Don’t know much about history

Predictions that the United States is on the verge of collapsing like the Roman Empire are pretty old hat, usually among the kind of people who are more worried about the national debt than about whether or not their fellow citizens have enough to eat (though there is a strain of this particular mania on the left as well). But give Ben Carson credit for finding a fresh new take on the genre:

Carson expanded on the notion in an interview with Bloomberg Politics’ Phil Mattingly. “For Carson,” Mattingly writes, “the canary in the American coalmine is political correctness.”

“The reason that is very troubling to me,” Carson explains, “is that it’s the very same thing that happened to the Roman Empire. They were extremely powerful. There was no way anybody could overcome them. But these philosophers, with the long flowing white robes and the long white beards, they could wax eloquently on every subject, but nothing was right and nothing was wrong. They soon completely lost sight of who they were.”

Carson has previously contended that gay marriage would lead to a Roman Empire-esque fate for the United States, so maybe he’s just got Rome on the mind. But, you know, every time this guy writes or says something he demonstrates that the old joke about “it’s not brain surgery” actually cuts both ways.

History ain’t brain surgery, and consequently Ben Carson doesn’t actually seem to know anything about it. Let’s assume that the gay marriage thing was just another variation of his political correctness message (though it’s more likely that “political correctness” is just code for “treating the gays like human beings”), because if Carson really means that Rome fell because of marriage equality then I’m really giving him too much credit.

(The Theodosian Code prohibited same-sex unions, and it was issued in 342, so there’s actually a stronger historical argument that Rome was doing just fine until it outlawed gay marriage and then the empire started to fall apart as a result. That would be a pretty dumb argument to make, but it would still be smarter than Carson’s, if we take his writing at face value.)

Anyway, political correctness brought down Rome because “philosophers, with the long flowing white robes and the long white beards” weren’t telling people right from wrong. That’s definitely an interpretation of the fall of Rome, I guess. Edward Gibbon, who literally wrote the book on the fall of the Roman Empire, a little tome called Atlas Shrugged The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, had a somewhat different take:

“The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of its power. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest, and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight”, he wrote. “In discussing barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome.”

Historians have moved beyond Gibbon, who wrote Decline and Fall to push a political and philosophical view, namely that things were better before Christianity, as a justification for what was happening in Europe when Gibbon was alive, the period that we now call the Enlightenment. But Gibbon’s explanation for the fall of Rome at least has the virtue of making chronological sense (the Empire did collapse after Christianity became its official religion, after all), whereas Carson’s is totally nonsensical. If the (pagan, one presumes) philosophers were going to bring down Rome, they’d had plenty of time to do it by the time Constantine converted to Christianity (a decision that, again one presumes, would have gotten Carson’s approval).

Anyway, you know, America isn’t Rome, and there are no barbarian armies on the frontier waiting to sack Washington, DC. The last great world empire was the British Empire, and it took two World Wars to knock them off the perch. Hopefully whatever decline America does undergo will take a different tack, because a World War in the nuclear age would pretty much eliminate the need for a new power to replace America.

As an addendum but still in the “don’t know much about history” theme, I give you Louie Gohmert, the pride of Texas, who told a right-wing radio show on Tuesday that the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” sowed the seeds for America to be defeated by ISIS, I guess. It’s actually hard to tell what he meant, since what came out of his mouth (via Booman) was one of the largest word salads the world has ever seen:

“I’ve had people say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s nothing wrong with gays in the military. Look at the Greeks,'” he said. “Well, you know, they did have people come along who they loved that was the same sex and would give them massages before they went into battle. But you know what, it’s a different kind of fighting, it’s a different kind of war and if you’re sitting around getting massages all day ready to go into a big, planned battle, then you’re not going to last very long. It’s guerrilla fighting. You are going to be ultimately vulnerable to terrorism and if that’s what you start doing in the military like the Greeks did … as people have said, ‘Louie, you have got to understand, you don’t even know your history.’ Oh yes I do. I know exactly. It’s not a good idea”

“Massages”? What the hell is he talking about?

Is Gohmert saying that the Greeks and their masseurs never fought big, planned battles? Or that they weren’t good at fighting big, planned battles? Because, you know, Marathon? Plataea? Alexander the freaking Great, who was himself bisexual? Is Gohmert arguing that the Greeks weren’t good at counter-guerrilla warfare? Because, I’ll grant you, Alexander had some trouble with the Scythians, but is there any evidence that the pre-DADT American military was any better at it? If there is, please send it to me via the Hồ Chi Minh Trail.