RAGE: Should Dr. Fauci be shipped off to jail?

THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2026

The Wall Street Journal says no: Despite the fact that he didn't exist, Homer has been in the air of late. 

In our opinion, Keats may have overdone it a bit with respect to Chapman's translation:   

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer 

[...]   

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien. 

Or then again, maybe not. There's a lot to see in the pair of poems by the poet who didn't exist. 

(According to experts, Keats may have meant Balboa, not Cortez—though yes, that's a reference to the Darien of today's Darien Gap. Also, the reference to a "new planet" would have resonated at the time because of the recent discovery of Uranus.)   

For us, Homer's recitations, starting with Book One of the Iliad, show us the madness of the principal players in the siege of Troy in a wholly unvarnished way. By way of contrast, major news orgs like the New York Times and MS NOW are devoted to the idea that the apparent mental illness of our leaders must be normalized, ignored, disappeared.

Because neither he nor Agamemnon existed, Homer knew he couldn't be sued, or even arrested and charged with crimes, by a man like that leader of the Achaean (Greek) forces. He knew that he could portray Agamemnon's rage, in all its irrational fury, in the Iliad's opening lines.   

We're still in Book One in the first of the poems! In his Introduction to the Robert Fagles translation, Professor Knox describes the situation as we've already portrayed it:

Bernard Knox, Introduction to the Robert Fagles translation

[...] 

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....

We wish that one word hadn't been used, though we'll soon see it several more times. As Knox continues, he repeats it again and again, but he does explain the background to the first appearance of "the rage of Achilles:"   

...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...

Calchas says the girl (or perhaps the young woman) must be returned to Chryses, her father. 

That said, the prophet Calchas knows the room. Sacred Homer portrays his fear after Achilles orders him to speak:  

"Achilles, dear to Zeus,
you order me to explain Apollo's anger,
the distant deadly Archer? I will tell it all.
But strike a pact with me, swear you will defend me
with all your heart, with words and strength of hand.
For there is a man I will enrage. I see it now,
a powerful man who lords it over all the Argives,
one the Achaeans must obey. A mighty king,
raging against an inferior, is too strong.
Even if he can swallow down his wrath today,
still he will nurse the burning in his chest
until, sooner or later, he sends it bursting forth.
Consider it closely, Achilles. Will you save me?"

And the matchless runner reassured him: "Courage!
Out with it now. Calchas. Reveal the will of god..."

Calchas fears Agamemnon's fury. He knows that Agamemnon will surely seek to punish him for the bad news he's about to deliver. 

Here within our own failing world, that same story has played out a thousand times in the past ten years, with careful journalists saying less than they think or know about the principal player. As the overview by Professor Knox continues, it reaches a point on which we moderns might want to focus:

...Agamemnon has to give her up, but he 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. 

Achilles represses an urge to kill Agamemnon and withdraws from the assembly, threatening to leave for home, with all his troops, the next day. The priest's daughter is restored to him. Apollo puts an end to the plague, and Briseis is taken away from Achilles' tent by Agamemnon's heralds.   

The one girl (or young woman) is returned to her father—to Chryses, the priest to Apollo. ("And the priest embraced the child he loved, exultant.")

The other girl (or young woman) is led away by Agamemnon's heralds. Even now, five thousand years later, are young readers of this foundational text invited to understand the nature of the conduct chronicled here?  

Patroclus obeyed his great friend's command.
He led Briseis in all her beauty from the lodge
and handed her over to the men to take away.
And the two walked back along the Argive ships
while she trailed on behind, reluctant, every step.

She trailed behind, reluctant, every step of the way. We'd be happier if Homer had dropped the reference to "her beauty" at that juncture. 

At any rate, our European literature started right there, with that, with the focus belonging to the subsequent rage of Achilles. 

(In the moment, we're told this: "But Achilles wept, and slipping away from his companions, far apart, sat down on the beach of the heaving gray sea and scanned the endless ocean..." To the modern reader, the inanity of this conduct should be clear—or then again, possibly not.)   

We also wanted to slip away this week! We wanted to slip away to Homer's unvarnished presentation of Achilles' famous rage—the famous rage which almost sank a thousand ships. We keep finding it hard to do, given the way Homer may perhaps seem to skip past the circumstance of those young women.

At any rate, a similar type of rage—on this occasion, a type of group rage—was on display last week in a Senate hearing room, then again as Robert Kennedy Junior interrupted and insulted Dana Bash.  

Should Anthony Fauci, age 85, be hauled off to prison for the rest of his life? A group of rage-filled tribal warriors directly said, or in some cases merely implied, that the answer is yes. 

The editorial board at the Wall Street Journal seemed to suggest that these warriors, in their vast and rather performative rage, were perhaps a bit over their skis. Live and direct from the Murdoch realm, the editorial started like this:

Dr. Fauci Takes the Fifth, Alas

Anthony Fauci’s decision to invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself before the Senate on Wednesday is a shame. The public could have benefited from his exchanges with Senators, even if they would have been contentious.

Sen. Rand Paul has been investigating the government’s response to Covid, and Dr. Fauci was at the center of the decisions to close schools and lock down the economy for months. President Biden granted Dr. Fauci a pre-emptive pardon, but Mr. Paul said that wouldn’t protect him if he lies to Congress.

Dr. Fauci blamed the Senator for an “unhinged obsession” with him and decided on silence as a strategy. Mr. Paul is too set on criminalizing policy differences in our view, and Dr. Fauci doesn’t belong in jail on any evidence we’ve seen... 

Tomorrow, we'll try to return to the rage of the GOP solons. We also want to show you what was said on the Gutfeld! program—by Kat Timpf and by the blowhard Tyrus, but also by the nut-ball Gutfeld himself, and by Emily Compagno (again).

Homer described the rage of Agamemnon, and that of Achilles, with no attempt to hide the madness put on display by these powerful men. 

It may have helped that they didn't exist! That said, he never directly seemed to suggest that there's a problem with the theft of the people who happen to be vibrant girls or young women for the obvious reason.

We still struggle with that topic today, and with the rage of disordered men who insist on having their way.

Tomorrow: Republican Solons Gone Wild