Tag: Aristophanes

It Couldn’t Hurt

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The unthinkable has occurred.  Camera Girl has joined the resistance.  Somehow, she’s discovered the 4B Movement.  I don’t know how it happened.  I keep her inside a hermetic bubble, into which no outside influence is allowed.  Like a Svengali I mold her every thought and gaslight her entire notion of what’s going on in the world.  But somehow, it’s happened.  She has declared herself part of the 4B; No barbecue, burger, brisket or bologna.  And as a further sign of her radicalized state of mind she’s added another 4B’s; no breakfast, bagel. bialy or bacon.  Shades of Lysistrata!

A complete food strike.  It’s diabolical.  And there’s nothing I can do.  I don’t know how to buy or cook food.  I’m not even sure what I currently eat.  The dishes she makes for me are complex and confusing.  If left to my own devices I’ll probably wander through the supermarket buying the easily identifiable items like bananas and seltzer.  It looks pretty bleak for me.  I tried to placate her.  I told her I’d stop watching YouTube videos of Kamala voters screaming and crying.  I told her I’d let her watch NCIS and other girly soap operas.  But she just ignored me.  Her tactic is to eat her meals before I get up in the morning.  When I get up at 10:30 am I can still smell the coffee and bagels wafting around the dining room but all that’s left is an empty coffee mug and some everything-bagel crumbs on a plate in the sink.

I can’t figure out where she’s hiding the food.  I suspect it might be in the kitchen cabinets but because of the illogical way she arranges things I’ve never been able to find anything but trash bags and window cleaner in those places, so what’s the use.  In desperation I’ve been sneaking out to the edge of the swamp looking for the crumbs and crusts that Camera Girl leaves at the edge of the water for Moe the Crow.  I’ll give him this, he puts up a pretty stiff fight for his food.  But I’m just too strong for him.  I will have to get there a little earlier though.  The bread gets very soggy from the ground water almost immediately.

I’m thinking of getting some outside help.  I’m going to write a letter to President-elect Trump and see if he has any advice for me.  I mean he’s always fighting with “nasty women” and he’s managed pretty well for himself.  Well, he did get sued by that harpy who claims he raped her in Bloomingdales.  And he is on his third marriage.  And he did have that Million-Woman March against him back in 2017.  But probably all of those experiences have made him wiser about women and anyway I feel he owes me after I stuck up for him with Camera Girl and all the other women who over the years have argued with me about what a terrible man he is.  Surely that wisdom can do me some good in my present predicament.  The “art of the deal” must have a chapter on food strikes.

Well, if all else fails. I will fall back on what every man has as his birthright; the male brain.  As Shakespeare very beautifully expressed it in Hamlet, “What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason.”  That’s right, how noble in reason.  We are the thinking animal and we can think our way out of any crisis.  I will buy food myself and by trial and error I will figure out how to cook it.  I can write the equations for the heat transfer of an electrical resistance stove top.  I can figure out the amount of time it takes for a quart of water to reach its boiling point at a particular power setting.  I know how the proteins in animal muscle become denatured at high temperature.  Fire is the invention of some male ancestor of my species and I can master its application to any technology.  As Prometheus is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!

Maybe if I tell her how nice her hair looks lately, she’ll make me some coffee and a pumpernickel bagel.  It couldn’t hurt.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh

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Dyspepsia doesn’t strike me as a particularly attractive flavor for a pundit to emit.  I mean listening to someone like me carp about all the things that are going wrong or will go wrong sounds like the height of boredom.    But it’s also kind of the world we live in.  I guess that marinating that flavor in humor might make it more palatable for the audience.  And I do try to add gallows humor and mockery of all the truly awful villains we face whenever I can.  But sometimes it’s almost impossible to paint a smile, even a wry smile, onto my face, when considering the catastrophically damaging events that seem to happen more and more frequently every day.

But we must laugh.  Despite the fact that it is very likely that Joseph Biden will be re-elected president of the United States, or maybe because it is so likely, we must laugh at Joe Biden.  All of the gaffes, the incoherent mumbling, the lies about everything from COVID to cannibals eating his uncle, to his creepy personal interactions with everyone from small children to the Pope.  All of this needs to be mocked and laughed at.

Because we need catharsis.  In ancient Athens, comedians like Aristophanes would rail against the politicians and accuse them of all manner of dishonest and even scurrilous behavior.  And the politicians had to take it with no recourse to the law courts.  Because the Athenians believed in the almost sacred right of the people to mock their elites.  And they were right.  There has to be a place where the high and mighty get taken down a peg.  It’s necessary, it’s healthy.  If that doesn’t exist you end up with Soviet Russia where the legitimacy of the state is slowly lost to cynicism and eventually when the social capital reaches zero everyone just ignores the leaders and wander away to become bandits.

Now maybe that is our fate.  With Donald Trump being stripped of his money and his freedom by kangaroo courts it won’t take long before even comedians will be hauled off to the gulag for mocking Joe.  I fully expect in the next Biden administration laws against disinformation will probably begin to mushroom around the country.  Maybe we’ll all have to refer to Biden as “the dear leader” instead of Dementia Joe.

But in the meantime, I intend to continue mocking these turkeys whenever they do something especially absurd.  And that’s bound to be any minute.  Why just today I read that during the White House briefing Haitian Shirley Temple claimed that videos of Joe Biden staring in the wrong direction from the parachutist that landed practically at his feet at the G7 conference was a “deep fake.”  We watch as the Italian Prime Minister takes him by the arm and turns him around to see what everyone of normal intelligence has already seen.  Karine Jean-Pierre is sort of like the voice of the Wizard of Oz bellowing, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

And who knows?  There’s always the slimmest of chances that something goes wrong and Trump gets elected.  And that would be the funniest joke of all.  Can you imagine if Trump actually did drain the swamp?  Hilarious.

Aristophanes and the LGBTQ

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All this historical comparison to 5th century Athens has made me jealous.  But instead of looking at the military and political similarities, I think I’ll compare the cultural revolutions that occurred in Athens and the United States.  And the primary evidence for the nature of the Athenian cultural change will come from Aristophanes comedy, “The Clouds.”

Rather than going back to the Greek original (for which my extremely rusty knowledge of the Attic comic dialect would be insufficient) I will use the text of Arrowsmith’s mid-twentieth century American English.  And this is fitting because I am also mid-twentieth century American in my origin.

The Clouds is the story of a wealthy but culturally traditional Athenian farmer, Strepsiades, who marries an aristocratic wife and subsequently ends up with a son whose patrician tastes are bankrupting Strepsiades.  In desperation to escape from his debts, he goes to Socrates’ School of Sophistry to learn how to flim-flam his creditors.  But it turns out Strepsiades is too old and adle-pated to learn the sophistic methods.  In desperation he forces his son, Pheidippides, to become a pupil at the school and learn the art of sophistic logic.  Or as it is described, “the art of making the worse argument appear the better.”  But once the boy is trained in the sophistic art, he turns his skill against Strepsiades and beats him when he dares to question the “genius” of some of Pheidippides’ literary favorites like the progressive poet Euripides.  And when Strepsiades complains of the impiety of dishonoring his own father Pheidippides uses his “logic” to prove to Strepsiades that beating his father is logical.  After Strepsiades admits the logic of his argument Pheidippides offers to prove that horsewhipping his own mother is also a reasonable practice.  But that is a bridge too far.  Strepsiades realizes that using the sophistic methods is a deal with the devil and he rushes to Socrates’ school and sets fire to it, to put an end to all the corruption.

During Pheidippides education we are witness to a debate between sophistic logic and normal logic personified as two fighting cocks.  During their exchange we learn that sophistry is completely immune to shame.  When accused of buggery, pederasty and perversion Sophistry laughs saying he’s being pelted with roses.  All such things are complements to the new way of thinking.  Sophistry finally defeats Normal Logic by proving to him that all the successful lawyers, politicians and poets are all perverted buggers.  Therefore, buggery is the successful lifestyle, QED.

Arrowsmith succeeds in putting the Greek into modern idiom but the ideas are all there in the original.  The traditional culture of the Athenians, which included filial and religious piety and a warrior tradition had been replaced among the young with an atheistic, materialistic philosophy wherein respect for tradition, the desire to compete for honor among fellow citizens or even the desire to just raise a family had all been replaced with a hedonistic imperative to eat drink and be merry with whatever money their parents may have accumulated.

The parallels between Aristophanes’ description and what we have in modern America are too striking to miss.  Besides the disrespect for all traditional virtues and heroes we also have the very pointed championing of sexual deviancy.  If this play was being written today, we could name the sophistry character LGBTQ and it would fit right in with Aristophanes’ dialog.  Look at this exchange:

Philosophy

And suppose your pupil, by taking your advice, is promptly convicted of adultery and sentenced to be publicly reamed up the rectum with a radish?  How, Sir, would you save him from that?

 

Sophistry

Why, what’s the disgrace in being reamed with a radish?

 

Philosophy

Sir, I can conceive of nothing fouler than being buggered by a radish.

I could just hear this kind of argument being put forth in National Review under the title, “The Conservative Case for Buggery.”

What all this tells me is that the path taken whenever traditional culture is subverted by an effete, materialistic, hedonistic and sexually deviant culture is essentially the same regardless of whether it is 21st century A.D. America, 1st century A.D. Rome, 5th century B.C. Athens or antediluvian Ur.  They go after the children and teach them that their parents are stupid and that the traditional rules are outdated.  And they tell them that raising a family is unnecessary and expensive so the better course is to feed their vices and live as a parasite on society leaving nothing after they die.  We seem to be in the midst of western culture succumbing to this impulse.  Like the Greeks and Romans before us we’ve lost the aspects of our culture that preserved and strengthened it.  I don’t know whether we’ll end up like Rome but at the rate we’re going it shouldn’t take too much longer to find out.  We’re rapidly reaching a crisis point.

And as for escaping this trap, Aristophanes had the right solution too.  Go to the school and burn it down.  Hopefully one day Harvard and Yale will join Socrates’ “Thinkery” in the actual ash heap of history.