TUESDAY, JULY 1, 2025
...came over the walls doing this: It must have been the summer heat—the not yet midsummer madness—which led us down this path.
This very morning, at 5 a.m., it was 86 degrees outside; the humidity was high. It must have been a recent attendant madness which led us to think that we could find a way to describe our nation's ongoing decline by searching amid various portraits of various previous arrivals.
Who or what arrived on the American scene when Candidate Trump came down the escalator in June 2015? By whom would Blue America be assailed in the years which followed that date—during the extended, aggressive arrival which continues along today?
We've long favored the Iliad as a portrait of the current fall. That portrait begins with The Rage of Achilles, along with the corresponding rage of Agamemnon himself.
From the earliest parts of that poem of war, Agamemnon, lord of men, is a highly erratic, rage-fueled commander of the Achaean troops—a man whose command stays on track thanks to the intercession of respected advisers like Nestor, the seasoned charioteer, and Odysseus, the wily tactician.
In that sense, Agamemnon is the first-term President Trump—a ruler subject to constant emotional breakdowns who is persistently saved from himself by the superior judgment of the lieutenants around him.
In this, the gentleman's second term, it has been widely noted that the Nestors are largely gone. The president's fury seems to have built over the course of these ten years, just as the Achaean fury had built during their ten-year siege of Troy.
(The fury has also built within the sitting's president's supporters, including those at the Fox News Channel. These corporate players have all sorts of legitimate complaints, but they seem to have little ability to regulate their anger.)
Here within our own failing nation, the rage has grown in these past ten years. In his lengthy introduction to Professor Fagles' 1990 translation of the Iliad, Professor Knox offers this portrait of the way the Achaean rage expressed itself when they suddenly came over Troy's towering walls—when, at long last, they arrived:
[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.
So it went in the aftermath of the Iliad.
In their vicious night assault, the Achaeans fought with the weapons of the Late Bronze Age. In our current situation, the fury of Red America's leadership cadres is expressed through the weapons of the Information Age—misinformation, disinformation, distraction, the flooding of the zone.
(Did we mention the fact that these furious players do have real complaints? This cadre does have real complaints, but in their fury, these players often seem to have little ability to regulate their emotions.)
What happened in that night assault hasn't quite happened here. On the other hand, even after the Minnesota murders on June xx, people like Watters, Failla and Gowdy keep attacking CNN's Natasha Bertrand in the most irresponsible and fact-challenged ways.
Watters, Failla and Gowdy oh my! The basic background is this:
A few days after the June 21 attack on Iran, Bertrand filed an accurate report about a preliminary damage assessment from within the DIA. Please note:
Stating the obvious, this damage assessment didn't come from CNN's Bertrand herself. The assessment which she reported had come from within the intelligence agency of the U.S. Defense Department.
That said, the DIA report had differed from the instant assessment which had been offered by this nation's impetuous president. For that reason, players at the Fox News Channel had to go on the attack.
Let's give a measure of credit to the silly child Jesse Watters! In his ridiculous presentation on the June 25 The Five, he didn't state the name of the reporter in question.
Elsewhere, the assaults have shown less restraint. This past weekend, D-list comedian Jimmy Failla and former congressman Trey Gowdy went go after Bertrand by name in a pair of inanely fact-challenged Fox News Channel attacks.
The victims in Minnesota were being memorialized even as Failla and Gowdy came over the walls in that remarkably dangerous manner. First though, here was the silly child Watters, on last Wednesday's edition of The Five, teed up by the former VJ who now performs as "Kennedy."
Here's what these (useful) idiots said:
KENNEDY (6/25/25): So Jesse, it almost seems like CNN and the New York Times are using this leaked report, whatever it is, to cheer triumphantly that perhaps the bunker buster bomber strike wasn’t quite as effective as the administration is claiming.
What do you make of that? And will the president get credit if he did, in fact, dismantle Iran’s nuclear program?
WATTERS: [Silly initial patter]
Now, the woman is the same reporter who said the laptop was Russian, and now she says our bombs don’t work. You’d think she would have been fired for getting hoodwinked by the deep state couple of years ago, but she actually got promoted. She got promoted for being wrong! She got a raise for being wrong!
Now she’s on CNN getting hoodwinked all over again, because that’s the point. She’s not there to be right. She’s just there to hurt Donald Trump.
[...]
The Israeli intelligence team, Petraeus, Rubio, the CIA, the IAEA. Everybody says, "Direct hit, years to come back from it." And then there’s CNN, alone in the corner in last place, spewing enemy propaganda. I don’t think they can come back from it.
KENNEDY: Do you think they’re getting it from some sort of nefarious Iranian sources and it’s wishful thinking?
WATTERS: A hater in the Pentagon leaked an early report that had no confidence and just relied on some camera up in the sky. That’s it...
For Alex Griffing's report at Mediaite, you can just click here.
Kennedy seemed to have no idea where the damage assessment had come from. Presumably, she was playing dumb, a task these stars are paid to perform.
Kennedy was casting herself as clueless with respect to the leaked assessment. In his response, the silliest child said that CNN had been "spewing enemy propaganda" in the report by the hoodwinked woman who was "just there to hurt Donald Trump."
According to Watters, CNN had been "spewing enemy propaganda" by issuing an accurate reports about an initial assessment from within the Defense Department's intelligence agency. But then, this is the way the garbage flows on this nation's most-watched "news channel."
In that exchange, Kenndy was playing the fool, as was the silly Watters. In truth, Watters' on-air comic persona is a highly sophisticated blend of the sacred and the profane—is part of the ongoing use of comedy stylings on the Fox News Channel to help make the propaganda go down.
According to Watters, CNN had been spewing the views of the enemy! As for the unnamed woman herself, she had somehow said "that our bombs don't work."
That was stupidity beyond the reach of the stupid. Such porridge is dished on this channel all day and all night, with the finer people at the New York Times and the Washington Post—but also at CNN and MSNBC—agreeing that this conduct must never be reported or discussed.
This manufactured stupidity is part of the warfare of the Information Age. So was the conduct of the president—the conduct which Kennedy and Watters were working to reinforce.
On the previous day, the furious president had repeatedly referred to CNN as "scum." Early on that same June 25, he had attacked Bertrand by name, saying that she should b fired by CNN—should be "thrown out like a dog."
(So raged Agamemnon, long ago. So rages this man today.)
The players on the set of The Five were working to help that conduct along. Minnesota had happened just one week before, but they took no warning from that murderous conduct. Instead, they told some crackpot somewhere that the CNN reporter in question has been spewing enemy propaganda in her latest attempt to hurt Trump.
How stupid does it get on this corporate "cable news" channel? The silly boy Watters inanely said that Bernard had said that our bombs don't work! He also claimed that she'd once said that "the laptop was Russian."
That claim was breathtakingly bogus too. In fact, fifty major intelligence figures had signed a letter describing that as a possibly. She had simply reported what those public figures had said.
Yes, it actually does get that stupid on this corporate messaging service. Four nights later, here was a certain D-list comedian spreading this (dangerous) messaging to whoever might be unbalanced enough to decide to act upon it:
FAILLA (6/28/25): Long story short, CNN quoted anonymous sources to cast doubt on the attacks. And they did it using a reporter named Natasha Bertrand, who is actually the one responsible for starting the false claim that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation, OK?
Like all reporters, Natasha would like to win a Pulitzer Prize one day, but (insert stupid commentary here about former President Biden falling off his bike).
It doesn't get dumber than that—and it doesn.t get more irresponsible.
Two weeks after Minnesota, the flyweight Failla was spreading the hate to the next potential assassin. Astoundingly, former Rep. Gowdy did the same thing the following night, savaging Bertrand by name while employing the helpful term, "aiding and abetting."
You can watch his presentation here. We return to the arrival which occurred when the rage-filled Achaeans were finally able to come over the walls at Troy.
The Achaeans expressed their fury through the tools of Bronze Age war. Today, people like "Kennedy," Watters, Failla and Gowdy express the fury of the past ten years through these more modern means.
In the immediate aftermath of the murders in Minnesota, they were willing to go on TV and behave in such dangerous ways as these. Meanwhile their own Agamemnon was crying "scum" and asking that the reporter in question be "thrown out like a dog."
Our view? The rage and the fury are the are the same emotions portrayed from the Iliad's first verses forward. In fairness, today's players have perfectly valid complaints about various aspects of Blue America's conduct. But even at this dangerous time, their ability to regulate their fury barely seems to exist.
We've long been drawn to Professor Knox's portrait of that "night assault"—of that ancient arrival. It starts to give us a way to understand the arrival which is now sweeping Blue America to the side.
Then again, there's the arrival which was recalled last Friday night by this new PBS program:
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 synopsis from the American Masters program itself. The program discussed a catastrophic arrival which took place in the Germany of the 1930s.
Should American Masters have done such a thing? Tomorrow, we'll show you what the program said.
Tomorrow: To be perfectly clear, President Trump has never done anything like that
Where is Cecelia? I miss her.
ReplyDeleteI like things a lot better without her. Now if only DiC would go away.
DeleteAgree with 12:25.
DeleteMe too, good riddance.
DeleteChecking on me, I see.
DeleteAnonymouse 12:25pm, you’d find things even better if this blog didn’t exist.
Ahh shit, the bitch is back, Elton.
Deletehttps://www.thefp.com/p/reading-homer-after-october-7
Delete
ReplyDeleteHannah Arendt? Tyranny? Seriously?
No, Bob, it's not the temperature. It's your TDS that makes you write all this nonsense. It destroyed your brain. Sadly.
Trump Destroys Society. The Dick Suckers. Trump's Dumb Shit. The Dainty Sociopaths. The Dog Shooters. The Daily Sacrileges. The Dearth of Sanity. Trump Digs Sodomy. The Dip Shits. The Depressing Saga. The Damn Shitheads. Totally Depressing Stupidity.
DeleteYes seriously. What kind of material is your bubble made of? Let the Pentagon know as it is impenetrable.
DeleteAccusations of TDS are highly correlated with those that abuse children, 11:09 is just outing himself as a pedo.
DeleteIf Bertrand was thrown out like a dog, would the Haitians eat her?
ReplyDeleteWould you, if you were a Haitian? Asking yourself questions like that is the first step toward developing empathy.
DeleteI'd eat you all up you big hunk you.
DeleteWhat Haitians? They are all being deported, even though they were hard working good and moral folks that were helping out in areas that were suffering from economic devastation, areas abandoned by Whites and the Republicans.
DeleteSomerby asks "who or what" came down that elevator. He still has not acknowledged that the election that put Trump into office for the first time was (1) manipulated with help of Russians, (2) intended to keep Hillary out of office not put Trump in, although he had already proven to be a useful idiot to Putin, (3) would still have failed if not for Trump's various crimes, including catch and release of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal's stories on top of the pussy tape, (4) was aided by Comey's last minute attack on Hillary not coincidentally involving a laptop (a pattern for Republican manufactured election attacks), and some fiddling with computers in three crucial swing states.
ReplyDeleteSomerby has never admitted that it took a lot of wrongdoing for Trump to win that first election. That blindness is only partly because of Somerby's hatred of Hillary in particular and women in general. The actual arrival in 2015 involved Somerby's shift from being a media analyst to shilling for Trump, as happened to several media figures at that same time. The change is very noticeable if you go back and read Somerby's essays in 2014 compared to 2015 and following to the present. Somerby helped make the election about bigotry by letting his own bigotry become public, starting with his belief that the South had been mistreated after the Civil War and was still subject to anti-Southern prejudice, his belief that integration of schools, even in Boston, had been a big mistake, his belief that racism was over and why then was civil rights still a thing, his leap onto the anti-woke bandwagon where he continually claimed that the left was annoying voters on the right by talking about microaggressions and pronouns, his support for book banning in public schools (starting with Maus and Toni Morrison books), then there was a long time where he argued that Trump was being misunderstood with a transition to crazy/sociopathic but why prosecute his crimes, and all the "Stormy" was extorting Trump gibberish and Chanel Miller should be a teetotaller if she didn't want to be raped stuff. That was followed by Biden is old and repetition of right wing anti-immigrant messages together with Harris has nothing but her smile garbage. His diatribes against Rachel Maddow went away after she switched to one night a week. It was Nicolle Wallace for a while, Joy Reid, many jabs at Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper, Ta-Nehisis Coates, Lester Holt, Jemelle Hill, Van Jones, and a whole bunch of youngish female journalists with Ivy League degrees.
Somerby need look no further than himself to see why and how Trump became our president, both in 2015 and in 2024. And he still has not learned his lesson about the consequences of his own behavior.
My husband, who is older than Somerby, spent five hours in the sun and heat, marching on No-Kings Day. Somerby never mentioned the marches so you can be pretty certain he didn't participate in one. Instead he gives us this alt-right shit about ancient warrior cults and claims the Blues did it all to us.
No one single-handedly could have stopped Trump except perhaps Trump himself and Putin. But Somerby could have joined the good fight instead of the bad guys. That leaves him no standing to complain about whatever happens next.
Elon is belatedly making me glad I didn't sell my Tesla. Better late than never for his awakening. Perhaps he has stopped taking so much ketamine and has joined the woke, or maybe it is only about his businesses, but either way, his attack on Trump's bill is welcome. He demonstrates that it is not too late for Somerby to grow a conscience. Just unlikely.
Enjoyed your post, but Elon has an inherently evil (racist) conscience.
DeleteAgree, good post, but Musk is nothing more than a snake oil salesmen that enjoys reveling in White Supremacy.
DeleteTrade in your Tesla, there are much better EVs options out now, and they don't involve compromising one's integrity.
Waiting for the redesigned Solterra (Subaru) EV.
DeleteWe have more important issues to worry about than who is still attacking Bertrand over a report that has now been substantiated in multiple ways. Why is Somerby focused on this?
ReplyDeleteThere are many profiles in courage, people who are opposing Trump at personal cost. Somerby is a profile in cowardice.
Jimmy Swaggart has died.
ReplyDeleteJimmy Swaggart epitomizes everything wrong with greedy self serving asshole fake Christians. These fakers rely on hate not love to generate $$ - just like the Orange Felon. Fuck the whole lot of them to hell.
DeleteSwaggart off to that lake of fire.
Deletewomp womp
Josh Marshall here — “The Democratic Party is Its Voters and They’re Doing Just Fine”:
ReplyDelete… On the one hand, the Democratic Party is “floundering,” “directionless,” “lost.” It’s approval numbers are bleak. And then, often in the same articles, you have all this evidence of voter intensity. Turnout. New activism. Lots of new people running for office. What seems like an apparent contradiction resolves itself if you get your terms right. I don’t think the Democratic Party is in a tailspin or floundering at all. In many cases, the elected leadership of the party is. But the elected leadership is not the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is its voters. Especially it’s primary voters. This is just a signal understanding of what a party is and what constitutes its health or disfunction. I saw a headline a few days ago that was roughly, The Dems’ Latest Nightmare: Primaries As Far As The Eye Can See.
Good news. Toss out the old, bring in the new. Crush the fascist scourge.
Yup, hopefully Dems can move past their old, establishment, neoliberal era and return to a progressive era, much like the country did in the wake of the Robber Barons; wealth inequality is as bad or worse than it was then.
DeleteIntra party primary chaos benefits Republicans in too many ways to count. It drains resources that should be spent on general elections, exposes internal divisions that Republicans will exploit, and it allows them to offer voters an alternative that is disciplined and organized as opposed to one that is fragmented and delivering contradictory messages about what they believe in. More participation in primaries is a sign of impending structural collapse. Think the Tea Party.
DeleteAt long last, are you really going to turn to an aging white male blogger with an audience of aging white male readers for realistic take on where the party is going? The answer is in the lower and lower middle class, young people, blacks and Mexicans none of whom read aging white male blogs written by people like Marshall. Turn to those groups to understand where the party is going. Not some out of touch aging white male. Marshall has done nothing but help bring Democrats to this state. Fuck him. I mean, really. Josh Marshall?
"Tomorrow: To be perfectly clear, President Trump has never done anything like that"
ReplyDeleteI disagree. Aside from using Hitler as his role model, Trump has done quite a few things that are similar to Hitler's actions, including most recently his detainment and shipping off to concentration camps of citizens, naturalized citizens, legal immigrants, non-criminal undocumented immigrants, people here on legitimate asylum petitions approved by a court, and political prisoners whose crime is saying something in a public forum that Trump disagrees with. This is all the same as what Hitler did.
Trump has been targeting minorities, women (who are being fired from high level positions for being female), gays and transpeople (who are being fired from the military because they are trans), and those who defend them. Hitler did that too, with special emphasis on Jews but including gays and transpeople, Roma, non-white immigrants and so on, all the same targets as Trump.
Hitler had no concern about hurting people who were elderly, disabled, sick or with congenital illness. He quietly orchestrated the killing of such people in hospitals. Those who objected, including priests and clergy, were shipped to camps. This is akin to what Trump is doing by eliminating medical care and social security for people in such situations, especially the indigent. It shows the same lack of empathy as Hitler displayed. His ICE agents have sent several kids to other countries where they could not receive proper medical care for serious illnesses, condemning them to death. These are kids who were flown to the US in the first place in order to receive specialized treatment. That very Hiterlian.
Then there is the military parade Trump orchestrated, without bothering to recruit an audience aside from himself, spending huge amounts of money and forcing soldiers to march by his review as if he were a military dictator. That too is Hiterlian.
So, on what basis does Somerby refuse to discuss the similarities between Hitler and Trump? Arendt would not have approved Somerby's misuse of her life's work to justify the orange Hitler imposing authoritarian demands on the US, just as Hitler did early in his career. If Somerby doesn't want to draw the obvious parallels, he shouldn't be talking about Arendt at all. She has earned respect. Somerby has not.
Hear, hear!!
DeleteTrump appointed Scott Bessent, the first openly gay Secretary of the Treasury in U.S. history,
DeleteTrump appointed Susie Wiles, the first woman to serve as White House Chief of Staff.
Prince Orange Chickenshit also appointed Little Marco as SoS, the first castrated dwarf to serve as secretary of state. Does anyone know what Wiles does? Bessent is there to bullshit to the business press.
DeleteErnst Rohm was gay, and there were plenty of woman Nazis from Eva Braun to Leni Riefenstahl, and sadists like Ilse Koch, Dorothea Binz, Irma Grese, etc.
Delete12:59 has once again, stepped in it.
Eva was not a member of the NSDAP.
DeleteOne of Hitler's lieutenants, Goring, I think was gay, albeit lightly closeted. A Jew was in Stalin's cabinet, as plans were being laid to ship Jews off to far north. My grandfather, a doctor, and obviously his family were probably days away from being sent into exile.
DeleteNow, of course, we have Miller, representing the Jewish wing of white supremacy. Where's comrade Zhukov when you need him.
Trump is trying to model himself after Putin, of course.
Zhukov? Khrushchev fired him.
DeleteGöring married a woman, she died, he married another woman, and they had a daughter.
DeleteBots don't have grandfathers.
Deleteit might have been one of the other ones, Himmler or someone else. Don't have time to dig into this.
DeleteZhukov executed Beria.
Khrushchev supported him then, fired him later.
DeleteJust like Trump with Comey. Comey played his part by "re-opening" the investigation into Hillary's emails, and he assumed that Trump owed him something.
DeleteStill, one can hold out hope that one day Miller will be summarily executed.
DeleteThe Bountiful Bill for Billionaires passed. These people are determined to destroy America in service to their donor class.
ReplyDeleteSenate passes Trump’s sweeping ‘big beautiful’ agenda bill 51-50.
ReplyDeleteAh yes the death knell of the Republican Party.
DeleteSenate passes a bill to immiserate most Americans so a few wealthy people can pay less taxes.
womp womp
Isn't it called the Billionaires Big Bonanza fuck you little people destroy America as the world's bank bill? Or is it the Burn all the Brown Bucks in the Florida Everglades camp ovens bill? Perhaps both?
DeleteDavid in Cal,
DeleteCongratulations.
Not caring about the deficit or how economics works, really worked-out for you and your idols in the bigot party.
""Guerrero concludes with this:
ReplyDelete"I am just one officer in a large military organization. I do not expect my resignation to persuade the president or the secretary of defense to reconsider the policy. I do hope, however, that my actions will prompt some reflection among military leaders about what it would take for them to disobey a lawful but unethical order. Most important, when my children grow up and look back at this moment in history, I want them to see an example of someone who chose the harder right over the easier wrong.""
We need courageous people in these times, not useless you have TDS, what fascism? succulents.
history is littered with courageous people doing the right thing and cut down in their prime by evil motherfuckers like Prince Orange Chickenshit.
DeleteI disagree. History is decorated with courageous people, not littered.
Delete9:25, I wish it were true
DeleteHitler told the people of Germany that they would each be given a "people's car" that was being designed and mass produced for the German population. He first began by charging every person a mandatory fee to pay for the car they were supposed to receive at some point in the future. The universal car never materialized, but it was in development and became the VW Beetle.
ReplyDeleteAI says:
"While Hitler did not design the Volkswagen, also known as the "People's Car" or Volkswagen Beetle, he did play a key role in its development by commissioning the design and pushing for its production. He tasked Ferdinand Porsche with creating a car that was affordable for every German family, leading to the creation of the Volkswagen Type 1. The factory for producing the car was also built under Hitler's direction. "
I suppose a key difference is that Trump is grifting to increase his own wealth, whereas Hitler was doing it to support the war effort, but the gall of requiring everyone to pay for the car up front without receiving it is very Trumpian. I expect Trump to discover at any moment that he doesn't have to actually produce sneakers or fragrance (eau de Trump sounds disgusting) to steal people's money. All he has to do is threaten to put them into his Alligator camp.