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       Neither did they care to reflect that a strength can be a weakness too, nor that “progress” depends on one’s point of view, nor that the rest of the world was watching them and their so-called progress closely … not always with admiration and goodwill. 

       Above all else, they hated to be told that they had experienced defeat on occasion, despite their invocations of (and pretensions to) divinity, and their glittering mythology, which had served them about as well as the lore of the long-dead Inca and Aztec empires before them. 

       So, to keep dark thoughts and memories away, they followed the lead of their most famous poet, who wrote, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” They celebrated and sang themselves endlessly, with fife and drum and just about everything else. And the cheerful noise – for a while – obliterated the thunder of storms that might dampen their self-adulation.

       These people had a proverb, “Ignorance is bliss.” Moreover, the pursuit of bliss, or at least “happiness,” was a “right” guaranteed them in one of their most revered documents. By a simple syllogism, then, it was no surprise that the average citizen knew little of what went on in the rest of the world. Knowledge could be disturbing. Ignorance was far preferable. 

       What knowledge the public did receive was filtered, distorted, and colored by a few hundred individuals who controlled dissemination of information. “News,” they called it, while praising themselves for their “objectivity,” the buzzword for censorship. 
Across the eastern ocean, British novelist George Orwell had written, only a few years before, that one day truth and falsehood would cease to be opposed concepts, and would become indistinguishable from each other. Had he lived into his seventies, instead of dying in his forties from tuberculosis, he would have seen his own forecast come true in this particular land and, through it, much of the rest of the world as well.  Just as they were uninformed about the present and hubristic about the future, these people were oblivious to the past. “History,” to them, was a vague, murky, irrelevant concept. They could cite an extensive list of modern athletes and entertainers, but anything before their own lifetimes was a blur. Christ,  Confucius, and Caesar were little more than shadows in a vast expanse of time which was too boring to be worth study anyway. Who wanted to be bothered with lists of unpronounceable names like Huitzilopochtli and Nebuchadnezzar? In any case, public education taught a heavily edited, condensed and sanitized version of “history” which was carefully designed to reinforce the official mythology. 

     Its flaws notwithstanding, this empire was blessed for a time with strong, wise leaders who steered a safe course between internal opposition and threats overseas, thanks in part to the counsel of sage thinkers who were unafraid to face the coldest reality and recommend practical ways to deal with it. For this, they borrowed a German word: Realpolitik. The vernacular expression was “hardball.” 

        Under whatever name, it worked well enough to avert global war. When diplomacy faltered, foreign enemies still had to reckon with a military machine capable of depopulating much of the world within hours. And domestic opponents could pacified by kind words and cash handouts, while being quietly divided against themselves and thus neutralized.  If all else failed, mass imprisonment remained an option, and was actually used on several occasions, in the interest of “national security.”

       For the empire and its rulers, it was a sweet situation while it lasted. But no set of circumstances lasts forever. And as the twentieth century neared its close, the empire found itself, if not in distinct peril, then at least fraying at the edges. 

Its infrastructure was crumbling. Sometimes, to travel was to take one’s life in one’s own hands, because so much of the transportation system was literally falling to pieces. The public educational system was turning out virtual illiterates, all the while becoming a battleground. It was nothing uncommon for a maladjusted student to commit mass slaughter at school by firing shotguns and even setting off homemade bombs. Metal detectors became standard equipment at the schoolhouse door. Even so, schools continued to become killing fields. 

     So did city streets. In one major city near the nation’s capital, there was a murder every day on the average. There, the typical citizen was in as much danger of being shot to death as a soldier in the front lines of a conventional war: about one chance in 2,000.  Even more startling than the statistics were the motives for killings. In some parts of the city, children murdered one another for coveted items of clothing – especially sneakers, whose purchase price might equal a year’s wages in certain countries. (Death could be visited on a person for even lesser motives. One of the empire’s legendary “heroes” allegedly had murdered a man merely for snoring too loudly!)

       For the first time in history, a whole generation of youngsters was raised in a pervasive environment of violence: at home, in entertainment and recreation, on the streets, everywhere. If not actual, then violence was portrayed in an extremely graphic way, far from the whimsical and exaggerated mayhem (Punch and Judy, Little Nemo, Popeye and Bluto, et cetera) that had entertained earlier generations. 

       Violence was not merely tolerated, but rewarded as well. The most violent participant in a game, instead of the fastest or strongest or most dextrous, was declared the winner. Brutality equaled prestige. There had always been violent sports such as prizefighting, to be sure; but never before had that aforementioned equation become a maxim for a generation, starting in the cradle.

     While adolescents dispatched one another for wearables, adults were more likely to shoot one another in retaliation for drug deals gone sour. A tremendous drug culture had arisen and, despite official disapproval, was tolerated, partly because the trade in illicit drugs was all that supported the local economy in many areas. Also – though this view was rarely voiced in public – the government had good reason to think a drugged-out, addled citizenry was more acquiescent and easier to govern than a more alert public would be. Only a few decades earlier, Orwell’s compatriot, satirist Aldous Huxley, had imagined a future society pacified by a ready supply of drugs. Now reality had come to reflect, in some measure, his once-amusing fantasy. Ethnic and economic divisions at home made the empire’s domestic politics delicate and sometimes vicious. The upper class indulged itself in pleasures which would have astonished Louis XIV, or even Nero, thanks in part to their amazing technology, which could regale them with entertainment from every corner of the world. I grew up in such a home and, even now, remain amazed at some of the marvels and comforts our family enjoyed. 

      Meanwhile, much less privileged folk with darker skin and a different dialect lived a few kilometers away. I knew some of them personally. Nothing prevented us from visiting one another’s neighborhoods, though we seldom did. We were on cordial terms, but just barely. 
We eyed one another warily, in the manner of lizards preparing to defend their territories. When I was a bit older, the strained cordiality dissolved into open warfare, from which I still bear wounds. For that matter, entire cities never recovered fully from that domestic combat.
Bloodshed was not confined the schools and streets. It also reached to the highest levels of authority. As during Rome’s decline, the selection of new emperors had become violent and unpredictable. Painful as the truth was to admit, assassination had become a tool of domestic politics, and prospective rulers, before declaring themselves as candidates, had to consider the possibility that they would be murdered during, or even before, their reign. A rumor began to circulate that the imperial mansion was little more than a front, and that the emperor and his family actually dwelt instead in a subterranean complex miles outside the capital, using a network of tightly-guarded tunnels to venture into the mansion itself only for ceremonial occasions. Whether factual or not, the rumor seemed persuasive enough to find its way into a highly successful novel. 

      Abroad, things were going even worse than at home. The technologies of mass destruction, which once had been restricted to a very few regimes, were now spreading through the world like flames through dry grass. 

       Access to those weapons proved surprisingly easy. Much of the information to build them was unclassified, and the materials were almost as easy to obtain as lumber and nails. If certain reports are to be believed, finished and functional weapons of mass destruction were left practically unguarded in the 1990s, or else could be purchased for sums even small nations could afford. Sometimes the makings of such weapons could be had for the asking, or stolen off a truck. A paperback sold in used-book stores told how to assemble the “devices,” as they were euphemistically known.

       In various cases, such technologies became the property of nations and leaders whose motives could scarcely be considered rational, and whose outlook was best described as vengeful. These smaller powers long had chafed under the domination of the great empire and its allies, whose values they did not cherish, and whose arrogance they despised. 

       Now, the spread of military technology (which, after all, is indifferent to ideology and authority) gave formerly impotent lands a new sway almost equal to the superpower’s own. And the very technology on which the empire relied for its everyday functioning was vulnerable in innumerable ways. Communications, national defense, banking … all these, and countless other interests, had weaknesses which high-tech adepts at home and abroad could exploit. It became something of a game to break into government information networks and insert mocking messages or graphics, in the manner of safecrackers leaving behind “Guess who?” notes.

     With each passing year, the empire felt its own influence waning, and  external threats growing, as the hardware and software of death and destruction (which, in a delicious irony, it had pioneered) became more sophisticated and widespread. From the afterworld, one could almost hear Tsar Peter the First -- who studied abroad and then whipped his foreign tutors on the battlefield, using the very lessons they had taught him – chuckling grimly. From beside him, one could imagine similar amusement from the ghosts of Frederick the Great and Adolf Hitler, who had wondered how long this huge and heterogeneous empire could hold itself together.

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