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The article is definitely interesting, and it's hard--maybe impossible--to refute LiMandri's allegations.

Western Civilization certainly seems to be in decline.

Many years ago, I suggested to my father's highly intelligent (and highly successful--and rich) brother that the United States could one day go the way of the Roman Republic. He said that he had often thought that that could well occur. This was before most of the events LiMandri cites took place.

This uncle, incidentally, was a staunch Republican--did NOT like Franklin Roosevelt. He was also open minded and liberal (in the true sense of the word; he admired Barry Goldwater). I once mentioned to him some evidence that talking to plants induced them to flourish. He replied: "I have always talked to mine." (His definitely flourished.) (Everything he did flourished.)

It seems to me that civilizations bloom and decline. This is nothing new. William Faulkner retold this familiar tale magnificently in Absalom! Absalom!.

It's hard to know whether each increment LiMandri mentions in America's descent from the Normandy Invasion to same sex marriage was the cause or the result of decadence.

It may be like periodic earthquakes occurring as techtonic plates sliding against each other incrementally experience tension, break, and release.

I have observed many times that the Left is decadence.

Certainly the decadence is to be opposed and resisted. But I'm not sure it can be stopped.

It seems to me that there are many parallels between America today and Rome at the inception of its Imperial phase, and that's cause for depression. The Left offers us bread, in the form of welfare and social programs, and circuses, in the form of increasingly licentious movies and TV, ubiquitous pornography, obscene popular music, etc., as Leftist leaders and elites amass enormous wealth and privileges for themselves. They pass draconian laws to which they exempt themselves. They claim to do it all for the public good--i.e. for the masses--but the bottom line is that they aggrandize themselves as a ruling aristocracy while anaesthetizing the peasantry (that's you and me) with bread and circuses.

I can't help wondering when someone or some court will come up with an excuse to overcome any objections to snuff films, battles to the death, or torture for public amusement. We can be happy that we're not there now. Maybe we never will be. But, considering the public outrage that would have occurred in the recent past to TV programs and movies that are routinely shown today--in fact to language used on the radio by Rush Limbaugh--one can't help wondering if the public outrage that a snuff film would cause today may not exist in future generations and thus it could become commonplace.

Will we reach the point, as Imperial Rome did, at which the wife of our supeme leader will hold a contest with a notorious prostitute to see which can service the most men in a night? Will the U.S. Congress become so insignifant that an Emperor will make his horse or dog a Senator--as occurred in Rome? Will a U.S. Emperor turn Congress into a brothel and force the wives and daughters of Congressmen to work there--as occurred in Imperial Rome? And will America degenerate to the point that such things are tolerated by the anaesthetized public--or even that they cause public amusement.

There is another way of looking at it all though.

It's true that sexual mores have declined, but sensitivity to other people and to animals has increased, and this is an improvement.

My wife says that, as a woman, she doesn't view the past with nostalgia. She adds that Black People probably don't either.

I was raised in a sexually repressed, puritannical family, and I certainly benefitted from more relaxed sexual attitudes.

I know one thing though: Decadent Imperial Rome was unopposed as a world power, but the U.S.A. and Europe are not. Islam is not decadent. Neither is China--and if anybody understands the cycles of ascension and decadence, it's the Chinese. India also seems to be in ascendancy. And many people--who refuse to be anaesthetized by bread and circuses will look elsewhere for ascendancy and lives free from decadence. This may be Islam's most important promise. The decadents who are encouraging and enjoy Western Civilization's downward slide will find themselves in very uncomfortable positions if decadent Western Civilization is replaced with something more ascendant while they're still around.