PROPHECY: That trial may have cost Donald Trump a few points!

THURSDAY, JUNE 19, 2024

Helen meets Stormy Daniels: For the record, the current prophecy won't be tested if President Biden wins re-election.

We refer to the prophecy widely advanced across the realm of Blue America—the prophecy according to which Donald J. Trump's return to the White House would produce an end to "our democracy."

Will President Biden win re-election this year? Without question, he certainly might!  In a new poll from Fox News, he's moved ahead of Candidate Trump by two points nationwide. 

That said, riddle us this. In that same detailed survey, substantial majorities of both parties made this declaration:

The future of democracy is "extremely important in deciding [their] vote for president." 

Democrats said it—but so did Republicans! Here are the actual numbers:

Percentage of respondents saying the future of democracy is "extremely important" in deciding their vote this year:
Democrats: 74%
Republicans: 64%

Republicans are saying it too! How about the percentage of voters saying that the future of democracy is "extremely important" or "very important?" Those numbers look like this:

Percentage of respondents saying the future of democracy is "extremely important" or "very important" in deciding their vote this year:
Democrats: 92%
Republicans: 86%

"Time passed, and now it seems, everybody's having that dream!" We're quoting the early Dylan there, but let's be clear:

In this case, that dream, and its attendant prophecies, may of course be accurate. More specifically, if Candidate Trump makes his way to the White House, it may turn out that "our democracy"—such as it is—will indeed be doomed, or at least will be badly impacted.

At any rate, everybody seems to be saying that "our democracy" hangs in the balance. As to what we the people mean by that, this lengthy report by Fox News offers a bit of detail:

Three in 10 voters say debate performance will be extremely important to their vote for president, and by a 5-point margin more think Trump will win next week’s debate. A few more Democrats (9%) think Trump will win than Republicans (6%) say the same about Biden.  

The survey asks voters what comes to mind when they hear about threats to the future of American democracy and, by a wide margin, more think of the threats as the end of certain "rights and freedoms" than the end of "free and fair elections" (53%-30%), and that holds true among Democrats, Republicans and independents.  

By a 23-point margin, more think Hunter Biden’s gun trial (79%) was fair than Trump’s hush-money trial (56%). Four percent say Hunter’s conviction led them to change their support in the presidential race toward Trump or a third-party candidate, while 5% say Trump’s conviction caused a shift in their support to Biden or someone else.

Go figure! We the people believe all kinds of things. We're frequently willing to say those things if someone actually asks.

At any rate, Democrats fear for our democracy, but Republicans fear for it too. That said, the prophecy issued by Blue America's pundit class won't be tested if President Biden wins re-election. 

(If the president wins re-election, the rage of people like Steve Bannon will perhaps be tested instead. The shinola may start to hit the fan when the candidates battle next week.)

For ourselves, we have a greater personal affection for noble Hector's earlier prophecy—for the prophecy issued in Book Six of the Iliad, the western's world's first great work of literature.

The storytelling is brilliant and clear in that "poem of war." So is the nature of human concern at that point in time. 

Famously, that poem starts with "the rage of Achilles." In his introduction to the Robert Fagles 1990 translation, Professor Knox offers a concise account of Achilles' fury—of the rage which drives the fictional events which unfold in the twenty-four books of the poem.

As Professor Knox explains, the poem begins with a different prophecy. We apologize for one choice of words:

The incident that provoked Achilles' rage took place in the tenth and final year of the Achaean attack on Troy...The rage of Achilles—its cause, its course and its disastrous consequences—is the theme of the poem, the mainspring of the plot.

Chryses, a priest of Apollo, whose daughter has been carried off by the Achaeans in one of their raids, comes to the camp to ransom her. But she has been assigned, in the division of the booty, to the king who commands the Achaean army, Agamemnon, and he refuses to give her up. Her father prays for help to Apollo, who sends a plague that devastates the Achaean camp. 

Achilles, leader of the Myrmidons. one of the largest contingents of the Achaean army, summons the chieftains to an assembly. There they are told by the prophet Calchas that the girl must be returned to her father. Agamemnon has to give her up, but demands compensation for his loss. 

Achilles objects: let Agamemnon wait until more booty is taken. A violent quarrel breaks out between the two men, and Agamemnon finally announces that he will take recompense for his loss from Achilles, in the form of the girl Briseis, Achilles' share of the booty. 

For almost ten years, the invading Achaean armies have been waging a siege against the wealthy walled city of Troy. In this brief summary, Professor Knox describes one part of the "toxic masculinity" which lies at the heart of this ancient poem.

The word "booty" strikes us as profoundly unfortunate. More directly, the Achaeans have been raiding area villages, seizing girls and young women to be held as sexual slaves. 

The rage of Achilles is provoked when Agamemnon, lord of men—forced to surrender the young woman he has taken—announces that he is going to seizes Achilles' sexual slave instead.

Meanwhile, why have these lunatics spent ten years conducting a siege of Troy in the first place? The events in question lie outside the text of the Iliad, but Professor Knox offers this account of the original offense:

There are in the poem two human beings who are godlike, Achilles and Helen. One of them, Helen, the cause of the war, is so preeminent in her sphere, so far beyond competition in her beauty, her power to enchant men, that she is a sort of human Aphrodite. In her own element she is irresistible. Every king in Greece was ready to fight for her hand in marriage, but she chose Menelaus, king of Sparta. 

When Paris, the prince of Troy, came to visit, she ran off with him, leaving husband and daughter, without a thought of the consequences for others. Her willful action is the cause of all the deaths at Troy, those past and those to come. When she left with Paris she acted like a god, with no thought of anything but the fulfillment of her own desire, the exercise of her own nature. But when the Iliad opens she has already come to realize the meaning for others of her actions, to recognize that she is a human being. She criticizes herself harshly as she speaks to Priam...

Helen had been married to Menelaus—the son of Agamemnon and an Achaean prince. Ten years before the start of the Iliad, she decided to run off with Paris—a prince of Troy, one of King Priam's sons.

The loss of Helen was perceived as a blow to Achaean honor. The legion of lunatics down by the shore have been fighting and dying for almost ten years trying to get her back.

This was the sexual politics which lay at the heart of human striving at the dawn of the west. Moving right along:

In the most recent poll from Fox, Candidate Trump may have lost a few points in the wake of his criminal trial in New York. That trial turned on the claim that he had engaged in consensual sex, on one occasion in 2006, with a woman who wasn't his wife—with our own struggling nation's top "porn star."

If we squint a bit and tilt our head, we think we see a certain similarity between these two stories:

Way back when, the Achaeans were willing to fight and die over control of Helen. Thousands of years later, we Blues were willing to say that we needed to hear Stormy Daniels tell her story—share "her truth"—about that one consensual event before we could know how to vote in the 2016 election.

The fate of our democracy, such as it is, may now turn on that ridiculous claim. Our thought leaders in Blue America, such as they are, have been willing to advance that embarrassing claim, with no apparent sense of embarrassment, again and again and again in the course of the past year.

We think we hear a type of rhyme when we consider these two stories. When we hear the sounds of those rhymes, we almost start to think we see a type of truth behind the idea that we humans aren't mature enough, even now, to conduct a serious "democracy."

Back to Professor Knox:

In 1990, all those millennia later, he was oddly fashioning Helen's decision to run off with Paris as "the cause of all the deaths at Troy." The "willful action" of Paris himself came in for no such appraisal.

How far had our sexual politics come by the time that appraisal was offered? When Greek citizens heard the Iliad sung, they heard Helen herself offering that same appraisal. We start with "the old men of the realm" catching sight of the world's most beautiful woman in Book Three of the poem:

So they waited,
the old chiefs of Troy, as they sat aloft the tower.
And catching sight of Helen moving along the ramparts,
they murmured one to another, gentle, winged words:
"Who on earth could blame them? Ah, no wonder
the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered
years of agony all for her, for such a woman.
Beauty, terrible beauty! 
A deathless goddess—so she strikes our eyes!
But still,
ravishing as she is, let her go home in the long ships
and not be left behind, for us and our children
down the years an irresistible sorrow."

The old men blamed Helen for the years of agony; the noble King Priam did not. Addressing her as "dear child," he tells her he "holds the gods to blame for bringing this war upon me."

This is the kind of conduct which separates Trojan civilization from the toxicity down by the shore. That said, Helen has internalized a type of sexual politics:

And Helen the radiance of women answered Priam.
"I revere you so, dear father, dread you too—
if only death had pleased me then, grim death,
that day I followed your son to Troy, forsaking
my marriage bed, my kinsmen and my child,
my favorite, now full-grown,
and the lovely comradeship of women my own age.
Death never came, so now I can only waste away in tears..."

Helen assails herself, even more sharply, at other points in the poem. Right here, at the dawn of the west, a certain familiar sexual politics seems to be in play.

In our view, a certain "hall of mirrors" connection links our embrace of Stormy Daniels to the ten-year siege of Troy. Today, as then, it almost strikes us this way:

In the end, the only thing we humans actually care about is the question of who gets access to the women. 

We don't need no stinking "issues." In the end, we only care about matters like that. 

So it went in the siege of Troy, but also in the silly, embarrassing criminal charges lodged against Donald J. Trump. So it went in the ludicrous claim that we needed to know if he had engaged in consensual sex, on that one occasion ten years before, before we could know how to vote.

Red America's thought leaders are routinely just this side of insane. But it seems to us, if you know how to squint, that Blue America's vaunted thought leaders are a giant embarrassment too.

How did we ever reach this place? Also, who has been more ridiculous in the past forty years, Red thought leaders or Blue?

Tomorrow: "A [democracy], if you can keep it."