PEOPLE: Troy fell during a Brone Age war!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2024

Our war involves (mis) information: Below, we'll show you something Greg Gutfeld said on red tribe cable last night.

One hour before the gentleman spoke, we saw Rachel Maddow deliver a beautifully reasoned, hour-long broadcast on our own tribe's "cable news" channel.

For us, the brilliance of Maddow's presentation came very, very late in a less impressive, 15-year game. We'll get to that as the days roll by—but last night's program excelled.

At any rate, the people who people these warring battalions are demographically distinct. That said, they constitute two of the major armies currently arrayed in the field as the siege of the Biden White House enters its final year.

At times like this, we often think of Carlotta Valdes, the character in Hitchcock's widely-praised Vertigo who occasionally seizes Kim Novak's soul. At those time, the Novak character mournfully recalls all the human destruction and death which have gone before.

It seems to us that there's a lot we contemporary people can learn from those earlier human wars. There are things we can learn about ourselves as people—about the impulses driving our conduct in the course of this current war.

That said:

To the extent that it actually happened, the fall of Troy was part of a Bronze Age war. The leading authority on that age describes that era in the manner shown:

Bronze Age

The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting from approximately 3300 BCE to 1200 BCE. Characterized by the use of bronze, the use of writing in some areas, and other features of early urban civilization, the Bronze Age is the second principal period of the three-age system proposed in 1836 by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen for classifying and studying ancient societies and history. It is also considered the second phase of three, in the Metal Ages.

An ancient civilization is deemed to be part of the Bronze Age if it either produced bronze by smelting its own copper and alloying it with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or traded other items for bronze from producing areas elsewhere. Bronze is harder and more durable than other metals available at the time, allowing Bronze Age civilizations to gain a technological advantage.

"A technological advantage" accrued to those engaged in Bronze Age war. This brings us to sacred Homer's Trojan War, which may or may not have occurred:

Trojan War

The Trojan War was a legendary conflict in Greek mythology that took place around the 12th or 13th century BCE. The war was waged by the Achaeans (Greeks) against the city of Troy after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology, and it has been narrated through many works of Greek literature, most notably Homer's Iliad...

The ancient Greeks believed that Troy was located near the Dardanelles and that the Trojan War was a historical event of the 13th or 12th century BC. By the mid-19th century AD, both the war and the city were widely seen as non-historical, but in 1868, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann met Frank Calvert, who convinced Schliemann that Troy was at what is now Hisarlik in Turkey. On the basis of excavations conducted by Schliemann and others, this claim is now accepted by most scholars.

Whether there is any historical reality behind the Trojan War remains an open question. Many scholars believe that there is a historical core to the tale, though this may simply mean that the Homeric stories are a fusion of various tales of sieges and expeditions by Mycenaean Greeks during the Bronze Age. Those who believe that the stories of the Trojan War are derived from a specific historical conflict usually date it to the 12th or 11th century BC, often preferring the dates given by Eratosthenes, 1194–1184 BC, which roughly correspond to archaeological evidence of a catastrophic burning of Troy VII, and the Late Bronze Age collapse.

Carlotta Valdes is speaking to us as we read that passage. That said, what in the world was "the Late Bronze Age collapse?" The authority riddles it thusly:

Late Bronze Age collapse

The Late Bronze Age collapse was a time of widespread societal collapse during the 12th century BC, between c. 1200 and 1150, and was associated with environmental change, mass migration, and destruction of cities. The collapse affected a large area of the Eastern Mediterranean (North Africa and Southeast Europe) and the Near East, in particular Egypt, eastern Libya, the Balkans, the Aegean, Anatolia, and, to a lesser degree, the Caucasus. It was sudden, violent, and culturally disruptive for many Bronze Age civilizations, and it brought a sharp economic decline to regional powers, notably ushering in the Greek Dark Ages.

The palace economy of Mycenaean Greece, the Aegean region, and Anatolia that characterized the Late Bronze Age disintegrated, transforming into the small isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark Ages, which lasted from around 1100 to the beginning of the better-known Archaic age around 750 BC....

So it went among the palace economies of the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age collapse. To the extent that it may have occurred, the fall of Troy is listed as part of that widespread societal failure.

At any rate, Troy fell as part of a Bronze Age war. It was fought on the wide plains outside Troy with death-dealing Bronze Age weapons—with weapons that tore human flesh.

It was fought in hand-to-hand combat, with bodies of the dead dragged behind chariots, as was the norm at the time. By way of contrast, the war we're fighting as part of the current siege of the Biden White House is a war of the (so-called) Information Age.

Our war is being fought through the weapons of information, though we'd be inclined to say that the term is routinely misused. More often, this war is being fought with misinformation or disinformation—with claims that are misleading. flatly false or absurdly fanciful, with claims that are meant to distract or mislead or confuse.

Our modern information war is also fought with the coarsest possible insults. Last night, on the Fo News Channel's Gutfeld! show, a certain 59-year-old man was quickly describing President Biden in the following way:

"An ice cream eating cadaver that farts dust."

So he said at 10:03 p.m., in his opening "monologue." 

Earlier, at 10:02, this 59-year-old manchild had told his several million viewers what Hillary Clinton is possibly thinking, now that President Biden has been assessed even more unfavorably in this new ABC / Ipsos survey:

Maybe she's thinking, though, thinking that she can replace Biden once Gavin Newsom and Michelle Obama kill themselves.

The fantasy that Michelle Obama will replace President Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket is constantly fed to red tribe viewers on Fox. In this case, the fallen man / boy who sits on the throne of this primetime "cable news" program added the image of Newsome and Obama, dead at their own hands.

All in all, there is nothing this channel won't put on its air, no image too coarse, ill-advised or unseemly to consider:

"An ice cream eating cadaver that farts dust!" In all honesty, Maddow once came approached this level of conduct, back in the Tea Party days, over the course of six programs spread across two separate weeks.

We thought she showed extremely poor judgment at that point in time; Jon Stewart chastised her for what she'd done. On the whole, though, the people who people our blue tribe's channel, Maddow certainly included, don't stoop to that remarkably low level. 

(It's also true that our higher new org simply ignore such red tribe conduct. By now, Gutfeld's conduct has been thoroughly normalized. It happens off there, in a forbidden zone "somewhere [high end journalists] have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience.") 

The world will be a better place if Greg Gutfeld can ever make himself better. That said, he's being rewarded for what he does, and what he does helps propel an enormously restive red army.

The warring groups on our red and blue channels are demographically distinct groups of people. They can be thought of Broadsheet Nation versus Tabloid Nation, even as Ivy League Nation versus Less "Highly Educated" Nation, though Gutfeld himself is a graduate of Berkeley.

On the plains outside the walls of Troy, Achilles sent Hector to the House of Death using Bronze Age weapons. The potent weapons we're using today are entirely different in form, and the groups of people we see on cable are demographically distinct.

That new survey from ABC seems to say that the red tribe people are winning. We will continue to ask you this question:

Why do you think that is?

Tomorrow: Chris Hayes is a good, decent person. Does he watch red cable?