Wednesday
With Donald Trump’s racism becoming ever more overt (not that it was ever that hidden), Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty finds herself pleading to President Obama to speak out and lift us up again. In doing so, she has reminded Esquire’s smart and extremely well-read Charlie Pierce of Odysseus pleading with Achilles to save the Greeks from the rampaging Trojans.
The situations match up well. First, here’s Tumulty summarizing Trump’s hateful rhetoric before sending out her plea. As you’ve no doubt heard, Trump told four Democratic Congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they came from. Then he doubled down with this:
“These are people that if they don’t like it here, they can leave,” he said Monday. “They hate our country. They hate it, I think, with a passion.”
Tumulty observes,
The irony was rich, given how incessantly Trump himself criticized this country before he was elected, and how even his campaign slogan — “Make America Great Again” — denigrated both the nation and the progress it has made.
Then she begs,
President Obama, what we need more than anything else right now is someone who can lift the country’s sights again. Someone who can charge us, as you once did, with a mission to “march into the future. Let us keep that promise, that American promise, and in the words of scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.”
Find your voice again. Reclaim your legacy. Do it now. It won’t wait until your memoirs.
In response, Pierce tweeted a reference to Odysseus’s plea from The Iliad (I cite the Robert Fitzgerald translation). :
Rouse yourself, if even at this hour
you’ll pitch in for the Akhaians and deliver them
from Trojan havoc. In the years to come
this day will be remembered pain for you
if you do not. No remedy, no remedy
will come to hand, once the great ill is done.
The passage appears in Book IX when the Trojans, taking advantage of Akhilleus’s absence, are on the verge of pushing the Greeks into the sea. Think of it as Trump’s onslaught on democratic values. To give you a sense of their panic (and that of some Americans), here’s Homer:
Panic that attend blood-chilling Rout
now ruled the Akhaians. All their finest men
were shaken by this fear, in bitter throes,
as when a shifting gale
blows up over the clod fish-breeding sea,
north wind and west wind wailing out of Thrace
in squall on squall, and dark waves crest, and shoreward
masses of weed are cast up by the surf:
so were Akhaian hears torn in their breast.
Agamemnon, acknowledging he made a mistake in alienating the Greeks’ greatest warriors, at first wants to pack up the ships and sail away. After a council meeting, however, he proposes showering him with gifts and sends Odysseus as an intermediary. Thus we have a meeting of the protagonists of what are arguably the world’s two greatest epics.
Akhilleus’s pride has been too deeply wounded, however, and he turns down the offer. Obama has his own reasons, including the tradition of not criticizing a predecessor. Perhaps he also has doubts as to how effective he would be. It’s hard to imagine him making the difference that Akhilleus eventually does.
Nevertheless, I understand Tumulty’s longing for someone to swoop in and rally us.
