ARRIVALS: How should we describe the current arrival?

MONDAY, JUNE 30, 2025

PBS shatters a rule: We didn't say so last Friday afternoon. But when the Achaeans came over the walls, it was a type of arrival.

This takes us all the way back to the very dawn of the West. That arrival was described by Professor Knox in his lengthy introduction to the Robert Fagles translation of the Iliad.

The lengthy essay by Professor Knox was published in 1990. Within it, he described an arrival.

That ancient arrival was characterized by fury and extreme violence. When the Achaeans came over the walls, this is what occurred:

[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.

If you can't defend your civilization, your civilization will fall! At any rate, when the Achaeans came over the walls, it was a type of arrival—but it was also a stunningly violent assault:

King Priam, a thoroughly dignified ruler, was butchered at the altar. His wife was dragged off into slavery. Their daughter Cassandra was raped.

His noble son's infant boy was thrown to his death from the city's high walls. Is this, in some far-fetched way, the type of arrival with which Blue America is currently struggling? Are we struggling to turn back, even to describe, an arrival of this general type?

As we noted in Friday afternoon's report, Hollywood has often portrayed other types of arrival. In 2016, Denis Villeneuve pictured a different kind of arrival in an Oscar-nominated film of that very name:

Arrival 

Denis Villeneuve’s lyrical alien film, based on a short story by Ted Chiang, is sci-fi at its most emotionally devastating. When a mysterious, looming extraterrestrial craft lands on Earth, a linguist played by Amy Adams...is recruited to try to speak to the tentacled beings known as heptapods. Less a saga about invasion than it is about communication, “Arrival” is intoxicatingly mysterious until it wallops you with its time-turning gut punch of an ending.

In this film, a linguist attempts to communicate with the newly arrived—with a group of tentacled beings! To what extent can our nation's current (and ongoing) struggle be compared to something like that?

Hollywood has offered many films in which the arrival involves a type of "alien" which differs from the "illegal [undocumented / unauthorized] aliens" who play a key role in our current societal drama. In 1997, a bit of whimsy was present:

Men in Black

Men in Black is a 1997 American alien/UFO science fiction action comedy film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as "men in black," secret agents who monitor and police extraterrestrials...In the film, Agent K (Jones) and Agent J (Smith) investigate a series of seemingly unrelated criminal incidents related to the extraterrestrials who live in secret on Earth.

[...]

Plot

In 1961, the Men in Black (MiB) organization is founded after secretly making first contact with extraterrestrials. Ever since, they established Earth as a politically neutral zone for alien refugees who live in secret among humanity...

In this, as in so many films, the arrival involved a species of extraterrestrials—beings who aren't like us. In Men in Black, they've been (secretly) living among for well over thirty years!

Back then, an alien invasion of this type could still be seen as humorous. It was different in 1956, when the arrival featured a darkly ominous tone:

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

[...] 

The film's storyline concerns an extraterrestrial invasion that begins in the fictional California town of Santa Mira. Alien plant spores have fallen from space and grown into large seed pods, each one capable of producing a visually identical copy of a human. As each pod reaches full development, it assimilates the physical traits, memories, and personalities of each sleeping person placed near it until only the replacement is left; these duplicates, however, are devoid of all human emotion. Little by little, a local doctor uncovers this "quiet" invasion and attempts to stop it.

To our ear, the portrait of "duplicates devoid of all human emotion" can almost start to ring a bell as we try to find the way to describe, and to understand, the nature of the current situation. 

Hollywood continues to offer portraits of unexpected arrivals. In 2022, Jordan Peele's Nope stuck to the concept of the extraterrestrial source of the arrival. 

On the other hand, you could almost say that Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019) describes the arrival of an alien force of apparently human type. This thumbnail comes from the new survey by the New York Times, in which Once Upon a Time joins Arrival among this century's hundred best:

Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood

Like Martin Scorsese’s New York or Federico Fellini’s Rome, Quentin Tarantino’s Los Angeles is a thing to behold: The director’s fevered love letter to his hometown circa 1969 is a gonzo-maximalist dream, encompassing a fictional fading TV star (Leonardo DiCaprio), his laconic stuntman-sidekick (Brad Pitt), a passel of Manson family freaks and the very real starlet Sharon Tate (played as pure blond sunshine by Margot Robbie). From there, the script breaks with established history, building to one of the most bravura and far-out finales in film history.

A tragic arrival is underway in that film, involving "a passel of Manson family" types. (Does it also involve the fatuous Hollywood players on whom those types will feed?)

Do any of those portraits help us understand and describe the arrival which got its start when then-Candidate Donald J. Trump came down the escalator in June 2015?  Completing the record for today, PBS has now added a portrait of a deeply horrific arrival in the latest offering from its American Masters series. 

This portrait of a disastrous arrival debuted last Friday evening. Along the way, PBS broke one of the most widely-stated rules in the book. To watch the whole program, click here:

S39 Ep 5
Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny

Discover Hannah Arendt, one of the most fearless political thinkers of the 20th century, who transformed her time as a political prisoner and refugee during World War II into daring insights about totalitarianism which continue to resonate today.

So reads the official thumbnail from the PBS program itself. 

For what it's worth, this 83-minute PBS program explicitly compares the rapid arrival of the Third Reich to the events now gripping our own struggling American nation. Whether justified or not, the comparison is completely undisguised as of the program's 20-minute mark, as chronicled by Jackie Calmes in this overview of the PBS program for the Los Angeles Times.

When the Achaeans came over the walls, it was a violent arrival. In part for reasons of our own making, those of us in Blue America have had a hard time describing the type of arrival we ourselves currently face.

Blue America's journalistic elites have established or played by certain rules—rules which regulate the types of things which can be said about this arrival:

Our journalists have observed explicit rules forbidding medical talk—forbidding discussions of mental health and mental disorder. They seem to be playing by rules which won't let them report or discuss the astonishing conduct which takes place, all day and all night, on the powerful Fox News Channel.

We lack an established journalistic language which lets us discuss the sheer stupidity which suffuses the American public discourse. Also, we have a rule which says that we mustn't discuss what happened in Germany, and then throughout Europe, not so long ago.

Like the fictional citizens of Camus' Oran, we simply haven't been up the challenge of describing—possibly, even of recognizing—what's happening in our midst. For what it's worth, our own view would be that the current arrival has almost surely already passed the point of no return—will not now be turned back. 

For the record, also this:

As we've noted many times, it was our own Blue America's foolishness, down through the years, which set the stage for this arrival—which triggered the anger of those who arrived. And as in sacred Troy, so too here:

It's an anger which many of the newly arrived can't seem to control, regulate or contain.

In truth, arrivals like these have taken place all through the course of human history. In the current instance, many of the newly arrived are well intentioned. Presumably, quite a few others are not.

 In our view, we Blues, like the citizens of Oran, simply haven't been up to task of dealing with this arrival. In The Plague, Camus described the mindset of Oran's denizens when their challenge arrived:

Our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions. 

Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences. 

 As with American Masters, so too here! Camus was speaking about what happened in Germany too.

All week long, we'll try to develop the language with which sensible people might be able to describe the current (ongoing) arrival. Once again, we'll say, up front, that we think the battle has already been lost.

We'll try to establish ways to describe the nature of this arrival. Sadly, we'll borrow from Lincoln in making this point:

We Blues have been part of this too.

Tomorrow: The view from American Masters