IS AMERICA'S DECLINE THE RESULT, IN PART, OF HAVING SPARTA, NOT ATHENS, AS ITS UTOPIAN MODEL?

Paul Cartledge, The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece (Woodstock & New York: Overlook Press, 2003) ("Sparta was the original utopia (Thomas More, who coined the word Utopia in 1516, had Sparta very centrally in mind), but it was an authoritarian , hierarchical and repressive utopia, not a utopia of liberal creativity and free expression. The principal focus of the community was the use of war for self-preservation and the domination of others. Unlike other Greek cities, which satisfied there hunger for land by exporting population to form new 'colonial' cities among non-Greek 'natives', the Spartans attacked, subdued or enslaved their fellow-Greek neighbors in the southern Peloponnese." "The image or mirage of Sparta is therefore at least ambivalent and double-faceted. Against the positive image of the Spartans' uplifting warrior ideal of collective self-sacrifice, emblematized in the Thermophlae story, had to be pitted their lack of high cultural achievement, their refusal for the most part of open government, both at home and abroad, and their brutally efficient suppression for several centuries of a whole enslaved Greek people." Id. at 24-25. Think of all the war-metaphors federal, state and local governments, plus the so-called intellectual class, use: war on drugs, war on crime, war on poverty, fight again (war on) obesity, fight against (war on cancer, heart disease, aging, or whatever, cultural wars, gender wars, class war, economic warfare, trade wars, etc.).