"Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself." Who said this?

John Lennon

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1216813-if-i-d-lived-in-roman-times-i-d-have-lived-in

As much as I admire John Lennon, the quote from Rolling Stone is no more than a unsupported sound bite and Lennon was no Marx! Comparisons between Rome and New York have been made since colonial times; the idea itself has been expressed in countless paraphrased ways.

'Cullen Murphy, editor at large at Vanity Fair, in his "Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America" lists six parallels to support his argument of why the U.S. today is much like the Roman Empire: a powerful military but not enough people to fill it; a practice of contracting government work to private agencies; immigration problems and immigrant communities that threaten us from within; prideful ignorance about the outside world; accelerating decadent national character; and leaders influenced by moralizing religion and superstition.

Murphy points out that the U.S. is seen as "dangerously overcommitted abroad and rusted out at home, like Rome in its last two centuries." He quotes the historian and columnist Chalmers Johnson: "Roman imperial sorrows mounted up over hundreds of years. Ours are likely to arrive with the speed of FedEx."'

(From Booklist)

http://tinyurl.com/d63w5f