the daily howler

WEDNESDAY: Angry fellow makes accusations!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2026

The rage of Kennedy Junior: Dana Bash and Bobby Kennedy never got on the same track on Sunday morning's State of The Union. The first apparent misstatement arrived right away—and it came from Kennedy Junior:

BASH (8/2/26): You have been placing nearly all the blame on the Covid pandemic and the way that the U.S. responded to it squarely with Dr. Fauci. But, of course, he worked for President Trump. Does President Trump also deserve some of the blame?
KENNEDY: Well, President Trump, as you recall, wanted to end the lockdowns. I think the thing that did the most damage to our country was the lockdowns, lockdowns that shut down 3.5 million businesses in our country with no due process, no just compensation, all of our churches, closed our schools, and our children are still paying the price for that. And yet we had the worst outcome of any country in the world.

We had the worst outcome of any country? That seemed to be a misstatement. (To watch the whole session, click here.)

Bash asked him to explain his statement. But now, the first non sequitur arrived, and this time it came from Bash:

BASH (continuing directly): How so?

KENNEDY: We have the highest death rate from Covid of any nation on Earth.

BASH: Well, let me just say, because I have heard you say that before on the death rate from Covid. That's not accurate, because public health experts say that there is a combination of factors that went into that—higher rates of chronic illnesses, which I know you would agree with, gaps to our health care system, and misinformation about vaccines.

Experts say "a combination of factors went into" the American death rate? Assuming that's true, in what way would that mean that Kennedy's claim was inaccurate?

Kennedy noticed the problem. He proceeded to repeat his claim—a claim which seems to be bogus:

KENNEDY (continuing directly): You just said what I said was inaccurate. What I said was accurate. We had the highest death rate from COVID of any—
(CROSSTALK)
BASH: Well, there are other countries that had higher. But go ahead.

For the record, Worldometer lists thirteen countries with higher death rates from Covid, several with much higher rates. The U.S. is listed with the highest death rate among comparable developed nations, but that isn't what Kennedy said, and the U.K. wasn't real far behind.

Ninety seconds into the interview, the pair were off to a shaky start—and for what wouldn't be the last time, the transcript now said CROSSTALK.

Within moments, Kennedy Junior proceeded to this apparent howler:

KENNEDY: Anthony Fauci was mismanaging the COVID pandemic and was doing it under the Biden administration. President Trump wanted to end the lockdowns.
And, in fact, in Anthony Fauci's diaries, he talks about how President Trump is calling him every day, trying to get him to reopen the country.
BASH: Yes, well, the lockdowns were done by governors. I mean, certainly, Anthony Fauci and the president had opinions, but the lockdowns were done by governors, and largely because—and largely because they were hearing from hospitals saying that their ICUs were overrun and they needed some help while that was happening.
(CROSSTALK)
KENNEDY: Well, that's not true. Dana, that's just not true.
BASH: It is true.
KENNEDY: What you're saying is not true. No, they were doing it because Anthony Fauci was telling them from the top, you need to lock down. There were ICUs that were empty all over the country, including in New York at the height.

In fairness, he didn't say that ICUs were empty "all over New York City." But even as Bash may perhaps have seemed to be "telling not asking," he now issued a statement which has been widely assailed in the fact-checks of his session with Bash.

Did the rage of Achilles trigger events which eventually led to the fall of Troy? This interview was soon dominated by the accusations and insults Kennedy aimed at Bash. This is where it began:

BASH: Again, I really want to move on. But you were saying you were—
KENNEDY: Of course you want to move on—
BASH: Yes, I do.
KENNEDY: —because you were part of the problem.
BASH: No, I wasn't part of the problem.
KENNEDY: There was absolute press malpractice. You weren't allowing—your job—
(CROSSTALK)
BASH: Mr. Secretary, your job—
KENNEDY: Your job is a fierce skepticism toward authority.
BASH: OK. Yes, I am. I am.
KENNEDY: And you weren't doing that. You were beating up on people who were dissenting.

No example was given there. Soon, jabbing his finger and raising his voice, Kennedy heatedly moved to this:

KENNEDY: You're just— You're talking nonsense. You're making assertions you can't support, and then when I call you on them, you're telling me I'm arguing with you.
BASH: OK, do you want to talk about you want to talk about assertions that you can't support? I will get there in a second.
Let me just say, for the record, that I am not saying that the entire way that the Covid reaction was accurate. It was a scary time, and people made mistakes, absolutely. Let me finish.
KENNEDY: You were scaring people.
BASH: Why are you saying that?
KENNEDY: Because that was the job of CNN—
BASH: OK. OK, stop.
KENNEDY: .—was to put the chyrons up about many people are dying to get people to comply.

CNN had misbehaved when it reported death totals! Before long, it was on to fuzzy claims about a possible link between vaccines and autism, with this exchange taking place:

KENNEDY: Dana, you probably don't understand this because you're not a scientist.
BASH: Well, you're not either.

Each statement was accurate. Of course, news broadcasters aren't supposed to be scientists or economist or even "education experts." Ideally, they should know how to interview and question such specialists, but before long the exercised Kennedy seemed to be criticizing Bash even for doing that:

KENNEDY: All you know how to do is repeat things that people told you and say, trust the experts. That's what you did during Covid.
Now we know that Anthony Fauci, who was the expert, was lying about everything—about masks, about the social distancing, about natural immunity, about the transmission from the vaccine, about the source of Covid.
He was lying, and you were punishing people for not trusting the experts. And now you're rolling out the experts again—
BASH: Yes.
KENNEDY: —to talk about something that you have no personal knowledge of.
BASH: OK. Well, guess what? That is my job to talk to people.
KENNEDY: Your job is to tell the truth to the American public—
BASH: Am I allowed to talk? Yes, yes. And my job is to get as much information as I can.

Bash is still interviewing medical experts, the angry Kennedy said!

For the record, "we" don't know that Dr. Fauci "was lying about everything." In the course of Kennedy's manic behavior, he made no attempt to demonstrate the existence of any such act of misconduct. But so this useless interview proceeded, driven by the rage of Robert Kennedy Junior.

Kennedy made some plainly accurate statements during the session. In our view, Bash did seem to be a bit over-protective of official government procedures during the Covid years.

That said, the rage of Kennedy was active, early and often, during this useless session.

The rage of MAGA is visible all through the halls of the Fox News Channel. It was also visible as Kennedy raised his voice and wagged his finger, interrupted and made accusations all through this tribute to the dangers of our failing nation's destructive tribal procedures.

RAGE: Homer made it easy to see!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2026

The New York Times won't go there: As far as we know, there was no historical Homer. There wasn't even a Homer Price, he of the doughnut machine.

(That Homer lived in a different time: "It [was] America laughing at itself with a broad and genial humanity....")

There was a Homer Parrish in The Best Years of Our Lives (Best Picture, 1946), "the highest-grossing film in the United States since the release of Gone with the Wind." In one of that film's most memorable scenes, his next-door sweetheart since childhood convinces him that of course she will, and of course she does, still love him despite the wounds he has brought back from the war.

That portrait of classic (female) fidelity might perhaps recall the weaving and unweaving of Penelope in the poem which wasn't written by Homer, who apparently didn't exist:

Homer
Homer (possibly born c. 8th century BC) was an ancient Greek poet who is traditionally credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer was highly revered in ancient Greek society and is considered one of the most influential authors in history. Today, the question of Homer's identity and existence—dubbed the "Homeric Question"—continues to be debated, and scholars generally regard the two poems as the works of separate authors.
The Iliad centers on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles during the last year of the Trojan War...

However it may have been composed, the Iliad does indeed "center on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles" during the last year of that fictional war. It's the rage of Achilles which triggers the action, leading on to the fall of Troy.

Leading on to the fall of Troy.! We refresh you about that famous event, produced by a vast group rage:

Bernard Knox, Introduction to Robert Fagles translation
[...]
The 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...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.

Hector's sister unspeakably abused in the temple, with an old man butchered at the altar? Hector and Andromache's baby boy hurled to his death from the walls of the city?

So it went in the group rage which followed the slaying of the endlessly valiant Hector. In his continuing rage, Achilles drags Hector's body behind his chariot, through the dust, as Hector's parents watch from the walls. Or, as Mary Lefkowitz put it in the Washington Post:

It was [Homer] who first portrayed [women] in their important role as survivors and the continuers of the culture that the men sought in their violence to destroy.

Regarding the baby boy in question, here's one small part of the scene, high atop the city's walls, as Hector prepares to go off to battle earlier in the poem. Andromache is begging him not to go:

In the same breath, shining Hector reached down
for his son, but the boy recoiled,
cringing against his nurse's full breast,
screaming out at the sight of his own father,
terrified by the flashing bronze, the horsehair crest,
the great ridge of the helmet nodding, bristling terror
so it struck his eyes.

And his loving father laughed,
his mother laughed as well, and glorious Hector,
quickly lifting the helmet from his head,
set it down on the ground, fiery in the sunlight,
and raising his son he kissed him, tossed him in his arms,
lifting a prayer to Zeus and the other deathless gods.

[...]

So Hector prayed
and placed his son in the arms of his loving wife.
Andromache pressed the child to her scented breast,
smiling through her tears. Her husband noticed,
and filled with pity now, Hector stroked her gently
trying to reassure her, repeating her name...

We thought that memorable scene should be mentioned today.

The baby's loving parents laughed together at their baby boy's innocence. Loving parents and loving spouses were found inside the walls of Troy. Down by the shore it was different.

For the record, Hector returns from battle that day, succumbs to the rage of Achilles as the long poem nears its end. We emerge from these reveries with a curious type of question:

Is it possible? Is it possible that Homer, who largely didn't exist, tells the story of our nation's current circumstance with greater clarity than can be derived from the well-intentioned news reports found in the New York Times?

Just within the past week, we've seen the tribal rage of a group of Senate Republicans directed at the 85-year-old Anthony Fauci. As his colleagues prayed to the gods that Dr. Fauci might be imprisoned, the astonishing Senator Moreno was even inspired to say this:

Here I am sitting in front of you, six years later, saying "Who the fuck do you think you were for doing that?"

Yes, he actually said it! And there was the grisly Senator Hawley, engaged in such undisguised clowning as this:

HAWLEY (7/29/26): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, Doc? Let's try something:
What day of the week is it today?
[...]
What color tie are you wearing?
[...]
What color is the carpet in front of you?

TUESDAY: Translation is as translation does!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 4, 2026

Endless approaches to fury: The latest bizarre MAGA meltdown, this time involving the reflecting pool?

Reflections on the furious behavior of Secretary Kennedy on Sunday's State of The Union, complete with the kooky misstatements? Reflections on the pitiful way the kidz on The Five pretended he masterfully nailed it?

Please, dear God, no thanks! Instead, how about a passing bit of puzzlement concerning the nature of translation? How about something that doesn't involve mental illness and the refusal to talk about same?

Last Friday evening, we posted a tiny passage from Book IX of the Iliad, courtesy of Robert Fagles. Odysseus and two others have been dispatched by Agamemnon to try to reason with Achilles, who's sulking in his tents.

Achilles' capacity for fury takes us even beyond that of a certain sitting president. As the embassy approaches the warrior's tents, Fagles hands us this:

So Ajax and Odysseus made their way at once
where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag,
praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth
that they might bring the proud heart of Achilles
round with speed and ease.

For us, "where the breakers crash and drag" is an inexhaustible treasure. As a child, before we'd created our own disasters, we happened to summer right there!

"Praying hard to the god who moves and shakes the earth?" That has us trudging with the challenged pair as they approach their challenge.

We recently looked at the 1951 translation of that same passage by Richmond Lattimore. That's the translation we started with. This is what we found:

So these two walked along the strand of the sea deep-thundering
with many prayers to the holder and shaker of the earth,
that they might readily persuade the great heart of Aiakides.

Wow! That wouldn't have grabbed us at all. And that was all he wrote!

True story! When we lazily looked for a way to copy and paste the Lattimore text, up popped a book review in the Washington Post from September 15, 1990. Discussing the new translation by Fagles, Mary Lefkowitz started like this:

THE WRATH OF ACHILLES
HOMER: THE ILIAD Translated by Robert Fagles Introduction and Notes by Bernard Knox Viking. 683 pp. $35
FOR MORE than a thousand years the most popular book in the Greek-speaking world was Homer's Iliad. It was studied and quoted in 5th-century Athens. It was recited to crowds from Asia Minor at the great festival of Apollo at Delos. Centuries afterwards in remote outposts, it was read eagerly and even translated by people who knew Greek only as a second language.
No single work of literature has had such a pervasive influence on other writing, since it was from the story of Achilles's anger and its deadly consequences that the notion of the "tragic flaw" ultimately derives. It was from Homer that students learned the basic patterns of rhetoric (Achilles is a fine speaker) and came to know about the capricious and dangerous character of their gods. And it was Homer too that provided young people with their first cruelly realistic impressions of the nature of human life.
Perhaps surprisingly for those who now imagine that dead white males can write only about their own "values," over the years Homer's many audiences included women, since women (like men) of the propertied classes learned to read and write. It was he who first portrayed them in their important role as survivors and the continuers of the culture that the men sought in their violence to destroy. It is Homer also who portrays the Greeks and their Trojan enemies with equal sympathy, and who shows that, ultimately, victors can suffer losses as great as the defeated in a war. As such The Iliad deserves to keep its place on the list of the books that every educated person ought to read.

Achilles's anger and its deadly consequences! And then, so on from there.

Before long, Lefkowitz begins discussing the characteristics of several different translations. For her sample passage, this is the one she chose--and no, we aren't making this up:

Here, first in Lattimore's translation, are a few lines (182-84) from Iliad IX, the "book" (or papyrus book-roll) that was most people's favorite in antiquity. Agamemnon, leader of the Greek army, has decided to apologize for the quarrel he started with Achilles, and to make amends for it. He sends ambassadors to Achilles, who in his anger has withdrawn from the fighting; these are Achilles's old tutor, Phoenix, and two of Achilles's friends, the great heroes Ajax (or in Greek, Aias) and Odysseus.

So these two walked along the strand of the sea deep-thundering
with many prayers to the holder and shaker of the earth,
that they might readily persuade the great heart of Aiakides.

All in all, go figure! From there, she moves to the Robert Fitzgerald translation (1974), then on to Professor Fagles.

She describes the pros and cons of the three renditions. Regarding the Fagles translation of that passage, this is what she says:

Because I know what the original says, I am more comfortable with Lattimore. But Fagles' translation will be far more accessible to non-specialists because it can be understood straight off. And the Fagles version also offers Bernard Knox's concise and informative introduction, which even Lattimore loyalists ought to read.

So much for those Lattimore loyalists! Overall, her assessment of the Fagles effort was this:

Robert Fagles now offers a verse translation that explains what readers need to know, in clear, vigorous language that still retains a sense of the sweep and the sonority of the original.

For the record, $35 was a lot back then! All in all, you never know what you might find once you've decided to google.

(Not a word about mental illness! Indeed, "mental illness?" What's that?)

Since you asked: Fitzgerald speaks:

Following Phoenix,
Aias and Odysseus walked together
beside the tumbling clamorous whispering sea,
praying hard to the girdler of the islands
that they might easily sway their great friend's heart.

Aias is an alternate version of Ajax, as we all learn here.

RAGE: Dr. Fauci "killed millions of people?"

TUESDAY, AUGUST 4, 2026

Tommy Tuberville's rage: For better or worse—we'll guess for worse—the prevailing rage of the current era was directed at Dr. Fauci last week.

It was directed at him in a Senate hearing. That said, in certain essential ways, the story of this tribal fury had been told long before. We return to Book One of the Iliad, in which the disastrous rage of Achilles emerges.

As we noted yesterday, this is the way that story begins, as rendered by Robert Fagles in his 1990 translation:

BOOK ONE
The Rage of Achilles

Rage—Goddess. sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds.
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,
Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
What god drove them to fight with such a fury?

At this point, we're told about the first step toward the destructive rage which would eventually cost so many lives:

Agamemnon, lord of men, has stolen the daughter of a priest to Apollo to serve as his "slave." Now, the young woman's father has come to the Achaean camps to get his daughter back:

Yes. Chryses approached the Achaeans' fast ships
to win his daughter back, bringing a priceless ransom
and bearing high in hand, wound on a golden staff,
the wreaths of the god, the distant deadly Archer.
He begged the whole Achaean army but most of all
the two supreme commanders, Atreus' two sons,
"Agamemnon. Menelaus! All Argives geared for war!
May the gods who hold the halls of Olympus give you
Priam's city to plunder, then safe passage home.
Just set my daughter free, my dear one. Here,
accept these gifts, this ransom. Honor the god
who strikes from worlds away—the son of Zeus, Apollo!"

The priest was willing to let Troy be sacked if he could win his daughter back—his dear one.

The troops were inclined to respect the priest. But Agamemnon, lord of men, responded with one of his familiar rages:

And all ranks of Achaeans cried out their assent:
"Respect the priest, accept the shining ransom!"
But it brought no joy to the heart of Agamemnon.
The king dismissed the priest with a brutal order
ringing in his ears: "Never again, old man,
let me catch sight of you by the hollow ships!
Not loitering now, not slinking back tomorrow.
The staff and the wreaths of god will never save you then.
The girl--I won't give up the girl. Long before that,
old age will overtake her in my house, in Argas,
far from her fatherland. slaving back and forth
at the loom, forced to share my bed!
Now go,
don't tempt my wrath, and you may depart alive."

I won't give up the girl! Tragically, but familiarly, this is where European literature begins.

At any rate, Agamemnon has flown into one of his recurrent rages. As the famous poem continues, an old man walks away, terrified, though the story will hardly end there:

The old man was terrified. He obeyed the order,
turning, trailing away in silence down the shore
where the battle lines of breakers crash and drag. .
And moving off to a safe distance, over and over
the old priest prayed to the son of sleek-haired Leto,
lord Apollo...

Terrified, the priest walks away. But as the story continues, he continues to pray to Apollo, and a plague will soon descend on the Achaean camps.

We're looking here at a first act of rage. In this case, it's the rage of Agamemnon, commander of the Achaean forces. The death-dealing rage of Achilles hasn't been triggered yet.

That's how the Iliad starts. A similar scene was perhaps on display last week as Dr. Fauci, 85 years of age and a long-honored public servant, sat before a furious Senate committee.

Rage! Even as the hearing was taking place, Senator Tuberville (R-Alabama) was being interviewed by Newsmax. Justified or otherwise, he voiced the rage to which his Republican colleagues were giving voice inside the hearing room.

From 1999 through 2008, he'd been head coach at Auburn. Last Wednesday, rightly or wrongly, he turned from the chalkboard with this:

SENATOR TUBERVILLE (7/29/26): He should be locked up before he leaves this building today and put in prison, and then put on trial in front of the American people.
We lost twenty to thirty thousand people in Alabama alone, and I hope every one of them sues this Dr. Fauci—puts him in court.
If we can’t put him in prison, let’s put him in court every day for the rest of his life, where he where he has to be punished and listened to the death that he caused.
[...]
I promise you one thing, we will find out if there’s a possibility that we can bring him to Alabama, to put him in front of a court and a jury, to see if we can put this guy in prison. He killed millions of people, folks. I mean, this was a catastrophe.

Tuberville wanted Fauci sent to prison, then later put on trial. Along the way, he claimed that Dr. Fauci "killed millions of people."

In fairness, one claim was clearly true! The Covid pandemic was indeed a catastrophe. But sometimes, catastrophe can also emerge from acts of fury, not excluding acts of tribal rage.

Tuberville was speaking with Newsmax from the building where the hearing was taking place. The hearing was chaired by Senator Paul. Back in May, he had tweeted this:

SENATOR PAUL (5/7/26): He lied to Congress about NIH funding dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan and engaged in the worst cover-up in modern medical history. The American people want Fauci behind bars.

Do we the people really want Dr. Fauci behind bars? Surveys say the answer is no, but the fury has been general over the Republican caucus.

As we've suggested before:

It seems to us that we can possibly see ourselves more clearly, at this point, through the auspices of literature. The world is perhaps a bit too much with us, given the relentless madness of the present age.

The rage was general over the Republican senators who took part in last week's hearing. Many claims emerged from their fury, but did their furious statements make sense?

Tomorrow: Furious voices prevail

MONDAY: Morning Joe presents those crazy Truth Social posts!

MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2026

But also, those crazy claims: Yesterday, in a rare Sunday outing, we linked you to Mediaite's report about the sitting president's latest, rather unusual social media posts.

We refer to last weekend's rather peculiar Truth Social posts. Because the posts seemed rather strange, we used them as an occasion to ask a rather familiar question:

Is it possible that something is wrong with the sitting president?

That was the question we asked.

This morning, Morning Joe viewers were offered an unusual type of report by guest host Jonathan Lemire. At 7 o'clock Eastern, Lemire reported on those peculiar Truth Social posts.

This is what he said:

LEMIRE (8/3/26): For the second weekend in a row, President Trump posted a lot of AI-generated content on his social media site.
It was a bizarre range of slop posts, from him kissing a golden crucifix—there it is—to him in a white Elvis jumpsuit.
I mean, I think he looks great! And there's this one here, where he's walking next to a shackled [extraterrestrial] at a military base. I'm not sure what that one's about. Maybe it's a preview of an October surprise!
He also trolled Greenland in one post—there—then, minutes later, suggested that Venezuela would be the 51st state.
And, just like last weekend, the president posted a TRUMP 2028 image. So that was where the president's mindset was this weekend amid those terrible poll numbers.

For better or worse, insightfully or otherwise, Lemire took a lighthearted approach to this rather peculiar fare. As you can see by clicking that link, he treated it as a bit of a joke when the most powerful man on the planet spent time on the second consecutive weekend posting a "bizarre array" of social media content.

As for "those terrible poll numbers" mentioned by Lemire, that was a reference to a front-page "news analysis" piece in today's New York Times. As with the Truth Social images, so too here:

Peter Baker describes President Trump posting peculiar content:

NEWS ANALYSIS
Trump’s Polling Numbers Hit a New Low. Don’t Expect Him to Change Course.

After a spate of bad polls earlier this summer, President Trump simply declared that they were not true. “MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN,” he wrote on social media, using capital letters as if they would shout away any contrary data.
In fact, his real poll numbers are at or near the lowest they have ever been in some nonpartisan surveys. A flurry of new samples in recent days found that Mr. Trump is at the nadir of his presidency, with support from just around a third of Americans as a stalemated war in Iran and high gas prices take a political toll.

[...]

These kinds of poll numbers would throw a normal White House into panic mode, especially coming just three months before a midterm election...But Mr. Trump has never been a normal president, and he does not react to political circumstances in the same way his predecessors have. Through force of will and command over his MAGA base, he has traditionally played a weak hand strong.

It is, of course, hard to have a course correction if it is not entirely clear what the course was to begin with. The most impulsive president of modern times, Mr. Trump follows his instincts and can completely reverse himself by the day, or sometimes the hour.

As with Lemire, so too here. To our ear, Baker's tone conveys this assessment:

There's nothing whatever to look at here! The normalization's complete!

There's nothing to look at here! There's nothing to look at when a sitting president makes crazily inaccurate claims about his polling numbers.

Meanwhile, is the sitting president the most "impulsive" president in modern times? Does he have a tendency to reverse himself by the hour?

There's also nothing to look at there! When he behaves in these abnormal, erratic ways, that's just Trump being Trump!

Could something be wrong with President Trump? Possibly on the other hand, is the normalization complete?

RAGE: The Iliad was a poem of rage!

MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2026

But also, the rage of Senator Paul: Now that's we've all seen the film adaptation of the Odyssey, let's go all the way back to the start.

More specifically, let's return to the first few lines of the Iliad, the war poem which preceded the poem that's known as the Odyssey.

The Iliad was a war poem, but it was mainly a poem of rage. Or so said Professor Knox, in his Introduction to the 1990 translation by Robert Fagles:

THE ILIAD
'Iliad" is a word that means "a poem about Ilium" (i.e., Troy). and Homer's great epic poem has been known as "The Iliad" ever since the Greek historian Herodotus so referred to it in the fifth century B.C. But the title is not an adequate description of the contents of the poem, which are best summed up in its opening line: "the rage of Peleus' son Achilles."
The incident that provoked Achilles' rage took place in the tenth and final year of the Achaean attack on Troy, and though Homer does work into his narrative scenes that recall earlier stages of the war...the rage of Achilles—its cause, its course and its disastrous consequences—is the theme of the poem, the mainspring of the plot.

The rage of Achilles is the soul of the beast—and sure enough, the Iliad begins right there. These are the opening lines of the Fagles translation:

BOOK ONE
The Rage of Achilles

Rage—Goddess. sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds.
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.

Achilles' rage produced many lost lives. Just for the record, Agamemnon, lord of men, is also in a state of rage as European literature begins:

[continuing directly]
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed,

Agamemnon lord of men and brilliant Achilles.
What god drove them to fight with such a fury?

"Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto" drove the pair to fight with such fury, the poem now reveals. "Incensed at the king / he swept a fatal plague through the army—men were dying / and all because Agamemnon spurned Apollo's priest."

In the short run, Agamemnon's rage subsides. For reasons which remain instructive today, the rage of Achilles did not—and, after a period of sulking in his tents, his rage was redirected at the very existence of Troy.

As the Iliad begins, the rage of the two Achaeans (Greeks) leads them to fight each other with a fury. And even though the fall of Troy has not yet occurred as the Iliad ends, Professor Knox describes the furious conduct of the Achaeans when the sacred city finally succumbs.

Brilliant Achilles has slaughtered Hector, the prince of Troy. Building on ten years of tribal rage, that slaughter leads to this:

Introduction, Professor Knox
[...]
The 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...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 rage produced the unspeakable.

Hector's baby son, thrown from the battlements? His sister Cassandra, assaulted unspeakably in the temple? In fact, the murderous fury which follows from rage persists within this pair of ancient texts until the closing lines of the Odyssey, which we'll visit before the week is done.

European literature begins with the murderous conduct produced by fury, by rage. Last Wednesday, furious senators from Red America's MAGA world directed remarkable acts of fury at Dr. Anthony Fauci, who remains a highly respected figure within the world of Blue America.

Did Dr. Fauci do something wrong during the Covid years? Did he make such unwise policy assessments? Is it even possible that he engaged in dishonest behavior?

Everything is always possible, but nothing can ever be resolved when inane spear-chuckers from a furious tribe agree to perform their tribal rage for the benefit of tribal followers.

Last Wednesday, an astounding number of Republican senators behaved in murderous ways as they mocked and berated Dr. Fauci during a Senate hearing. It doesn't help when the leader of the pack continues to lead with a blindingly obvious groaner, as described by Jessica McDonald in this lengthy piece for FactCheck.org:

Paul Distorts Fauci’s Diary Entry About COVID-19 and Wet Market
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In the hearing, and in multiple statements before and after, Paul has focused on a Jan. 26, 2020, diary entry in which Fauci stated that “the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. … Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.”
Paul has zeroed in on these statements to falsely suggest that Fauci was saying then that the coronavirus didn’t have a natural origin and to argue that he wasn’t being transparent with the public.
[...]
This is not the “gotcha” that Paul makes it out to be. Citing this one passage...falsely implies that if the pandemic didn’t originate in the one market, that it couldn’t have had a natural origin...

Duh! As McDonald notes, Senator Paul just keeps pimping a classic 5-star groaner. In fairness to Paul, other Republican senators behaved in ways which were even more clownlike still.

(Who is Jessica McDonald? She's "a science journalist who joined FactCheck.org in 2018. She trained as a scientist, receiving her Ph.D. in immunology from Yale University in 2013.")

Let's return to the dawn of the West! The Achaeans were laying siege to Troy in a rage-filled clash of civilizations.

(Their motive remains instructive today. They were prepared to fight and die for ten years in response to a perceived sexual insult. They wanted Helen back.)

They wanted Helen back! In the meantime, Achilles and Agamemon fought with a fury over Briseis, a young woman who had been stolen from a neighboring village for sexual purposes. Early in the Iliad, we seem to learn that Odysseus has a kidnapped young woman of his own.

(Is the Iliad ever taught this way? Even now, we'll semi-guess that the answer is still no.)

Senator Paul bristled with rage. Three or four of his MAGA colleagues behaved like absolute fools.

Somewhat similarly, the Achaeans displayed a vicious tribal rage when sacred Troy finally fell. The headline of this lengthy report in the Washington Post describes the frequently-stated goal of their present-day successors:

The intense pressure facing Fauci, as GOP lawmakers push for his jailing

Dr. Fauci is 85. The modern Achaeans, filled with rage, would like to see him in jail.

Yesterday, it was the rage of Robert Kennedy Jr. which spilled out onto the nation's TV screens.

Is something wrong with this furious man? For many years, the answer has seemed to perhaps be yes—but at times of tribal rage, such people can be valuable.

The Iliad was a poem of rage. In the end, the rage of Achilles produced the fall of Troy.

Vicious, grisly behavior ensued. Absent some sort of new politics, will our civilization, imperfect as it always has been, perhaps go down the drain too?

Tomorrow: Ed Luce of the Financial Times, speaking on today's Morning Joe:

"I can describe this guy as a nutcase. He's a nutcase. Let's be frank."