October 20, 2010 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • Page 15 nibal, their greatest general in the end-game of the Second Punic War, won all his battles by trickery and with an army made up of Gallic and African mercenaries. George Washington won the Battle of Trenton with the help of a regiment of German-Americans, a third of his Continentals were Irish, and another 10 percent were black or Indian. The Battle of Yorktown was largely a victory of the French Navy and German soldiers in French uniform commanded by French officers. The story that the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were all shot or hanged or died broke is mostly bogus. Not one was killed and almost all of them died rich and in bed. The Irishmen, the blacks, and the farmers and tradesmen were the ones who died for liberty. America is a plutocracy where poor people do most of the dying. Carthage, baby! Let the other guy do the dying and let him defend our rights for us. We had a system like that once ourselves. It was called the Lodge-Philbin Act of 1950. If you had served in a (non-German) foreign army that had not done well in World War II and wanted to move to America, you could get your ticket punched by serving for five years in the U.S. Army. Much as we love to extol our own valor, people who actually enjoy combat are quite rare and always at a premium. Lots of people who started their military careers in auxiliary units of the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS helped us out during the Korean “police action” or the early stages of Vietnam under Lodge-Philbin Act auspices. Some were decorated for valor. They weren’t born in Minneapolis, but they helped kill a lot of commies for the second time just as they had the first time. The Gauls whom the Carthaginians hired didn’t like Rome any better than the Finns and the Balts and the Ukrainians liked Russia. Carthage. Carthaginians relied on technology to win their wars with people who had armies made up of citizen soldiers. Their favorite technology was the elephant. War elephants had been introduced to the Western world when Alexander the Great invaded India 100 years before the time of Hannibal, and they were the tanks of their era – until their demerits were more widely understood. Elephants induced panic in cavalry horses and in untrained infantry, but foot soldiers who stood their ground could throw the elephants into a panic by wounding them with javelins. When the elephants panicked, they were a worse danger to their own side than they were to the enemy. Hannibal, the greatest of Carthaginian generals, lost the battle of Zama, and the Second Punic War, when his elephants mutinied and trampled some of his own men in their terrified flight from the battlefield. At the end of the war, the Romans confiscated all the Carthaginian war elephants, all but 20 of the Carthaginian war ships, and all of the Carthaginian colonies outside of Africa. The Carthaginians were left with nothing but trade with the African interior and agriculture – surprisingly enough despite their skill at commerce and navigation, they were among the greatest agronomists of antiquity. Their success at trade and farming was such that they paid off their staggering war indemnity to Rome ahead of schedule, and offered the Romans a free bail-out of surplus wheat when the Romans needed it. This aroused such envy in Romans who remembered the Roman defeats of the previous century that they forced impossible terms on Carthage in return for a peace as a “friend” of Rome. When the Carthaginians refused, they were destroyed entirely. The City of Carthage was razed, salt was plowed into the ruins, and those survivors who had escaped battle or suicide were sold into slavery. All their books were burned except a treatise on agriculture that was too good to throw away. The Romans then proceeded to emulate all the bad points of Carthage – a dwindling agricultural base as commercial farming replaced subsistence farming, government by a plutocracy instead of a general electorate, and reliance on armies of mercenaries to control the remote colonies that still produced food and revenues. The Romans also added a distinctly Roman vice: obsession with the bloodiest possible spectator sports. In the end, the foreign mercenaries decided they could run the country better without bureaucratic interference and Rome “fell,” in that the central government was forced to acknowledge its own uselessness by Lodge-Philbin types who had not done well against the Huns but were more than a match for the bureaucrats who cheated them on payday. Are we Carthage? I think we are. Do we want to end up like Carthage? I don’t think we do. If we don’t, we should shift back to the concept of a populace that supports the government rather than being supported by it. We don’t need to bring back the draft. We need to get away from the idea that our armed forces are for rent to serve corporate and foreign interests. We need to defend the North American continent through a combination of intelligent strength and the restoration of good will through generosity and objectivity rather than arrogance. We need to rebuild a country that people want to defend rather than hiring foreigners and enticing luckless citizens into armies and navies to protect our commerce and other people’s political chicanery. We really don’t have a choice. We are never going to undercut the cheap labor of industrial Asia by cheating illegal immigrants out of the absurd minimum wage we now offer to people who were born here. Let’s not be Rome, and let’s not be Carthage. Let’s be the kind of America we were when the people next door were our fellow citizens and not the spectators to our conspicuous consumption or the reluctant targets of our reliance on tax money. Every now and then, someone buttonholes me at the library check-out desk, in an elevator, or in a parking lot, and asks me, “Aren’t we really Rome?” Good question! In this area, newspaper readers are not what they were where I grew up. There, nobody got off the sports pages except for the arrival of the “funny sheets,” as we used to call them, which was the highlight of the reading week even for those pseudo-intellectuals who claimed to have read the entire “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” by the age of nine. Putting down Prince Valiant, Brick Bradford and his Time Top, and Mandrake the Magician, wise heads agreed that we were really Rome. Since one of those people was my late father, who couldn’t mention the word “discipline” without his nostrils flaring and his blue eyes flashing lightning bolts, I was forced to agree that we were really Rome. Well, here is the word from the Orphan Prince: The United States of America may not be Rome after all. We may actually be Carthage. Let’s explore the metaphor and let every man and woman decide. A surprising number of my readers can actually handle this stuff, and I respect them for it. I wouldn’t pay these property taxes if I felt comfortable living among dummies, and most other people around here wouldn’t either. It’s not all about the schools – it’s about an adult peer group that isn’t composed of zombies. That’s why nobody wants to move out of Northwest Bergen County when they’re done with the schools – and are tough on the people who split for North Carolina when Biff and Buffy are done with the local high schools. Geezers have rights too. Cut those school taxes. On to Carthage. Roman was aboriginal. The city on seven hills grew out of Italian tribes that spoke a language generated in their own back yard. They got rid of the Etruscan tyrants -Europeans, not people from Asia Minor – and developed a local government based on local tribal customs. English is a colonial language. America was actually several colonies, mostly English, some Dutch or French Huguenot or Swedish, with early mixtures of German or Gaelic. We are not an aboriginal people. The Romans were. The Carthaginians weren’t. Get my drift? Carthage was founded on the north shore of Africa in 814 B.C. by colonists of Sidon and Tyre, which was then the commercial center of the world, as Britain was during the founding years of America. The original settlers prided themselves on their honesty in dealing with the native peoples just as our own Puritan forebears did. The much-maligned Puritans were the only white group in American history to have carried out honest dealings with the original inhabitants. Before the Puritans would sign an Indian treaty, they made sure the whole tribe was represented and everybody on both sides was sober. This never again happened in American history. The Greeks – who hated the Carthaginians because they were trade rivals – admitted that in commerce the Carthaginians were trustworthy, though their wars, when they couldn’t be avoided, were treacherous beyond belief. Han- Are we Rome or are we Carthage? Members of the Friends of West Bergen Mental Healthcare gathered recently to kick-off the non-profit agency’s upcoming fundraiser. Some 600 tickets are expected to be sold at $50 each. First prize will be 25 percent of the proceeds, second prize will be 15 percent, and third prize will be 10 percent. The winners will be announced at A Fall Night of Fine Dining, set for Monday, Nov. 1 at the Indian Trail Club in Franklin Lakes. (Winners need not be present.) Funds raised will benefit the West Bergen Center for Children and Youth in Ramsey. The center provides counseling, therapy, and addiction treatment services for young people, ages two through 18, and their parents. For cash prize tickets and more information, call (201) 444-3550. For information on A Fall Night of Fine Dining, visit www.afallnight.com. Help a family in need