February 29, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • Page 15 and savage events from a civilized and humane perspective. Achilles, having lost his own best friend, drags the corpse of Hector behind his chariot in revenge, but when Hector’s aged father shows up to ask for the body, Achilles is deeply moved and returns to decency. Both sides are recognizably human and both sides number both heroes and cowards in their ranks. The monsters in “The Odyssey” were fictional, but the emotional responses of the people in the stories were intensely human. These are major works for all humanity. They are truly international. I recently noticed a license plate that read 480 HET. Having just come off the computer for some clarifications of my next book, I realized just for a moment that what I was looking at could allude to the downfall of Western civilization. HET is “nyet” in Russian Cyrillic and 480 B.C. was the date of the Greeks’ defeat of the Persians, which, we were all told, saved Western democracy from Asian despotism. That could be a little simplistic: The Persians were ruled by an arbitrary monarch, but they practiced a monotheistic religion, Zoroastrianism, which offered a clear distinction between good and evil and the prospect of personal immortality. The Persians also sheltered the ultimate monotheistic religion, Judaism, which formed the matrix for Christianity and Islam. These three beliefs, separately or together, contributed far more to the development of civilization and human rights than Athenian-style democracy, which was based on outright slavery of foreigners rather than Persianstyle serfdom. Greek democracy was about personal popularity rather than universal human rights. Athens functioned on a level like that of the barbarian Germanic tribes or the heathen Vikings, not George Washington and James Madison. The degree of human rights in ancient Greece was questionable. People who were unpopular in Athens could be exiled simply for their opinions, like Plato, and in extreme cases, like that of Socrates, they could be executed. In Sparta, lower-class helots who showed too much fight while serving side by side with their free-born owners were routinely executed to deprive revolutionaries of their possible leadership. The Spartans never had a democracy, and Athenian democracy only lasted about two centuries, while the Roman Republic lasted three times as long before it imploded into an empire. Conversely, the Carthaginians, who practiced an ugly religion that included infant sacrifice, were far better sailors than the Greeks, far better farmers, and far better at running an economy. Carthage never collapsed as Greece and Rome did. Carthage was eradicated. We don’t know what kind of literature the Carthaginians produced, since the Romans burned it, but we do know that the literature of the Greeks in the era just after the defeat of the Persians, and their art and architecture, led to a Golden Age that was far more important to the world than their politics. One would have to be incredibly imaginative or incredibly dense to imagine a world without Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Euripides, and without the Parthenon. Their political contribution may be overrated, and their allergy to “Asia” could be the bane of 21st century foreign policy, but their literature and art earned the Greeks a pinnacle in the development not just of Western culture, but of world culture. Athenian economics is another story. Unlike the Romans, the Greeks looked down on agriculture and cultivated trade. Slaves did the hard work. Foreign craftsmen, or metics, whence the word meticulous, produced the trade goods, and the Greeks sold those products. This produced a boom economy that paid for the Parthenon. However, it also produced economic predation that turned the Delian League – the Athenian dominance over the loosely confederated Greek city-states – into a hostile debating society and a matrix for civil war. Greek culture was shattered by the protracted war between Athens and Sparta. When the Spartans won, they spared Athens and its citizens for their superb artistic contributions, but continued and exacerbated the Athenian tendency toward mismanagement. The Macedonians and the Romans mopped up and the Greeks became scholars of no political importance. Yet their language, in the form of the New Testament, led to another and more permanent civilization that still exists, and hopefully will continue to exist. We should honor and revere the art and architecture and literature of the Greeks, but we should avoid their economics as practiced then and now. What the modern Greeks have done was to conceive of a lifestyle that would make the average citizen happy, without realizing that their economy couldn’t pay for it. Greece went potentially broke by paying for services the economy could not afford, and had to borrow money, mostly from Germany. The United States has gone deep into debt by paying for social services the economy could not afford, and had to borrow money, mostly from China, but also from Japan. The Germans are getting tired of bailing out Greece. While I am not privy to the inside story of what the Chinese think, the Japanese are extremely concerned that the United States stay afloat, and hope we will get a grip on our domestic spending. Since the standards of living and the social programs in both the creditor nations are nowhere near ours they, too, may get tired of bailing out a nation with a magnificent past, and a very questionable future. The European Union just appropriated a last-ditch $172 billion to bail out the Greek economy, partly, I suspect, in gratitude for the immense contributions ancient Greece made to the world during the glory days of Athens, and partly in a pragmatic attempt to keep Greece from going bankrupt and taking the rest of Europe down into the sinkhole after the birthplace of Western European democracy. This could happen. A week before I started to write this column, the bailout was considered iffy and controversial. An analyst for a major newspaper pointed out that those European countries that know how to run an economy are getting tired of bailing out those European nations that do not know how to run an economy. He said the modern Greeks got into trouble by paying more for social programs than they were earning through manufacturing, agriculture, and tourism, and that constant borrowing from foreign sources to cover domestic expenses was running their economy into the ground. Greece is not the only country in Europe to have these problems. Spies tell me that the Germans are now quietly urging customers to pay for purchases only in Euros that were printed in Germany. The tacit argument is that the German government may actually back its own Euros, but may not be able to cover anybody else’s Euros – or simply may not feel like it. I hope they are just being provincial and paranoid, but there aren’t many other countries in Europe that are fiscally solid, and the patience of the solid countries for endless bailouts may be getting a little thin. As Aristotle – actually a Macedonian, but a functional Greek – wrote some years ago, true friendship demands equality, because people need to function on the same level. Aristotle also said good people always get along, but bad people never do, because every good person is satisfied with having as much as his or her neighbor, while every bad person wants to have more than his or her neighbor. Economics today is a lot more complicated than in Aristotle’s day, but the principle appears to be unchanged: Americans have long been tired of sending money overseas, and have said so, but the government just keeps on sending it. Our humanitarian aid programs cost about one percent of the economy. We all know, or think we know, about the glory that was Greece. Nobody who went through any serious college was allowed to escape the astounding list of books produced in classical Greece, and with good reason. Even the minor Greek writers were so much better than anybody else outside of the Bible that their writings were as inevitable as they were enjoyable. Homer, whose identity is the subject of endless scholarship and debate, gave the world its first extended war story, “The Iliad,” and its first science fiction story, “The Odyssey.” These were redoubtable works. The earlier war stories of Pharaoh So-and-So bragging about how many people he had hit over the head was a lapse into self-serving savagery from an otherwise benign civilization that produced beautiful hymns and superb art and architecture – but nothing of secular literature that resembles Homer. “The Iliad” is remarkable because it describes brutal The glory that was Greece and the lesson for America Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: I am dismayed by the public statements of Wyckoff Township Committeeman Scanlan who complains that he was “passed over” for the deputy mayor position on Jan. 1. It is surprising to me that Mr. Scanlan believes he is entitled to a leadership position on our township committee when he is the sole Democrat, and the four other members of the committee are Republicans. Mr. Scanlan claims that he is “non-partisan” and the community should not care about political affiliation when electing their leaders. If that is the case, why doesn’t he again become a Republican, like he previously was? If he is not really a Democrat, why does he work with county and state Democrats to advance their agenda? Mr. Scanlan harps on the point that he was the “topvote getter” in the 2011 election, but he seems to forget that the four other members of the committee were also duly elected by the people. A few of them (DePhillips, Rooney, and Boonstra) all had much higher vote totals when they last ran as compared to Mr. Scanlan in 2011. Vote counts all depend on the year you run, voter turnout, and how many candidates you are running against. Committeeman Scanlan should stop the partisan bickering and join the Republicans in governing the town. Brian H. Ellen Wyckoff Dear Editor: Midland Park Lions Club held a Food Drive at the local A&P Supermarket to benefit the Center for Food Action of New Jersey on Feb. 18 and 19. The Lions collected over 12 shopping carts of food through the generosity of the grocery shoppers in Midland Park and the surrounding area. I want to thank all shoppers who supported this Midland Get down to governing Park Lions effort by donating a nonperishable grocery item to help those in need. I want to especially thank Midland Park A&P Store Manager Sue Giordano and her staff, for allowing the Midland Park Lions to hold this event. John L. “Jack” Romano, President Midland Park Lions Club Dear Editor: Committeeman Brian Scanlan and a handful of individuals have been treating the community to a number of letters to the editor complaining that the township committee did not appoint him deputy mayor at the committee’s reorganization meeting on Jan. 1. I believe these same handful of individuals are missing the point. As everyone knows, the committee is comprised of four Republicans, and one Democrat (Scanlan). Does anyone really believe that if the committee were four Democrats and one Republican, the one Republican would be offered the mayor or deputy mayor position? Please don’t insult our community’s intelligence. Mr. Scanlan says that the township’s form of government should be “non- partisan.” But Mr. Scanlan has never proposed that to the township committee or to the community because he is trying to score political points by attacking Republicans throughout the town. Maybe if Mr. Scanlan stopped personally attacking his colleagues on the committee, which he has done for years, he could build some trust with them. The bottom line is that Mr. Scanlan is a partisan Democrat. He was once a Republican, but he changed political parties because he thought he would have a better chance of getting elected by railing against Republicans. Drita McNamara, Chairperson Republican County Committee Missing the point? Lions’ drive was success