We need to learn to see ourselves!

MONDAY, APRIL 8, 2024

To see our own conduct more clearly: You're right! We continue to lead with an unconventional theme, based on this improbable bromide:

Everything We Ever Needed to Know We Could Have Learned from Reading The Iliad

As we explained last week, this bromide is patterned on Robert Fulghum's big best-seller from 1988, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. 

That gentleman learned from kindergarten. We'll go with an ancient poem of war. Our basic view is this:

We Americans—we citizens of Blue America as well as Red—badly need to step outside our current political context to see ourselves (and our behaviors) as we and they actually are. The madnesses of our present state can all be found in that ancient text—and Book Nine, The Embassy to Achilles, is one of the poem's most compelling.

At one point, Agamemnon, lord of men, confesses that he has been gripped by a type of madness for the previous nine years. At present, we see madnesses wherever we look on the American political and journalistic stage—and no, these madnesses are not confined to the obvious nutcases and flyweights who are floating around in some of the major leadership cadres of our current Red America.

As a minor aside, some episodes in The Iliad seem to be torn right from our own modern history. When Odysseus and Ajax beg Achilles to return to the field of battle in the endless siege against Troy, this is what the rage-filled warrior tells them. He's speaking of the blow to his honor occasioned by Agamemnon at the start of the poem:

And the swift runner Achilles answered warmly,
"Ajax. royal son of Telarnon. captain of armies,
all well said, after my own heart. or mostly so.
But my heart still heaves with rage
whenever I call to mind that arrogance of his—
how he mortified me, right in front of the Argives—
that son of Atreus treating me like some vagabond,
like some outcast stripped of all my rights."

One thinks of the way President Obama famously mocked Donald J. Trump at the 2011 Correspondents Dinner. 

In a series of inexcusable appearances on the Fox News Channel, Trump had begun establishing himself as king of the birthers. Obama humiliated him from the stage that night. For Frontline's treatment of the incident, you can just click here.

(CNN Business asked this question: "Was this the night Trump decided to run?")

Trump decided to run for the White House that night, or so some readers of the flight of birds have suggested or maintained. We don't know if that really happened. If so, the incident in question didn't turn out real well from the perspective of Blue America.

That isn't the sort of event from which we can draw the greatest improvement in self-awareness. But Trump was mortified "right in front of all the Argives," like the rage-filled, sulking Achilles thousands of years before him.

Our tribe's many smaller behaviors have had many other effects. Can we blues ever learn to see ourselves more clearly? 

In many ways, Red America's leadership cadres often behave as if they're out of their minds. How well have Blue America's cadres been functioning over here? 

Do we sometimes create a world where the even the most furious Reds—even the ranting Mark Levins—can't help being somewhat, even basically, right? We'll be exploring such questions this very week.

We need to see ourselves more clearly. Are some of our madnesses on dim display right there in that ancient war poem?