That is how I felt while descending the legendary Spanish Steps of Rome. Like a 5,000-year-old man. Something out of an old Mel Brooks-Carl Reiner comedy routine.

I crept, lowering myself step by step, one hand on the old and decayed marble railing and the other on my cane. It rained all day yesterday. The Spanish Steps were slick as a skating rink as I descended them to the Piazza di Spagna below. While exploring Rome, I felt a vague sense of foreboding.

There’s not much Pax Americana in Iran or the Sudan these days. Goose-stepping Iranian soldiers in Tehran march over the concealment places for atomic weapons. Sudanese Africans are being slaughtered by the government-supported Janjaweed (so much for the all-embracing Way of Allah). Hu Jintao, president of the People’s Republic of China, visits Microsoft’s Bill Gates in Seattle before meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush in Washington, D.C. Imagine!

They’re rioting in Nepal and drowning in the Balkans. Everything is right on schedule for implementation of the New World Order.

A youngish waitress refused to bring me another cappuccino because, as she proclaimed: "In 10 minutes, breakfast will be served!" I thought I’d booked a hotel room, not two days at a summer camp. Their "good intentions" are aimed at preventing me from smoking on the patio, the one place where it’s allowed.

So, I’m a 5,000-year-old man – just check the curricula of my Jesuit/Ivy League/Fulbright Scholarship education – a fading memory! Yes, a very eccentric, vestigial throwback reactionary to an era where we were all proud of our European heritage.

The advancing troops are suitably intimidating and the Third Way operations are bloodcurdlingly creepy!

However, the eugenicists are happy. The Apocalypse will be televised! After the war, what remains of the human race will obey the "enlightened ones" who found their way to the bomb shelters housing the survival tools allowing them to weather the aftermath of Armageddon.

Nothing like "letting nature take its course" – that most common phrase heard at the United Nation’s Security Council. Preventative Law Enforcement Policies will rid us of the "hell of other people." Scientific Supremacists disinherited their own humanity to become an unrelated part of nature, maintaining a distant objectivity to their lifeline.

The remnants of the Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian civilization stand bravely behind Pope Benedict XVI and remind us that worldwide abortion and euthanasia, cloning and organ harvesting will doom us to a gradual mass suicide begot of social engineers’ contempt for humanity.

"Contempt is good," cry the eugenicists. "It will eventually leave only the ‘fittest’ standing."

The Third Way liberally exploits these homicidal forces to cut the human race down to size.

Meanwhile, the 5,000-year-old man, hunched over his writing paper in the dawn of a now-awakening Via della Purificatione in the Eternal City, is reminded that his eccentricities of smoking and cappuccino-drinking are unsightly, unseemly and unacceptable in the New World Order.

A self-righteous maid sweeps the patio. My wife and I have been very careful with our cigarette butts, so this maidservant of the Third Way will not be at all inconvenienced by our lifestyle, aside from the empty coffee cups we leave behind.

Ah, the Third Millennium, which the 5,000-year-old man endeavours to write in, has grown ever more tyrannical. One wonders if the smug, sanitizing wave of "enlightened operatives" will possess enough sentiment to withstand the antiquated ways of decaying monuments to the past like myself.

Returning to his tiny hotel room, the 5,000-year-old man scribbles away, still confident that his image, creeping down the Spanish Steps, laboring patiently with his physical limitations, will wait out the next disastrous six years, so he can enter the White House in 2012 and reinstate the Declaration of Independence by legislating through Congress, within the first 100 days of his administration, a Constitutional Amendment stating that the U.S. Supreme Court first rescind Roe v. Wade before America presses on with the job of containing the expanding empires of Allah and Mao Zedong.

It is the very bedside manner of a eugenicist to discreetly euthanize a majority of the human population. Liberals fashion themselves as the middlemen when in fact they are "metamorphosizers" of the Stalinist/Maoist Death Machine, the transformers of a public purging, starvation and slaughter in Russia and China, into the RU486 privacy of wholesale abortion. Apologists for evil abound nowadays.

Like an ancient statue in the Piazza della Signoria of Florence or some relatively neglected corner of the Acropolis in Athens, the 5,000-year-old man ponders how utterly dependent the human race will be when the few individuals remaining after the war find themselves obliged to begin anew, out of the ruins of a Free World not subjugated by a foreign power, but poisoned from within by the horrifyingly successful New World Order.

As I behold the marvels of Rome, I am struck by the fact that all this Catholic glory is under siege by euthanizing eugenicists and savage invaders from the East!