Thursday
Thanks to Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film, The Odyssey is having a moment. Elon Musk once again displayed his racism by decrying the casting of Kenyan-Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o (she also holds U.S. citizenship) as Helen of Troy, and Jay Kuo, one of my favorite political bloggers, has invoked Sylla and Charybdis in discussing Trump’s Strait of Hormuz dilemma. And then (although this isn’t connected with the film), a friend alerted me to a news item that basketball legend Shaquille O’Neil earned an advanced degree in Sports Management with his thesis “Interdisciplinary Approach to Mentorship through the lens of the epic poem The Odyssey.” But this last one will have to await a future post.
Blogger Noah Berlatsky, another fine political blogger, lays out the fascistic foundations of Musk’s bigotry and then explores its dangers. To “racist pseudo-intellectuals like Musk”—and, one could add, to the Nazis–the Greeks were “not just white, but transcendental icons of white culture.” For them, therefore, Nolan’s casting decision is “an insult to whiteness, and a sign of Hollywood’s assault on Western purity and honor.”
In his article, Berlatsky parallels this aesthetic with Hitler’s attack on Jewish art and notes that Musk has the same genocidal aims as the Fuhrer. For Hitler, he notes,
genocide was not just about eliminating and murdering human beings. It also involved a thoroughgoing effort to remove, destroy, and discredit art which he believed was “degenerate”—especially art by Jewish, Communist, and avant garde artists (groups which Hitler indiscriminately and compulsively conflated.) Under the Nazis, the work of Jewish composers like Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg were banned. Jewish musicians were barred from performing. Jewish artwork (or art that Hitler claimed was Jewish-influenced) was ridiculed in an infamous “degenerate art” exhibition. Jewish directors and actors were expelled from German cinema.
Musk, who has expressed an admiration for Hitler, obsesses over the fact that non-whites outnumber whites. Unfortunately, also like Hitler, he at one point had the power to carry out a genocidal project. His wholesale attack on USAID and other global aid programs last year led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans, mostly children, of malnutrition and preventable disease. Berlatsky points out that the end of aid has also contributed to a dangerous increase in African violence. “If aid is not restored,” he writes,”researchers believe preventable deaths because of Musk’s genocide will reach 14 million by 2030.”
In The Secret War against Hate, Steven J. Ross—interviewed by Rachel Maddow Monday night—notes that there has been an active fascist strain in nn life for much of the 20th and 21st centuries. One must see Musk’s attack on Nolan and Lupita Nyong’o in light of that strain. Unlike political correctness and DEI programs on the left—which are often attempts to address racial inequalities—violent erasure is the end goal of America’s fascists. Attacking multiracial art is integral to their project. Bertlasky observes,
For Hitler, a painting that didn’t appeal to him was not just a painting that didn’t appeal to him. It was a deliberate, violent attack on his nation and all that he held dear. Decadent art, Jewish art, was framed as an essentially genocidal assault on Germany, its culture, and its people. The destruction of such art was part of the effort to erase Jews from Germany, but it was also a justification of that effort. The ridicule of Jewish cultural production, and the framing of Jewish visibility in culture as an existential threat, served to dehumanize actual Jewish people and to legitimize their mass murder.
Over the past 18 months, we in America have becoming increasingly aware as to how far authoritarians are willing to go once they seize the reins of power. Whether it’s unleashing ICE agents on American cities, banning books, purging school history curricula, or attacking a Black actress, it is all in service of white Christian fascism.
Jay Kuo takes his use of Odyssey in a different direction. I start first with the passage he alludes to in his discussion of the Strait of Hormuz. Unlike Trump with his war of choice, Odysseus is forced to navigate a dangerous strait if he is to get home. Both men, however, learn that a price must be paid once they are enmeshed. The island goddess Circe sets forth the problem, starting with the six-headed serpentine Scylla:
That is the den of Scylla, where she yaps
abominably, a newborn whelp’s cry,
though she is huge and monstrous. God or man,
no one could look on her in joy. Her legs—
and there are twelve—are like great tentacles,
unjointed, and upon her serpent necks
are borne six heads like nightmares of ferocity,
with triple serried rows of fangs and deep
gullets of black death. Half her length, she sways
her heads in air, outside her horrid cleft,
hunting the sea around that promontory
for dolphins, dogfish, or what bigger game
thundering Amphitrite feeds in thousands.
And no ship’s company can claim
to have passed her without loss and grief; she takes,
from every ship, one man for every gullet. (trans. Robert Fitzgerald)
To avoid her, however, a ship would have to deal with a whirling maelstrom:
On the opposite point seems more a tongue of land
you’d touch with a good bowshot, at the narrows.
A great wild fig, a shaggy mass of leaves,
grows on it, and Charybdis lurks below
to swallow down the dark sea tide. Three times
from dawn to dusk she spews it up
and sucks it down again three times, a whirling
maelstrom; if you come upon her then
the god who makes earth tremble could not save you.
Circe advises Odysseus to choose Scylla:
[H]ug the cliff of Scylla, take your ship
through on a racing stroke. Better to mourn
six men than lose them all, and the ship, too. ..
This is what Odysseus does, even though, in a futile gesture, he tries hacking at Scylla as she grabs his men. The scene is heartrending:
Then Scylla made her strike,
whisking six of my best men from the ship.
I happened to glance aft at ship and oarsmen
and caught sight of their arms and legs, dangling
high overhead. Voices came down to me
in anguish, calling my name for the last time.
A man surf-casting on a point of rock
for bass or mackerel, whipping his long rod
to drop the sinker and the bait far out,
will hook a fish and rip it from the surface
to dangle wriggling through the air; so these
were borne aloft in spasms toward the cliff.
She ate them as they shrieked there, in her den,
in the dire grapple, reaching still for me—
and deathly pity ran me through
at that sight—far the worst I ever suffered
questing the passes of the strange sea.
Now for Kuo’s application. First, there’s the Scylla option, which would involve America cutting its losses and rowing like hell to get out of the entanglement.
For Trump, the Scylla of Hormuz is the giant loser of a “peace deal.” Steering toward it means accepting a brutal political accounting: Trump started a war that sent oil prices surging 40 percent above pre-war levels, drove inflation to its highest point in three years, and cost innocent lives, including 13 Americans and over 120 Iranian school children. Under the current proposal, Iran would be in a stronger position than it was in February. Even more humiliating for Trump, Iran’s uranium stockpile—which he repeatedly cited to justify the global economic pain inflicted by the war—would remain intact. And to top things off, Iran would retain de facto control of the Strait.
As bad as this is, the Charybdis option is even worse since it would involve
a full resumption of the war. It would require more U.S. military strikes and more economic pressure, all in the hopes of finishing what Operation Epic Fury started. But a wider conflagration risks pulling in an already volatile entire region, setting neighboring nations’ oil refineries ablaze, sending oil above $200 a barrel, and inflicting economic damage on an unprecedented scale. Once caught in its vortex, no one would return from that whirlpool, and Trump seems finally to recognize this.
Those Republicans worried about a shellacking in the November elections are opting for Scylla:
For all their bluster, Trump’s officers on deck remain in a trap they cannot escape. The party fears becoming the sacrificial vessel, politically devoured by Scylla from a terrible and humiliating deal. But they understand that there is no better deal to be had.
There are Congressional war hawks, however—including Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham—who are arguing against the Scylla option. To do so, however, they are refusing to openly acknowledge that the whirlpool of all-out war is the only alternative.
Say that Trump, like Odysseus gets through the strait—which is to say, that he walks away and pretends that the Iran debacle never happened. If one goes by the story, although he himself will survive, his party won’t. Kuo draws the continuing parallels:
Six of his party had been devoured by Scylla, and the rest had grown restless. They were warned by the gods not to slaughter the sacred cattle of the sun god, but they proceeded anyway, with hunger, exhaustion and the collapse of discipline doing what Scylla and Charybdis could not.
As punishment, Zeus destroyed the ship. Every last member of his party perished, and Odysseus had to survive on his own, the wreckage of his vessel now his life raft.
Tidy though the comparison is, Kuo needs a second Greek myth to round out his story. This one, like so many Greek stories, involves hubris, and it’s right on the money:
Yet to compare Trump to Odysseus is to flatter him beyond recognition. The figure from Greek mythology Trump more closely resembles is Phaethon, the vain mortal son of the sun god Helios, who demanded to drive his father’s celestial chariot across the sky to silence those who doubted his divine bloodline. His father warned him, begged him, enumerating every danger, every reason Phaethon was unqualified for the task.
Phaethon grabbed the reins anyway, certain that his stature accorded him what greater beings had mastered through long experience. He lost control almost immediately. The chariot lurched and careened. The earth scorched, and rivers boiled. Whole civilizations burned below while he clung to the reins. He was unable to halt the conflagration he’d lit, and unable to admit he never should have begun it.
Zeus finally struck him down with a thunderbolt, not to punish him, but to stop the terrible damage he was inflicting on everyone else.
Kuo punctuates the story with a punchy moral:
Were this Ancient Greece, we’d say the gods are being sorely tested by Trump’s hubris and recklessness. And their patience is wearing thin.
Unfortunately, even though the long arc of history may bend toward justice and reckless tyrants be brought low, they usually take down many innocent people first.
