End of an Empire
A few weeks ago, Rabbi Henry asked me if I knew who John Prine was. I said I didn’t, and he said “that’s a spiritual deprivation.” He started playing a song called “That’s how every empire falls:”
“Padlock the door and board the windows
Put the people in the street
"It's just my job, " he says "I'm sorry."
And draws a check, goes home to eat
But at night he tells his woman
"I know I hide behind the laws."
She says, "You're only taking orders."
That's how every empire falls
A bitter wind blows through the country
A hard rain falls on the sea
If terror comes without a warning
There must be something we don't see
What fire begets this fire?
Like torches thrown into the straw
If no one asks, then no one answers
That's how every empire falls”
John Prine’s lyrical rendition represents the sensations and experiences of a person living through the end of something. His verses transition from describing an individual man’s downfall to the downfall of the world around him. The nouns in this last stanza, like rain, terror, warning, fire suggest real, Biblical catastrophe, but he also reminds us of the mundanity of domestic life maintained by those who cause the terror: he “goes home to eat, tells his woman ‘I know I hide behind the laws.’”
Right now, here on Spring Street in Downtown LA, helicopters are looming and announcing their presence with that unique metallic ringing noise that they make, hovering and spinning in circles overhead. On my way here, I drove, and got caught in traffic because the police shut down Spring Street and several other streets in response to a protest unfolding across downtown. I drove past protesters looking powerful outside the federal courthouse. Stuck in traffic, unable to see past the stalled cars and buses in front of me, blindly following turns indicated by police traffic cones, my thoughts turn stressful and my shoulders tense up like I am building a protective shell with my own musculature. Is this also what the end of an empire feels like?
This week, I read a novel by Joseph Roth called The Emperor’s Tomb. Roth is well-known author considered the voice of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. A Jew from Galicia, born in 1894, Roth was a highly prolific journalist and novelist who wrote about life and events in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and the Slavic lands of Central and Eastern Europe. In The Emperor’s Tomb, he brings the reader into the fall of an empire: his narrator, the scion of a Slovene family elevated into nobility by chance in his grandfather’s generation, is a Viennese dandy who does not work and exists only in coffee shops and rapt conversations on the state of Europe with his friends.
This narrator, Trotta, reminded me so much of some of my friends. Bohemians living in Brooklyn don’t look unlike affluent Viennese young adults in 1914. In the novels’ opening scenes, Trotta’s distant cousin visits from Slovenia, looking like the humble chestnut farmer he is. Trotta buys his watch and chain off of him, and parades his cousin to the café to show off his connection to a real, rural culture. Trotta’s friends are impressed by how down-to-earth and provincial this cousin is: he earns clout by effacing his wealth and pretending to be poor. Today in East Los Angeles, we might see something similar…
Roth’s book expresses a nostalgia for the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, representing it as a tolerant, multicultural regime that instilled respect between Viennese elites and the Eastern European farmers whose land was their breadbox. Jews were better off then than they were after the Empire fell and was replaced by nation-states like Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, and so on. Once these nation-states replaced the empire, Jews became national outsiders rather than citizens in a pluralist cosmopolitan milieu. It was not long after the fall of the empire that Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. When Roth’s narrator returns from the first world war and comes back to Vienna, much has changed, but much has not. His mother saved the best coffee and treats for him, which have become rare due to wartime scarcity.
If we are experiencing the flailing death of an empire that is bent on war and destruction as it peters out, Roth and Prine can teach us we’re not the first to know the feeling.
