State of the Discussion

If you haven't, check out Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey and the Iliad.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/08/the-odyssey-translated-emily-wilson-review

A fun quote from the review that gets us to questions of nobility and truthfulness

“He failed to keep them safe,” writes Wilson. “He could not save them from disaster,” is Robert Fagles’ version for Penguin. Chapman has: “But so their fates he could not overcome.” The Greek? “All’ oud’ hos hetairous erruasato” – “but even so he did not protect his companions”. Whereas male translations have a habit, perhaps quite unconsciously, of letting Odysseus off the hook (he tried his best! He just couldn’t manage it!), Wilson is more attentive to the poem’s foldedness, its complexity.

I also may have mentioned this, but if I haven't, you might be interested in the South African translation of the Iliad

https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2013/2013.03.06/

Does anyone in Greek myths have a noble character as we would define it? Brad DeLong, long ago, noted that he'd rather have Odysseus as his buddy in a foxhole rather than Achilles, as Achilles only wants kleos, whereas Odysseus, because he has metis, would craft a plan to get everyone out of whatever jam they are in. (with Nolan's film and the Ralph Fiennes movie, the Odyssean pov seems to be ascendent, though I've also noted that people can be too clever) One thing I like about thinking about Greek myths is that what they value and deprecate are often at odds with what we do.

Philoctetes certainly doesn't have any noble traits (those are assigned to Neoptolemus, who was coming fresh to the battlefield) but is identified with a noble act, lighting Hercules funeral pyre when no one else would, which is why he got the bow and arrow. (a quick check shows that another thread has his father, Poeus, lighting the pyre, which then makes the bow and arrows is a tainted inheritance). But in his implacable hatred of those who got him in his situation, I'm really seeing where he is coming from.

"There's An Emergency!" is getting a lot of work done for TrumpCo right now. if the funding is cut, Trump will declare an emergency of some kind and pull funding from whichever program will hurt Dems the most.

What hairshirt said.

If the (D)'s actually manage to turn off the DHS money, Trump et al will (a) bit h and moan and write a million Truth Social posts about it and (b) try to find a way around it.

They might be successful with (b).

But do it anyway. Do whatever is available.

I'm not sure that I'd say that Philoctetes, Hercules, or Odysseus were great and noble of character. All three were men of great ability, sure, but of very mixed character. In this they seem to support Aristotle's claim in the Poetics:

There remains, then, the character between these two extremes,—that of a man who is not eminently good and just,-yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous,—a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families.

I think many of the supporting people in the first Clementine Caligula administration fit this description, and were brought low by it. Of the current batch, Rubio is probably the closest thing.

Whatever the case, it'll probably require a deus ex machina to achieve public catharsis in our current state. We are still deeply polluted, politically, by the miasma we have allowed, and the sources of our pollution have not yet suffered enough to assuage the wrath of the political gods.

...at least speaking from the classic Greek perspective.

I think the answer to your question, Hartmut, is "nothing." Or tRump's own mind, which is more or less the same answer if you get my drift.

They should still do it, though. Let the pressure mount.

The play dates from the Peloponnesian war (after the catastrophe of the Sicilian expedition that had decimated the Athenian stock of young men) and a period of political turmoil in Athens (violent conflicts between oligarchs and democrats).
It is almost certain that it was read politically even then. Raison d'etat against the individual liberty, the youth manipulated by a deceitful and incompetent leadership etc.

yikes, the Brooks debate again!

FWIW and for the record, my issue with Brooks is probably much simpler than y'alls.

He seems to live in, and speak from, a pretty privileged place. Which is all well and good, I live in and speak from a pretty privileged place.

But a lot of his writing seems to be along the lines of "If everyone would just calm down and stop being so extreme they would see that everything is kind of OK".

Which is not really true for all the folks who don't live in or speak from a pretty privileged place.

I think the Trump years have kind of freaked him out and made him understand that we all don't live in the kind of well-groomed world that he does.

But I generally agree that if he thinks it's all down to Trump, he is mistaken and is still wearing his blinders.

And that's everything I have to say about Brooks.

On another topic, I encourage everyone reading this who lives in the US to get on the horn to your Senators and let them know you want them to NOT PASS funding for the DHS.

I think the (R)'s in the Senate are currently trying to figure out how to separate that stuff from the overall budget so that turning off the tap to DHS doesn't shut the whole government down (again). Which tells me that they are finally beginning to understand that the current ICE/CBP thing is fucking toxic and might well lose them a (R) majority in the Senate.

But one way or another, it's time to shut these fuckers down.

I try not to use bad language but the times are what they are.

Hey nous, I sent you an email a couple of days ago ... if you didn't get it, will you email me so I can try to reply to a correct address? It's just a quick question....

GftNC - However, on the subject that you and Snarki raise of his having an “unerring ability to land on a GOP friendly position”, it seems to me that the whole piece is a really scathing denunciation of Trump’s character, conduct, motivations etc etc. And given, as we all see, that the GOP as a whole has cravenly and pathetically bent the knee to him, enabled him, acceded to his power grab from Congress and been totally mealy-mouthed about his attacks on the constitution, I think it’s odd to say that he is supporting the GOP.

I'd say that he's lending cover to the GOP as a whole when he writes:

Of these four, the unraveling of Trump’s mind is the primary one, leading to all the others. Narcissists sometimes get worse with age, as their remaining inhibitions fall away. The effect is bound to be profound when the narcissist happens to be president of the United States.

When you look at the things currently being done in the US, the majority of them are in line with what the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have been working to get done for a lot longer than Trump has been on the scene. This administration is not acting on the whims of a mad king, they are taking advantage of the noise and foment that Clementine Caligula provokes to advance their own agenda. Brooks' heaping of all this on He Who Slumbers head is some fine scapegoating. At the end of the day it allows him to put all the sins of the GOP on one man's head and usher him into the desert, sins forgiven after having momentarily succumbed to a fever.

But really, the institutions are okay, and the people still believe in democracy in their hearts.

But I do know that events are being propelled by one man’s damaged psyche. History does not record many cases in which a power-mad leader careening toward tyranny suddenly regained his senses and became more moderate.

See? No one else in frame. No lackeys. No institutional agendas. No long assault on the judiciary to facilitate this takeover. No discussions of illiberal democracy and wishing for a Red Caesar. It's all one madman dragging everyone else with him.

It’s interesting, but I realise I don’t really have favourites. I read the arguments of the various commentators, and sometimes I think they’re worthwhile, and sometimes not. Quite frequently, people with whom I’ve deeply disagreed on other subjects say things I think are worth considering, or a hopeful sign from commentators who might influence a constituency with whom I very much disagree (like David Frum), and I take some comfort in that.

I've been thinking about this a bit. Definitely one of those chacun son gout sort of thing, but Snarki's observation twigged why I don't like Bobo, which is that everything seems to be in service of defending a GOP position and every observation seems to be linked to that.

It reminds me of the banning of Tacitus/Trevino from here. IIRC, he accused _Edward of promoting Islam when he quoted a Saudi cleric on some point. But (again iirc), the final step was when he came in under a different name to participate and try and put the same point across. As cleek mentioned, back in the day, he was part of the thrust and parry of the site, but there are (or at least were) norms and pretending to be someone else was a step too far. I feel like the site was proven right when he found a job that had him playing up the sodomy charges against Anwar Ibrahim because the government wanted him out of the picture. (and in a bizarre turn, Anwar Abrahim ended up forming a coalition with the guy who tried to throw him in prison and is now the current PM)

Now, Brooks hasn't pretended to be someone else, but that unerring ability to land on a GOP friendly position suggests that what he says is driven by considerations outside of what I would think are important.

wj's response to Brooks's ritual performance of balance calls to mind one of the books I read early in my Ph.D. studies when I was building my Media Studies chops: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, by Alexander Galloway. The central idea there being that what makes the modern networked world continue to function is not deregulation, nor is it centralization - it's the informal and changeable rules that negotiate the conflicts between those two poles, which Galloway identifies as protocol.

In the US, that protocol was largely a function of what we call The Deep State. Congress makes laws. Private citizens make products. The Market exists as a fluctuating hologram of the shifting dynamics between those two. The Deep State oversees the negotiations between those two in order to steer the overall system and keep it functioning within acceptable parameters for both sides. (His digital analogy for this is the system of protocols that allowed TCP/IP to work with the DNS system to facilitate information exchange.

Galloway was, like most of the Media Studies people writing in the moment between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, a bit of a utopian technolibertarian. He did point out that the authoritarian nature of DNS
allows whole realms of the Web to be blacked out with the flip of a switch, but the belief was that those things would self-correct as protocol adjusted to keep the system moving.

We are living in the moment when protocol has been destroyed in order to prevent the system from moving to preserve the privilege of the powerful. Without the federal bureaucracy, and with the legislative branch neutered, we have only the executive and the judicial, operating top-down with no negotiation.

Anyway, thought I'd mention the book in case any of the (more) tech savvy (than me) here wanted to find it and take a look.

>I remember him saying that Trump was ‘the most consequential president in our lifetime’

i've been thinking the same thing.

if you disregard the direction of the things he's done and only focus on their magnitude, it's hard to say he hasn't changed far more than anyone since FDR. the problem is that all he's done is negative.

also, re Tacitus the blogger - he's a reason a few of us are here. back in the mists, his blog was a place where people could try to seriously discuss things (the Iraq invasion being the primary thing). and a lot of the early ObWi crowd were also Tacitus regulars. there was even interlinking. some of us followed those regulars from Tacitus to ObWi. for a while, Travino seemed like one of the sane Republicans. he grew out of it.

Thanks for the David Brooks link, though let me rag on it a bit. I wish he had spent a little less time the previous 2 years claiming that everyone who was pointing out the direction this clown car was rolling had their hair on fire and a little more time putting up some resistance, even if only by observing it in a column or at a speaking event. I remember him saying that Trump was 'the most consequential president in our lifetime', which sounds a lot like the sentence in the reference letter "When you come to know him as we know him, you will appreciate him as we appreciate him."

The column has Brooks going back to Tacitus, but it would have been nice if he invoked Tacitus to discuss some other points of the MAGA movement, perhaps noting after one of those circle jerk cabinet meetings that 'Flatterers are the worst kind of enemies' or, in considering the whole cult of MAGA "In their ignorance they called it culture, when it was part of their enslavement."

Brooks has spent a lot of time claiming that the judiciary would ultimately function to stop Trump and that what people should do is stay at their desks. He's still playing the same games when he says

And no, I don’t think America is headed toward anything like a Rome-style collapse. Our institutions are too strong, and our people, deep down, still have the same democratic values.

I think in response to the line about how everyone needed to stay at their desks, Jamelle Bouie said that this is really hard when the desk is being sold for parts. (I hope you can post Bouie's reply to Brooks, he's weighed in a few times in response, I think, and I'm sure that it will be worth reading)

Battle hardened vets on the blog can also note that Tacitus was the nom de blog of one Josh Trevino (the tilde over the n came later), who got into some problems with editorials on Malaysian politics, but, like a bad penny, pops up again and again. I understand that one can't blame the original Tacitus for the sins of the nouveau Tacman, but I have to wonder about the connection in Brooks' mind. The Tacitus quote "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws" embodies one notion that has gotten us into this mess, so a little reflection might be in order from Brooks, though that is not his strong suit.

Again, apologies for ragging on the article, but as you note, Brooks is certainly not a favorite of mine.

OK, on lj's formulation that this thread is about American reaction (as opposed to foreign reaction) to Trump, this is David Brooks in today's NYT. I know he is not any kind of favourite on ObWi, but since it is decades since I read Tacitus I was very struck by this:

Tacitus was especially good at describing the effect the tyrant has on the people around him. When the tyrant first takes power, there is a “rush into servitude” as great swarms of sycophants suck up to the great man. The flattery must forever escalate and grow more fawning, until every follower’s dignity is shorn away. Then comes what you might call the disappearance of the good, as morally healthy people lie low in order to survive. Meanwhile, the whole society tends to be anesthetized. The relentless flow of appalling events eventually overloads the nervous system; the rising tide of brutality, which once seemed shocking, comes to seem unremarkable.

As the disease of tyranny progresses, citizens may eventually lose the habits of democracy — the art of persuasion and compromise, interpersonal trust, an intolerance for corruption, the spirit of freedom, the ethic of moderation. “It is easier to crush men’s spirits and their enthusiasm than to revive them,” Tacitus wrote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/23/opinion/trump-authoritarian-power.html?unlocked_article_code=1.G1A.6RhQ.aLVPTM4t9pmB&smid=url-share

I keep thinking of it as Trump's Bored of Peace. Because he certainly does seem to be. Who needs peace, as long as he's got a supply of "losers" (whether ICE thugs or the US military) to do the fighting and dying for him.

Sorry, I didn't know we were discussing the very same thing on two threads, this and the Moral Insanity one! I must say, I think the name of that one is perfectly appropriate.

I’m sure you can imagine, even if you haven’t seen them, the responses ricocheting around the world from former servicemen to Trump’s and Hegseth’s comments.

All the worse given tRump's phantom bone spurs. The f**king gall...

Meanwhile, talking of Moral Insanity, this is an extract from The Critic. I don't agree with the entirety of the piece (fairly reflexively anti-Europe), but you can't disagree with this:

Trump’s latest insult was to sneer that non-American troops who served in Afghanistan “stayed a little back”. This ignobly underplays the sacrifices of thousands of coalition troops — including those of 457 Britons who died — and is being received with outrage online. Actually, I am not sure I have ever seen such bipartisan condemnation.

Something else that Trump said seemed almost worse, though. “We’ve never needed them,” he said, dismissively, of his NATO allies. Now, I actually agree that the US didn’t “need” NATO support in 2001. It didn’t need to embark on a foolish and destructive war in Afghanistan, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people before the Taliban simply took control again. But it certainly claimed to need a “worldwide coalition”. So, if anything, Trump should be apologetic rather than dismissive. He is sneering at people for not sacrificing enough for the sake of American hubris.

Given that, for example, coalition casualties in Afghanistan in response to 9/11 included:

USA 7.96 deaths per million of population
Denmark 7.82 deaths per million of population
UK 7.25 deaths per million of population

I'm sure you can imagine, even if you haven't seen them, the responses ricocheting around the world from former servicemen to Trump's and Hegseth's comments. One I've just seen from someone called Andrew Fox, alongside a picture of a chestful of medals, says

I always thought it was super nice of the Americans to give me that badge for “staying a little off” from the front lines.

It’s nice to be appreciated!

American friends, especially my former brothers in arms - I’m sorry your President shames you daily. You deserve better.

"Ve haf vays of making you (look like) cry(ing)"
Our agentz are sooo tuff, that ve can make the worst of the worst (certainly all members of Friends of Antigua) look like frightened old n-word ladies. Gif us moor time and ve make them look like toddlers and infants next. Ve haf az of jet not decided whether to add or remove bullet holes buy our magick Ey-Aye.