Report from the End Times

It's conventional for accounts like this to provoke analogies (real or imagined) to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.  But I'd say a more plausible, if equally facile, comparison might be to the end of the Roman Republic--a gaggle of loosely intertwined clans all striving for eminence in a polity which from many perspectives wasn't really governed at all.     Readers who have not chucked their copies of Roland Ronald Syme may want to dust them off for a refresher.