rule AND be loved, both. Sorry. The Romans got that; their consolation prize was bringing people into the Pax Romana, where they could trade, so long as they acknowledged Rome's mastery over them. I'm reminded of "The Aeneid"...

“Roman, remember that you shall rule the nations by your authority, for this is to be your skill, to make peace the custom, to spare the conquered, and to wage war until the haughty are brought low.”

They didn't care if they were loved, while America does -- we want people to trade with us, to obey us, and to love us. We don't even really want to be feared -- that's why we like the image of the soldiers with candy that they're handing out to children, versus soldiers forming naked human pyramids of captives. Empire is dirty, ugly business, and I think our desire to be loved is probably the saving grace that makes us not so good at imperial politicking, even as we try to do it, driven on by ideology and circumstance and the inertia of our endless militarism.

I don't think Imperial America will last nearly as long as Rome did; we've not the stomach for it, and the times don't favor the stability of that kind of rule. The corporate feudalism model Murphy outlined as one of the future scenarios seems far likelier; and really, that's what feudalism was -- the public had gone private, including government and military, the monopoly of force; the genius of the ancients was allowing for a public sphere at all. That's what Americans should be defending, and that's best defended by having a broad middle class, who can offer us stability, protecting us from the bipolar strivings of the Patricians and the angry desperation of the Plebians.

I loved your post! The understated thunder of a Stoic's reproach seemed to ring within your words (I'm more of an Epicurean, myself; the Romans took so much from the Greeks).

Your comment was great, but you're too kind to us (although I loved "ribbons of interstate highway leading from nowhere to nowhere") -- American roads and structures won't last nearly as long as what the Romans' slaves built.

When you think about our world around us, you realize how much of it is so transitory -- the roads don't last, the buildings break, and so very much of our culture is thrown into the airwaves. Take away the cellphones, the internet, the television, the radio, and so much of our culture evaporates, as if it never was. One bad solar storm would rub it all away -- silence.

Even books, fast-waning (unfortunately), aren't built to last. The pages yellow and crumble, the bindings dissolve. Consumer culture is about the moment, not the future (or even the past). Just the now, the noise of the marketplace.

And as somebody else wrote, we depend on oil so much -- our militaries run on it, plastics, our vehicles, our asphalt roads, our sprawling cities require cheap energy. Oil and electromagnetism form the boundaries of our world -- one's slippery and fast-disappearing, the other is downright ethereal.

The cracked and broken pillars of Rome are bedrock monuments, compared to our vanishing world.

GNews, don't even invoke the Byzantines, man! That'll play right into the GOP's hands -- a persecuted, conservative, theocratic Christian empire endlessly vexed and hindered by duplicitous European "allies," betrayed by fickle mercenary armies, and hounded mercilessly by relentless Muslim adversaries until its eventual doom! Hahah! Far more comforting for Americans to think of Classical Rome than Medieval Rome, ala the Byzantines -- more bread and circuses, gladiators, legions, orgies, puking, all that good stuff; less mosaics, poisonings, and sieges!

The one thing we might take from the Byzantines would be their heavy reliance on eunuchs for public officials as a key component of the Byzantine state, which would certainly winnow down the field of macho, opportunistic wannabes in politics, and make sex scandals less common, for sure. ;)