Then began the steady slide. The main business was Her Majesty's government, especially after the world wars, was its own dismantlement. By 1949, with India independent and Britain yielding the world stage to its brassy colony across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Clement Attlee spent an endless summer rereading Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The New York Times reported, "No significance, his admirers say, should be attached to his selection at that time of the particular work." The English knew better.

In 1965, Winston Churchill, the last great symbol of the Empire, died, and for one long, gray day, England went through the old imperial trot. Big Ben was silent. Bands across London ground out the Dead March from Saul. A boat bore the casket down the Thames on the way to the final resting place in Oordshire. The funeral was as much for an empire as for its emplar. "The true old times were dead, when every morning brought a noble chance, and every chance a noble knight."

The American descent has been a comic shadow of England's, embodying Karl Marx's comment that historical figures and events always occur twice—"the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

Never was the American Empire so strong as on the cold day in 1961 when a millionaire's young son stood triumphant on the Capitol steps to deliver an inaugural address full of promise and swaggering gall. John Kennedy had behind him the confidence of military triumph and untold wealth. We would conquer space, poverty and Communism. We would all wear mink to work and drink champagne for breakfast. The future was ours.

As they say in Victorian novels, the years passed. Passed bitterly. Then, in an effort to revive some of the old dream, Ronald Reagan came along, bearing "It's Morning Again in America" slogans. He promised nothing less than to revive the empire feel of the Kennedy years, its glamour, its might, its promise. As it turned out, Reagan's greatest mistake was to win re-election. The great soufflé that Reagan had baked in his first term collapsed. Suddenly the spectacle of conservative culturati Jerry Zipkin and Wayne Newton at state dinners seemed to so much elegant as grotesque.

The party's over. When the stock market crashed 508 points one Monday last October, the cartoonist Herblock drew a hung-over party boy clutching his forehead. The caption: "Morning in America." It's not just the economics. American influence abroad makes the money picture look positively vibrant. The splendid military mission in the Caribbean, in which the cabanas and golf clubs were made forever safe from Communism, seems now a depressing event, merely another embarrassment in line with the jumbled efforts in Nicaragua, the Philippines and Lebanon.

Reagan himself no longer summons memories of his fresh-faced days as the Gipper. He is more like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, obviously aping his starlit days by the emerald swimming pool while the world around him moves ineluctably on. The signs of decadence before the fall can be seen in all the restaurants in New York: hyper-starved wives of real-estate barons, wearing the great poufs and flounces of Arnold Scaasi and Christian Lacroix, lunching without eating, kissing without touching. The glorious waste! The manic spending before the crash is reminiscent of the tulip inflation in Holland, the brief period before its fall, when the Dutch were willing to spend thousands of dollars for a single bulb. Nowadays the sacramental tulips are everywhere—the $100 tie, the $10,000 gown, the $7 movie ticket, the $1-millon one-bedroom apartment.