Hiroshima, Cannae and Troy

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey is about an end of civilization brought on by the Greeks' violation of their gods' golden rule; but no simple "anti-MAGA" interpretation respects history, it only offends the gods anew. Homer probably believed Agamemnon's expedition was ruinous from its inception and Odysseus' trick with the horse-gift was ignoble; but no strategy to foreswear deception will redeem humanity, and treating others as you would be treated will never apply to enemies in war.

The sack of Troy was roughly a thousand years before the battle of Cannae, and roughly three thousand years before Hiroshima. But destructive war was frequent or almost continuous between and since those events, even as the hope was frequent or almost continuous, that humanity could someday, somehow, rise above such insanity. The lesson Homer offers is that people haven't changed and won't change. They think, feel, and behave exactly as they always have.

Against this enduring reality, we Westerners have recently settled upon what we call science, and a portion of it that we call medicine, as our best shot. Occasionally we are so enamored as to imagine that because of modern breakthroughs we are no longer kin to the king of Ithaca and his long-suffering bride, that we will never have to be slaughtered on a sweltering, stinking field, and that we ourselves did not and would not fly that airplane to Japan and incinerate all those people.

When we read about Achilles' rage at Patroclus' death and the golden urn containing their mixed ashes, or Penelope's proof that Odysseus was her returned husband by his simple knowledge of their great rooted bridal bed, Homer shows us we are progeny of the ancient people even as surely as we remember our own mothers and fathers. 

Our supposed upward progress from the horror of Cannae is belied by eerily comparable gore at Jonestown, Benedict Canyon, and Milwaukee. My father-in-law stood in radioactive dust on the outskirts of Nagasaki in August, 1945. He was 21 years old. Fifty years later I stood with my pre-teen children gazing across the beautiful graveyard above Omaha Beach. My youngest asked me, "Dad, who killed all these people?"

And then we encounter... psychiatry. It is a relatively recent endeavor that causes insanity, manufactures criminals and encourages war: the most destructive idea since the Inquisition, the cruelest system since chattel slavery, under a truly sick guise of "medicine".

We desperately hope the world isn't worse than ever before in history, but it's not much better. We are not saved.

I don't ask who is mentally ill, or for whom the bell tolls.