But there are bigger fish to fry than meathead ptuitary cases, bewigged libertines and petty tyrants. The real contest takes place, of course, in Hollywood - and it's no contest at all. I'm talking Italian leadership here. When Italian mafia bosses - or mafia figures in general - show up on screen, they're generally pretty menacing figures - the baseball bat-wielding Al Capone, for example, or the towering Luca Brazzi. I wouldn't mess with Don Corleone in a dark alley, even if I had no idea who he was. And neither would you.

However, rent a few of the old "event" films of the 1960's (Spartacus being a prime example) and one finds quite a different type of Italian in the position of leadership. Roman Emperors and Senators are always portrayed as big, fat, effeminate, morally bankrupt slobs who might break down crying on a bad hair day. Certainly no one to physically fear, and always laughable. Why such a difference? Is Dom Deluise really a more accurate model of Italian leadership than Marlon Brando? Granted, Italy's wartime performances haven't been up to par in the twentieth century, but do things really change that much in just a thousand years?

More important, does the grandeur of Rome, whose monuments of unaging intellect stand to this day from Britain to Africa to the Persian Gulf, really deserve to be commemorated as a bunch of (for lack of a less Archie Bunkerish term) fruitcakes huddled around the vomitorium? An interesting free association survey might ask: What comes to mind when you think of the Roman Empire? Actually it wouldn't be interesting, because we already know the answer. Ask for yourself. Is it our failure to teach history or just the modality of pop political theory that's made Caligula (with additional footage directed by Bob Guccione) the prime specimen of Roman manhood?

There is, of course, a homegrown explanation for this whole Roman moral bankruptcy business - The Impending Fall of the First Great American Empire, complete with our own sins of flabby decadence. While the root cause of Rome's fall is as likely to have been the rise of Christianity as the decline of morality, while a cursory reading of Edward Gibbon reveals a two-hundred-year time lag between the depredations of Caligula and the arrival of the Germans, while Popery kept Rome at the center of European affairs for another thousand years after the Fall (or, more accurately, the Relocation), we know, we just know Washington will fall, like Rome before it, for our failure to meet the righteous standards of our Puritan forebears.

And if we are due for a fall, where does that leave our legacy? Cop Rock? Robert Fulghum? A continent of sprawling subdivisions more likely to be paved over for the parking space in a few years than to be standing in glorious ruin at the dawn of the fourth millenium? We do have nukes (and the airplane and the polio vaccine and the man on the moon), but there's always that sneaking suspicion that from a distance of a thousand years or so, The United States will look like a late period offshoot of the British Empire - an historical fate infinitely more lame than death.

So tales of Roman libertinism exist for the same reason we have conspiracy theories - to spare us a more disturbing meditation on the chilling meaninglessness, the rank unlearnability, of history. Overextension, stagnation, bad year for the Nikkei index, El Nino - none of the prevailing theories fully explain what was so different about the Roman empire during its collapse in the 5th century A.D. than during the previous 7 centuries.

What could scare a stock trader more? What could scare an American who bought Netscape at 65 more? Nobody in American wants to be reminded what a house of cards western civilization really is. In the age of the collective consciousness, it appears the only thing that will hold our fragile empire together is if all little children close their eyes and believe!

If everyone all at once decides that the stock market is bogus, it collapses. If Tamagotchi are the toy to have, there's a run at Toys'R'Us. Everyone decides to stop stopping at red, and we have chaos. (Everyone in San Francisco decided to do this years ago, but the strong economy is keeping this monster at bay.)

Our own unique form of late empire decadence is tempered with just a little too much (or too little) knowledge. Rome fell, dammit, and nobody knows why. Shit, that could happen here. We have to be able to look at Rome and say "those fat slobs had it coming all along. What wimps." And that's where Hollywood comes into play.

Think I'm going anywhere with this train of thought? Think again. My only purpose here is to make a pitch for my American's Guide to the Fall of Great Empires.