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Wednesday
My faculty reading group, especially our current moderator John Reishman, has given me a new take on Homer’s Iliad: Priam, I now realize, is largely responsible for the ruinous war his city faces because he can’t or won’t deny his self-indulgent and narcissistic son Paris. As we discussed Troy’s king, I couldn’t help but think of how the Republican Party has gone off the rails because it similarly can’t stand up to Donald Trump.
And like Trump, Paris seems to pay no price for his self-absorption. Though he violates the fundamental law of hospitality—we could say that he grabs his host’s wife by the p****y—he finds ways to shrug off any responsibility for the disaster he has brought about. When his brother Hektor chastises him for his behavior, notice how easily he deflects the blow.
First, here’s Hektor expressing a wish that multiple Republicans have had regarding their party’s de facto leader:
Evil Paris, beautiful, woman-crazy, cajoling better had you never been born, or killed unwedded. Truly I could have wished it so; it would be far better than to have you with us to our shame, for others to sneer at…. Were you like this that time when in sea-wandering vessels assembling oarsmen to help you you sailed over the water, and mixed with the outlanders, and carried away a fair woman from a remote land, whose lord’s kin were spearmen and fighters, to your father a big sorrow, and your city, and all your people, to yourself a thing shameful but bringing joy to the enemy?
To be sure, Paris is unlike Trump in that he acknowledges some wrongdoing, but he has Trump’s knack for wriggling out of any responsibility. Professor Reishman said that Paris’s response reminds him of those students who, oh so easily, assure him that will submit their essays on time, even though they haven’t started them:
Hektor, seeing you have scolded me rightly, not beyond measure– still, your heart forever is weariless, like an axe-blade driven by a man’s strength through the timber, one who, well skilled, hews a piece for a ship, driven on by the force of a man’s strength: such is the heart in your breast, unshakable: yet do not bring up against me the sweet favors of golden Aphrodite. Never to be cast away are the gifts of the gods, magnificent, which they give of their own will, no man could have them for wanting them.
Paris here frames his brother here as an unimaginative drudge. Why be a boring hewer of wood—why be a responsible citizen—when the gods throw a beautiful woman in your path? Paris would have thrived in our own celebrity culture.
To his credit, Paris actually shows up to fight Menelaus in hand-to-hand combat to end the war. He’s not like Trump promising an alternative to Obamacare or promising to share his taxes with the public or promising to get Mexico to pay for his wall or, or, or… But like Trump, Paris manages to wriggle out of situations where his opponents have him dead to rights: when Menelaus is about to slay him, Aphrodite swoops in and carries him off. And to be honest, divine assistance sometimes seems the best explanation for how Trump, time and again, escapes paying for his misdeeds.
But Paris wouldn’t be able to get away with his shenanigans without his paternal enabler, just as Trump would not be running for reelection if Republican senators had found him guilty of extorting Ukraine’s president to smear his likely political opponent or of inciting the January 6 insurrection. Instead, they let him off the hook, which means that he continues to be a thorn in their side.
In Book VII we hear “Antenor the thoughtful” voicing sentiments previously expressed by Hektor. Think of him as another responsible Republican standing up to Trump:
Trojans and Dardanians and companions in arms: hear me while I speak forth what the heart within my breast urges. Come then: let us give back Helen of Argos and all her possessions to the sons of Atreus to take away, seeing now we fight with our true pledges made into lies; and I see no good thing’s accomplishment for us in the end, unless we do this.”
Paris doesn’t bother to counter-argue, essentially telling the assembled Trojans that he’ll do what he wants, Troy be damned. His speech is all about “me” and “I”:
Antenor, these things that you argue please me no longer. Your mind knows how to contrive a saying better than this one. But if in all seriousness this is your true argument; then it is the very gods who ruined the brain within you. I will speak out before the Trojans, breakers of horses. I refuse, straight out. I will not give back the woman.
Then, to soften his refusal, he promises to return the gifts he got from Menelaus and to add some extra:
But of the possessions I carried away to our house from Argos I am willing to give all back, and to add to these from my own goods.
One would hope that Paris’s promises are more reliable than Trump’s promises to pay his lawyers. Paris doesn’t even have to sacrifice this much, however, because Priam acts as though he hasn’t heard Antenor’s proposal. The most blame he ascribes to Paris is to refer to him as he “for whose sake this strife has arisen.” (There’s none of Hektor’s “better had you never been born” here.) He tells his messenger to go to the Greeks with Paris’s word (the part about the possessions, not about never giving back Helen) and–implicitly acknowledging that such an unserious proposal will go nowhere—adds the “solid message” that a momentary truce should be called so that both sides “can burn the bodies of our dead.”
When one is surrounded by enablers who don’t firmly insist upon the sacred laws of hospitality or the peaceful transition of power, then all hell breaks loose. Many people suffer.
Further thought: As I have been accused, by one conservative acquaintance, of Trump Derangement Syndrome, let me expand my scope here: I think the GOP began its downward slide with Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. His irresponsible flouting of Congressional norms transformed Congress from a collegial body where members found ways to work together to a perpetual food fight. Trump just took Gingrich’s tactics to a new level, and he has spawned imitators (Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Loui Gohmert, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis), who similarly eschew governing for performance art.
