AFTERMATHS: He's been found guilty of 34 crimes!

MONDAY, JUNE 3, 2024

Aftermaths can be a [-----]: "The world is too much with us," William Wordsworth famously said, in a poem of the same name.

Here's the way the poem starts:

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers...

We've never studied the poem in question, but so the poem begins.

Within the past week, we've often thought of that famous opening line. We continue to think that we, as a nation, have allowed the specific events of the Donald Trump Era to be (way) "too much with us."

We continue to think that we could gain by stepping back from the press of immediate events—by trying to see our present circumstance within a wider context. For a bit of human context, we've been discussing the events which were described in the western world's first "poem of war."

Today, as we start our first week in the wake of last Thursday's guilty verdicts, we turn to that famous  poem again, pondering this possible conclusion:

Aftermaths can be very hard! That's the lesson we'd take away, at this time, from that first famous poem. 

The poem ends with the burial of Hector, the noblest defender of Troy. After Hector is slain by Achilles and dragged through the dust, the fall of Troy is inevitable.

The subsequent fall of Troy isn't described in the Iliad. But every Greek citizen knew the story of that brutal aftermath.

For starters, the aftermath was quite unpleasant, even for some of the conquering Achaeans! How about Agamemnon, lord of men? The leading authority on the matter describes the fate which awaited the lord of men:

Agamemnon

In Greek mythology, Agamemnon was a king of Mycenae who commanded the Achaeans during the Trojan War. He was the son (or grandson) of King Atreus and Queen Aerope, the brother of Menelaus, the husband of Clytemnestra, and the father of Iphigenia, Iphianassa, Electra, Laodike, Orestes and Chrysothemis. 

Legends make him the king of Mycenae or Argos, thought to be different names for the same area. Agamemnon was killed upon his return from Troy by Clytemnestra, or in an older version of the story by Clytemnestra's lover, Aegisthus.

[...]

After a stormy voyage, Agamemnon and Cassandra land in Argolis, or, in another version, are blown off course and land in Aegisthus's country. Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's wife, has taken Aegisthus, son of Thyestes, as a lover. When Agamemnon comes home he is slain by Aegisthus (in the oldest versions of the story) or by Clytemnestra. According to the accounts given by Pindar and the tragedians, Agamemnon is slain in a bath by his wife alone, after being ensnared by a blanket or a net thrown over him to prevent resistance.

In Homer's version of the story in the Odyssey, Aegisthus ambushes and kills Agamemnon in a feasting hall under the pretense of holding a feast in honor of Agamemnon's return home from Troy. Clytemnestra also kills Cassandra. 

When the lord of men returned from Troy, he quickly met his end.

We'll explain the references to Cassandra below. First, a few more aftermaths:

Odysseus, the wily tactician, endures a remarkable ten-year journey back to his native Ithaka after Troy has fallen. His journey is the subject of the Odyssey, the (violence-strewn) "poem of homecoming" which followed the earlier "poem of war."

Aftermaths were difficult even for some of the victors! For the defeated Trojans, the aftermath of the fall of Troy was more difficult still.

Hector was the son of Troy's King Priam. In the various books of the Iliad, we meet Hector, the poem's noblest figure, and his wife Andromache and their darling baby son. 

The aftermath was brutal for this entire family. In his Introduction to Robert Fagles' 1990 translation of the Iliad, Bernard Knox describes that aftermath: 

[T]he death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city. 

The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history, immortalized in lyric poetry, in tragedy, on temple pediments and painted vases, to reinforce the stern lesson of Homer's presentation of the war: that no civilization, no matter how rich, no matter how refined, can long survive once it loses the power to meet force with equal or superior force.

The Iliad ends before these events occur. But Greeks all knew where the story led:

The kindly King Priam was "butchered at the altar." Cassandra, Hector's sister, was "raped in the temple."

Hector's darling son was thrown from the walls of Troy to his death. And Andromache, his loyal wife, was dragged off to slavery, exactly as Hector had prophesied much earlier in the poem. 

Meanwhile, why was Cassandra mentioned in connection with the murder of Agamemnon? Once again, we turn to the leading authority: 

Cassandra

Cassandra or Kassandra in Greek mythology was a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecies but never to be believed...

Cassandra was a daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy. Her elder brother was Hector, the hero of the Greek-Trojan War. 

[...]

In Homer's work, Cassandra is mentioned a total of four times "as a virgin daughter of Priam, as bewailing Hector's death, as chosen by Agamemnon as his slave mistress after the sack of Troy, and is killed by Clytemnestra over Agamemnon's corpse after Clytemnestra murders him on his return home."

Cassandra faced a horrible aftermath—a disgraceful aftermath as judged by modern norms. 

After the fall of Troy, the lord of men chose Cassandra to serve "as his slave mistress." Later in its account of her story, the leading authority goes into a bit more detail:

Once Troy had fallen, Cassandra was taken as a pallake (concubine) by King Agamemnon of Mycenae. While he was away at war, Agamemnon's wife, Clytemnestra, had taken Aegisthus as her lover. Cassandra and Agamemnon were later killed by either Clytemnestra or Aegisthus. Various sources state that Cassandra and Agamemnon had twin boys, Teledamus and Pelops, who were murdered by Aegisthus.

Agamemnon and his innocent "slave mistress" were killed upon his return. The twin boys were murdered too. Enormous impulses to violence and other forms of aggression are present in these early records of human behavior.

For the record, when Odysseus finally makes it home, he has to drive a bunch of suitors away from Penelope, his loyal, long-suffering wife. 

With the help of his son and two associates, he manages to kill all the suitors. According to the leading authority, "[his son] also hangs twelve of their household maids whom Eurycleia identifies as guilty of betraying Penelope or having sex with the suitors."

We humans were a harshly punitive bunch back then. At any rate, so went the aftermath of the siege of Troy, even for one of the victors.

Aftermaths can be brutal, even for those who have emerged as the victors in some episode. We've thought of this as we've wondered, this past week, about where those 34 guilty verdicts might lead our struggling nation.

Where might those guilty verdicts lead? In this morning's New York Times, Norman Eisen recommends prison time for the fallen Trump.

In a corresponding guest essay, Nancy Gertner disagrees.  At the end of her essay, Gertner offers this:

GERTNER (6/3/24): [T]he bottom line is this: The factors pointing to imprisonment are outweighed by Mr. Trump’s unique position. Justice Merchan pulled his punches in imposing fines, not detention, for Mr. Trump’s repeated violations of his court orders. Anyone else would have been jailed. Mr. Trump no doubt will be treated differently—that is, less harshly—than other criminal defendants in our extraordinarily punitive criminal legal system. But we shouldn’t equalize the treatment of defendants by ramping up everyone’s punishment. Our criminal legal system is far too retributive and leans too heavily on imprisonment, no matter what the crime. Besides, Mr. Trump is different, because he was president and could become president again.

You rarely see major figures say that, as a general matter, our legal system is "extraordinarily punitive"—that it's "far too retributive and leans too heavily on imprisonment, no matter what the crime."

In Blue America, we tend to pick and choose the circumstances in which we offer such judgements. 

That said, will Donald J. Trump be sent to prison? Should Blue America seek that outcome? Could that outcome be wise?

We wonder about the aftermath—about the possible whirlwind—which might emanate from the instincts we see taking general hold within our own self-impressed Blue America tribe.

As a general matter, we're sorry that this particular criminal case was ever brought at all. As we've explained in the past, it seems to us that this prosecution sought to discourage the wrong type of behavior.

That said, what might the aftermath of those guilty verdicts be? In Blue America, major journalists continue to struggle just to define or describe the 34 crimes in question here. In Red America, anger grows as Blue America struggles forward in such unusual ways.

What might the aftermath of this remarkable matter be? Are we possibly "laying waste to our powers" as we continue to head down the punishment road?

We'll ponder such questions this week. It seems to us that judgment can often be quite poor over here within our own tribe.

Judgment can be poor within all tribes. Also this:

Aftermaths can be a real [-----]. Could some such thing happen here?

Tomorrow: Can anyone here play this game?