Tuesday
Of the many ICE horror stories emerging out of Minneapolis, there’s one that caught my particular attention because the agents violated a sacred law that dates back to Homer’s time and earlier. Apparently four agents dined at a family-owned Mexican restaurant and then, after the restaurant closed, followed the staff home and arrested three of them.
To break bread in someone’s establishment and then turn around and abuse that establishment chills the blood.
It is violation of a host’s hospitality, of course, that sets off the Trojan War: Paris runs off Menelaus’s wife Helen after the Spartan king has welcomed him into his home. It takes a crime of this magnitude to bring the Greek city states together to launch their assault.
Then there is the incident of Odysseus with the Kyklopês Polyphemus, although in this case it is the host who violates the laws of hospitality. Odysseus brings a goatskin full of sweet wine hoping to meet the cave dweller. What he encounters instead is a host who rejects the laws set down by Zeus, eating rather than entertaining his guests. Odysseus reports on their interchange:
“We would entreat you, great Sir, have a care
for the gods’ courtesy; Zeus will avenge
the unoffending guest.”
He answered this
from his brute chest, unmoved:
‘You are a ninny,
or else you come from the other end of nowhere,
telling me, mind the gods! We Kyklopês
care not a whistle for your thundering Zeus
or all the gods in bliss; we have more force by far.
The difference between the Kyklopês and the Greeks is the difference between barbarism and civilization. Odysseus describes them as “giants, louts, without a law to bless them,” which pretty much sums up ICE and Border Patrol agents.
Of course, the epic also features the ultimate abuse of a host’s hospitality, which Odysseus sums up when he returns to wreak vengeance. While I don’t wish for Trump’s federal agents to suffer the fate of Penelope’s suitors, I do wish them to be held accountable. Here’s Odysseus after he throws off his disguise and confronts them, bow and arrows in hand:
You yellow dogs, you thought I’d never make it
home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder,
twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared
bid for my wife while I was still alive.
Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven,
contempt for what men say of you hereafter.
Your last hour has come. You die in blood.
As a democracy, our own “gods who rule wide heaven” are the Constitution and the rule of law, which ICE and Border Patrol are busily trashing. Contempt for these and “for what men say of you hereafter” pretty much sums up Trump and everyone following his example.
May there one day be a cleansing.
