States' Rights Vs. the Guh-Mint

"Liberty and Union, Now and Forever. One and Inseparable." -- Daniel Webster (statue in Central Park).

Webster was making a speech about how the states combined into a federal union have both union and liberty.

In other words, states can have liberty, and yet remain in union. It's part of an address written by Daniel Webster to a man named John Haynes, a South Carolina Senator, in about 1830.

South Carolina was asserting states rights to nullify federal laws. They did it again during the Civil War. Webster argued that no states should be granted a divorce from the Federal union, because they have so much liberty, why would they need to?

But they didn't have the liberty to continue with slavery. South Carolina was a slave oligarchy, and releasing their slaves would have meant they had to work. What does work have to do with liberty, Haines cried out.

The point is that once the states joined into a union, they were stuck. But there is still a vestige of something called States' Rights. Do states have the right to overturn federal laws? Marriage definitions, medical marijuana, illegal immigration, and other issues turn right now on States' Rights. Who gets to decide? (30 states now have an injunction against gay marriage, while six allow it.) Generally speaking the federal guh'munt (attempt at southern dialect humor) has priority over the individual states.

Early on it was the Republicans under Lincoln who insisted federation trumped states' rights. Now it is Democrats (since Roosevelt at least) who have attempted to ram federalism down the throat of the states in order to give us Social Security, and now Obamacare (a vast broadening of Roosevelt Administration policies that some think is the principle reason for the 16 trillion dollar deficit), as well as gays in the military, and probably soon, a gay marriage amendment.

The issues depend on the interpretation we give to relatively few phrases within the Constitution. "We the people," rather than "We the states," for instance, seems to mean that we are AMERICANS, first, and citizens of South Carolina or Massachusetts, second.

Marriage laws vary from state to state (not only who can marry, but at what age), but all marriages recognized in one state are recognized in the others.

The tenth amendment, the commerce clause, and a few others, are also part of the tiny canon of phrases that divide us as a nation, two professors at my college said Thursday during Constitution Day. Some states allow illegals to pursue higher education, and get drivers' licenses, while Alabama has recently passed a restrictive law against illegal immigration (according to something another prof said in the comments period). In other words, it's not legal to be illegal.

I went through the newspaper this morning and another topic jumped out at me. 1400 species are now protected under the Endangered Species Act, and 500 more species are on the way. (A bewildering number of agencies -- U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and House Natural Resources Committee, are warring over which ones should be scrapped.) These include the gopher tortoise, the American eel, and the tiny Texas kangaroo rat. Once they become protected, resources are set aside, lawsuits on the part of the eel or the tortoise, etc. The giant Palouse earthworm of Idaho has been denied protection as has the plains bison. The only animal I knew for sure was the bison. I still remember it used to be on the back of the nickel. (One never sees those nickels any longer. The last one I saw was probably in about 1965.) I googled the Palouse earthworm. Who knew that people are going to war over this creature. I can't imagine God made the Palouse earthworm. It isn't mentioned in the Bible. Surely, Satan did it. Perhaps Eve was chatting with the Giant Palouse Earthworm.

The government in a sense has fifty brides. So there's a lot of squabbling.

Agencies fight agencies. In general the Republicans care about economics, and the Democrats care about everything else except economics.

Marianne Moore's last line in the poem "Marriage," cites Webster's federalist interpretation of the States' rights problem "Liberty and Union, Now and Forever," as the definition of a good marriage. Can Republicans and Democrats continue to get along? One group wants state capitalism. The other wants individual capitalism. I think the latter one works better. Long live individual capitalism!

Colbert - Stewart - Brett

Brett said that I should listen to Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert. I did. I like Stewart's long pauses. He makes fun of Obama pretty well, before he turns the tables, and makes fun of the people who make fun of Obama. I think he's ok.

Then I listened to Colbert and thought he was a dummy. He says if we were really Christian we would help the poor in America, or something:

"If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.”

But we do help the poor. Hasn't he heard of food stamps? Or HEAP? Or food stamps? Or welfare? Or HEAP? Or WIC? Or food stamps? WIC is available even to the families of college professors like myself. For years I availed myself of it, and it helped the chicken nuggets fly down the hatches of the hummingbirds who live in this tin shack with the Cadillac out front. I gobbled down tons of peanut butter and drank fruit juice like I was living in Oceania.

Colbert thinks there are poor people in America.

I think of a poor person as one who is starving. In the Bible the Jews have to live off manna which was some kind of bugsnot that grew on stuff in the desert. The Jews didn't like it so they asked for quail. God sent quail. Everyone who ate it died, so they went back to bugsnot, or whatever it was (one theory offers psychadelic mushrooms).

Eating food is hardly our problem in America. Look around. Everyone is too big. It takes all one's willpower and ingenuity in America not to overeat. The average poor child opens the fridge and a cornucopia of delicious goods leap into his throat, threatening to choke him with calories.

It's true that there are some people who starve to death in America. The Karen Carpenter types. What can I say that hasn't been said. Get help if you find that you are a prisoner in an Auschwitz of your own making.

Around the world there are unAmerican countries where people can't get enough to eat, or drink.

Arid areas are the hardest to reach because of Marxist regimes. It's especially difficult to get water into arid areas because of the cost of shipping and because of the ruthless blockades of the Marxist pirates of Myanmar and Zimbabwe. Some people insist on living in deserts. Sometimes it's hard to find those people, as the maps are scarce, and it's hard to find nomads in huge deserts in order to give them our beautiful desserts. I imagine sometimes that they get thirsty for lemonade. It would work better if we could ship dry water and powdered lemon with them on the camels since it wouldn't be so heavy. With dry water, like dried food, all you'd have to do is add water.

Every American has access to water. Not so in India where it's one in five. 600 million people in India have never sat on a toilet. Around here that's all some people do. Try to get into a toilet in a mall. Some stinker will sit in there all day eating Raisinettes and reading the funnies between picking their nose and farting gasses so putrid you'd think it was World War I.

The main problem in America is that there's too much food being eaten. We have an obesity epidemic. So it's not about getting food distribution going. Go into any supermarket and you can eat all day and night for peanuts. Colbert is wrong, which means he isn't that funny. He would have been right if he was working in about the year 1100 or during the Irish potato famine. He apparently hasn't heard of food stamps, welfare programs, and other giveaways that have made almost everyone obscenely fat. We're rich at least in terms of our rich food. I do think there are too many stupid people (Colbert is one of them) but it's very hard to educate people like Colbert because they already think they know everything.

Maybe I'm too hard on Colbert in this report. But, I did like Stewart.

Applause and Effect: Republican Debates and the Brent Spence Bridge

Approval can be registered in various ways. It can be applause, it can be laughter, or it can be something silent, registered in the soul.

First, clapping. The clapping over Herman Cain's cancer survival at the Fox Republican debate on Monday evening felt mandatory. Herman Cain said he had survived colon cancer but that Obamacare would have killed him. The Republicans burst into applause. The audience stood and clapped. All the candidates clapped. This was wrong on many levels, I think, because although the Republicans did try to show they have hearts -- Cain had nothing to do with his own survival (his doctors may have saved him, but he didn't really do anything himself to survive cancer, so there is no reason HE should have been applauded -- although maybe his immune system should be applauded).

On the other hand, when Gary Johnson told the joke about how the neighbor's dog makes more shovel-ready jobs in a weekend than Obama has made in his entire regime, the laughter was spontaneous. Johnson triumphed insofar as he had made a joke. A joke is a correct judgment. However, it is still unlikely that the dogs are creating the kind of good well-paying jobs that we should look to as models for the American economy.

After the debate, pollster Frank Luntz talked to various audience members. No one liked Perry giving illegal aliens huge handouts to attend the University of Texas. This was silent disapproval. It may have meant that as many as half of the voters would never vote for Perry and instead will vote for Romney. I am now against Perry.

Underneath the louder emotions are moments in which logic and emotion click, and an audience sees something clearly.

What audiences are looking for is a symbol that clarifies their logic. Hitler was able to do this. The Jews stole your money, he said. Kill them, and you'll be rich. It hurt the German people to accept the scapegoating of the Jews (and others), but it was effective in terms of promoting hope for change.

Reagan was good at this, too. Communism is the evil empire. Unlike Hitler, Reagan had a point. Communism withered away, and Eastern Europe was free.

I don't know if Obama is better than Hitler and Reagan. He certainly did more with less in the last election. He had no specifics in his first election. His election slogan was YES WE CAN! Is that even an entire sentence? Didn't he have to say DO WHAT? Now he's got this whole thing going with the Brent Spence bridge over the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Kentucky. It's a giant image, and it's somewhat specific. He wants his new jobs bill to pay for the bridge. He's trying to argue that the Republicans want to deny the citizens of Ohio and Kentucky this bridge. He has incredible imagery of himself shaking hands with construction workers. Obama doesn't tell us how we're going to pay for this, since we have no money. (The country is 14 trillion dollars in debt, or 16 trillion, and sinking.) At present a foreign conglomerate has the contract to rebuild the bridge. There is no money set aside to pay for the job. So are WE going to pay foreign workers to rebuild the Brent Spence?

Obama can play poker. All the others at the table are amateurs. I expect him to rake in huge numbers of votes with his bridge, even though I have no way of knowing where he's going to get the money, or who's going to get the money. Still, I applaud Obama. He's effective in building bridges to the voters. YES WE CAN!

Do what? Should anybody ask him to finish the sentence? Here's some possibilities: destroy the economy? print lots of money? get elected without much of a legislative background? Write an incomplete sentence, like a blank check, and let the voters fill it in with their own hungry hopes? All of the above?

PROOFS OF GOD

In the medieval era I understand that the natural world was considered to be coterminous with the divine realm, and they intertwned. So in a sense everything was a symbol.

By our own time, after Darwin, after the growing increase of scientific empiricism, we tend more and more to see the natural realm and the realm of the divine to be completely separate, with no intermingling.

There are still those who claim that intelligent design is a proof of God.

But I think most Christian theologians no longer believe that there is a proof of God that is available in the natural world. At any rate, this was I think Luther's claim.

That we cannot reach faith through reason, and that nothing in the natural world would lead us to the conclusion that God exists.

Sometimes there are still seeming bridges between this world and the next. Rainbows, perhaps. But scientists tell us now this is just refracted light. Nothing to write home about.

It was once thought that there were unicorns and behemoths of the oceans' depths with unparalleled immensity. We pretty much have all the larger things inventoried and we have to conclude that everything can be accounted for with reason, that each thing occupies a niche, to which it is adapted, and on which it capitalizes.

Christ did perform miracles, but today's Christians can no longer perform miracles. I haven't seen anyone walk on water, or multiply loaves.

Miracles became symbols of God's existence.

If there is something in the world that symbolizes for you the necessary and true existence of God, what is it?

Animals & Symbols

I don't think animals can understand symbols. I don't think a bear could understand that one person is a president and another is the vice president.

I could never shoot another person for money. But I don't think I could shoot a monkey for money either. I don't think I could shoot a bear for money. I am pretty sure I could shoot a fish if there was a lot of money involved. I could shoot any kind of a fish. I am also certain that fish don't have souls.

Why is a fish the sign of a Christian?

How is it that we can pledge allegiance to a flag, but no other animal can?

There are 192 countries in the world, and most of them seem comical to me. How can anyone pledge allegiance to Turkmenistan, or Russia, or to a nightmare country like North Korea, or to a comic opera country like San Marino?

I'm not sure that our respect for symbols is always well-deserved.

I saw a bald eagle go over the soccer field two nights ago. I have 18 small children under my care and am training them to be the Genghis Kahns of the pitch. But I stopped and watched the bald eagle and my heart leaped because it was as if America itself was flying over the trees and I found my hand over my heart.

Phynances Poetry Contest

This poetry contest will be about money, either in personal terms or national or international.

Deadline is September the 22nd, 2011, midnight your time. Voting on the 23rd. This poem is from earlier in the summer (July 24th) but it can serve as an inspiration for the others, perhaps.

Voting will be on the 23rd. You can't vote for your own poem. This time there is no limit on the number of lines.

STANDARD & POOR'S

Nation about to collapse according to Standard & Poor's
Obama and Boehner playing chicken over the debt

Introduce a 3-dollar bill with the 3 Stooges on it
In Slapstick We Trust

Dollars flying south like Canada geese

V-necked
Tourist dollars saying Adios!

WHAT SO PROUDLY WE HAIL

I received a book in the mail entitled What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech and Song, edited by Amy and Leon Kass, and Diana Schaub. ISI Books, 2011.

The table of contents is amazing. It has in it many pieces you don't usually see in literary anthologies, especially writings that reveal or induce pride in America. There is Patton's address to the American troops of the Third Army before D-Day. There is Calvin Coolidge's Speech on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Battle Hymn of the Republic. My country Tis of Thee, and God Bless America. It's got different kinds of rhetoric in it than the sort of defeatist nonsense we normally read in contemporary literary anthologies.

Here's a piece from Patton's address:

"I don't want to get any messages saying, 'I am holding my position.' We are not holding any Goddamned thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding anything, except the enemy's balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time ...

We are not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we're going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We are going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking basket. War is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt off your face and realize that instead of dirt it's the blood and guts of what once was your best friend beside you, you'll know what to do!" (326).

The text is not all blood and guts, although it's about 98% blood and guts.

Blood and guts have always been part of the Judeo-Christian tradition back at least to the book of Numbers. Joshua and Caleb took on far larger armies and won. The horizon on all side was filled with the bodies of the dead. The only thing still moving were the carrion.

Patton is clearly in that line of thought, as is the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

"As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
As God goes marching on."

The idea was to flatten the enemy. Today because of multiculturalism we are supposed to try to understand the enemy. This will lead to Judeo-Christian extinction. I think some of the Jews in Weiner's former district woke up and understood this point, and gave the district to the Republican as a result for the first time since 1923. People everywhere are starting to wake up.

In Calvin Coolidge's amazing address he traces the history of American liberty and the doctrine of inalienable rights back to 18th century preachers such as Samuel Wise. Wise wrote in 1710, "Democracy is Christ's government in church and state." Coolidge writes, "Here was the doctrine of equality, popular sovereignty, and the substance of the theory of inalienable rights clearly asserted by Wise at the opening of the eighteenth century, just as we have the principle of the consent of the governed stated by Hooker as early as 1638" (687).

I'm enjoying this fine assemblage of texts which reconstitutes a bandwidth of American history and rhetoric which has largely been censored if not outright banned by the multicultural elite. They don't want us to be proud of America or of its heritage. They want us to be ashamed of our entire history and to flatten all of our heroes including Jefferson (he slept with a slave, as if that's the only thing he ever did) and even including Lincoln (he was gay, and never really cared about the slaves). No one takes someone like Calvin Coolidge seriously any more. But he's always been my favorite president. No one would think that a general like Patton could speak with such brilliant rhetorical passion (his invective was used to fire up the crazy qualities of a soldier and unleash their fiery passions -- compare Obama's tepid lucubrations that are bridges out of nothing to nowhere).

Blurbs on the back of the book are from George Will and William Kristol.

"All hail the editors of What So Proudly We Hail! They've put together an anthology worthy of study by free men and brave citizens, from the dawn's early light to the twilight's last gleaming." -- William Kristol.

If you were bothered not so much by the attack on the WTC and the rhetoric of the left (Ward Churchill's comparison of the citizens inside to Hitler's assassins and accomplices and the tacit acceptance and corroboration of this rhetoric by his peers), or if you were stirred by the men on board the plane that took out the kreeps on board the plane headed for the White House (let's roll!), then maybe this anthology can help us clarify what the nation was built on: what Protestant ideals this country was founded on, and why we are still a light to the world, in spite of every attempt by the Marxists to destroy our Christian underpinnings, and obscure the hope for change we once represented, and will always represent. When I returned from Finland in 2000 I saw how dispirited the country was, and watched the Towers crumble, and was moved by firemen and the police -- seemingly the only persons who still understood America. Some of my colleagues laughed with Churchill, and thought we deserved it. I heard Bush compared to Hitler at least ten thousand times online in Marxist literary circles. It's time we join the spirit of the firemen and the police, and rebuild the country starting with our ideals. It's going to be a long hard job, and it's going to mean a fight with the lousy left.

In this kingdom we will have to fight for the laws of our country as if they are its walls. Otherwise, we will be breached, and destroyed. We represent an oasis of civilization surrounded by mindless wilderness. We are already infiltrated by a massive enemy that would be happy to see every last American turn French, or who would at least do nothing but be passive in the face of their Europeanizing and globalizing verbiage.

DEATH AND TAXES

I'm reading a book entitled "Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks" by Simone Weil. Weil was a tubercular philosopher who died during World War II working with the French underground.

She is discussing Antigone, and her love for her dead twin brothers.

Weil cites two lines from the play:

Creon: Never at any time is the enemy, even when dead, a friend.
Antigone: I was born not to share in hate but to share in love.

Creon suggests that if that is how she feels, she belongs among the dead.

Weil's comment: "It is only among the dead, in the other world, that one is free to love. The present world does not authorize love" (9).

This is one of the most poignant reminders of Two Kingdoms that I've ever read. It is only the dead who can truly love. This is why when we think of our dead it is mostly love that comes to mind, as tears come to our eyes. The dead exist in a kingdom of pure love.

But "the present world does not authorize love," Weil adds.

Why is it that communism always ends in mass murder? Murder of course has always been with us. Cain killed Abel. But the mass murder of communism slaughters everyone. This is because in taking pure love out of the kingdom of the dead, it needs to slaughter everyone in order to inaugurate pure love. Lenin signed enormous death lists, including one for a party of his birthday guests. (In a Freudian slip, he gave the order to execute the "wrong" list.) Stalin slaughtered millions, including many of his closest loved ones. Almost no one in Stalin's inner circle remained alive by the 50's. Death isn't an accidental aspect of communism: it is the crucial aspect. To truly love someone with all one's being, a person must first be dead. Communism, because it attempts to authorize universal love, authorizes total extinction.

It is only on the cross as He dies that not only the disciples, but even the common Roman soldiers, realize how deeply and truly they loved Him. And how He represented the kingdom of love.

Communism IS death. True love requires death (Romeo & Juliette). It is only in holding our loved ones in death that we perceive as through a dark glass what it is to truly love someone.

For some reason love is not authorized in this kingdom.

Communism kills everyone in the name of love. First it kills the economy and then people die of starvation or of mass murder. Take your pick. Communist intuition is toward a total destruction of everyone. When the killing fields in Cambodia had killed everyone, the Khmer Rouge would have thrown themselves on the top of the heap.

Hatred and faction are our paradoxical lot in this kingdom. We compete, as do animals and bugs. Adam & Eve are thrown from the Garden of Life into the world of Death. In a sense we are dead, and will only fully feel immortal love in the next kingdom. At twilight we remember our dead as we fold our hands in prayer. The shades come over us, as the kingdom of love draws near, and we draw near again to our ancestors. But in the harsh light of day, we think instead of our ambitions. I do not know why this paradoxical world was set up. I was not there at the foundation of the world. I do not know why we have been asked to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. Is it a metaphor for returning our souls to our Maker?

HOW TO SAVE AMERICAN LIBERALISM

Many people say to me: Kirby, why are you against the left? You're a poet.

It has apparently not occurred to many that the left -- inspired by Plato and Marx, is totally against freedom of speech. Look at North Korea, Russia under Stalin, Romania under Ceausescu, China under Mao, Myanmar under the weirdos in control of it now.

Does the left lead to freedom of speech for anyone?

NO.

So, there is still liberalism, or what's left of it. But Fox is far more liberal (in terms of allowing everyone to speak) than the so-called liberal stations such as MSNBC or the crummy leftist newspapers like the NYT.

WSJ has many more voices across the spectrum than the NYT.

Liberalism is dead. Long live liberalism.

But who can save it? The left doesn't want it. They've closed down freedom of speech on thousands of campuses. Can the anarchists save it? Not likely. There aren't enough.

Who's left?

Who overthrew the communists in Romania and in Russia?

It was, quite simply, the Christian right. This is why I back the Christian right. They are the only remaining force that can meet the leftists with the necessary zeal. Michelle Bachman is practically Joan of Arc. She wants to be first into the fray. This is why I support her. I think we have to worry about a theocracy. It's true, we do. The Calvinists in particular are dangerous in this regard. But religious pluralism is better than Marxist monoculture. If Perry and Bachman's forces slam into the Marxist left, the Marxists won't have a prayer. Not that Obama and his ilk would try one.

Who do they have to pray to? They have the bearded prophet of profit-sharing: Marx. Look where that got North Korea or Myanmar.

We have to stop them. And so the poets and writers need to make a holy alliance with the Christian right. It's the only hope left for American liberalism.

Obama's Speech: Brent Spence Bridge

I confess I had hoped he would take back Obamacare. Or resign. What a miracle that would have been. But he did have one specific: he wants to fix the Brent Spence bridge that travels between Cincinnati and Coventry, Kentucky.

For openers, we got a strange rambling speech where he got a few of his facts wrong and there were so many weird lapses in logic in the text that I laughed continuously. He said that China was doing a lot of infrastructural building, but that we could beat them, building their infrastructure right here!

" Building a world-class transportation system is part of what made us a economic superpower. And now we’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads? At a time when millions of unemployed construction workers could build them right here in America? (Applause.)"

I was thinking he was going to try to help private enterprise, but again he only thinks about government spending. I don't think he wants private enterprise, as it competes with the government. But he did mention a "private construction company" (it is actually a multinational corporation that has had the contract signed and is waiting for funding) that wants to get to work fixing our highways. Part of the company is French! So in fact part of the money would go to the French! Obama loves the French. I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese don't also have a stake in the company.

"There are private construction companies all across America just waiting to get to work. There’s a bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that’s on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America. A public transit project in Houston that will help clear up one of the worst areas of traffic in the country. And there are schools throughout this country that desperately need renovating."

The Brent Spence bridge has a long history including many fatalities and such, it was opened three days after Kennedy's assassination. There are four other bridges across the river, but that one bears the most traffic. It will cost 2 billion and 2 years to fix it.

An aesthetics committee is assigned to think about sighting for the bridge, among other things. Their meeting notes can be found online:

"Goals and Measures Development
The discussion of goals for aesthetics started with views to and from the bridge and along the corridor. A comment was made that discussion of views could distract from the functionality of the bridge and corridor. Economic protection and development, existing plans, and connectivity are important to the aesthetics of this project."

Why did Obama focus on that bridge? What kind of symbol is it? It turns out that Boehner of Ohio is the leader of the House of Representatives and McConnell of Kentucky is the leader of the minority Republicans in the Senate. So perhaps he's throwing them a bone. My guess is that this bridge gets funding.

But let's see. It's all over the Cincinnati area newspapers. Just google Obama's Speech, Brent Spence bridge, and hundreds of articles and bloggers pop up. The main thing to point out I suppose is that it's a multinational corporation that already has the contract. So the money will go to foreign countries (to a large extent).

Not that there's anything wrong with the French (or the Chinese). It's just that I thought this speech was going to be about America.

9/11 Poetry Contest

The 9/11 poetry contest is now open. It will go through 9/11/11, at 11:59 pm. Late poems are DQ'd. Poems should be less than 31 lines. Multiple entries are permitted, but each entrant will only get one vote, and you can't vote for your own poems. Voting will take place on 9/12.

Here's my first entry:

9/11/2001

The CEOs & janitors at the Twin Towers lept
As the paupers and princes wept

They held hands as they fell to their death
& the buildings tottered forward

As if they were knocked out of breath

TROJAN WOMEN at FSC

The Trojan Women, by Seneca. Franklin Stage Company, August17-September 4, 2011.

My daughter Lola got an offer to play Polyxena at Franklin Stage Company this summer. We quickly agreed, and ended up taking Lola six days a week to extensive rehearsals with a company that includes professional actors and a newly minted director (Mollye Maxner) recently graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts. The play opened three weeks ago, and we went to see it and since the opening I've probably seen it seven or eight times. It was a strange experience. I think I could have gone to see it every night for the rest of my life. I reviewed the play here:

http://www.watershedpost.com/2011/review-franklin-stage-companys-trojan-women-seneca

The play opens with the remaining Trojan women (the royalty) who are talking about what they will do and whether Troy has a chance to get back on its feet when their children are adults. These royal women are being divvied up by the top Greek generals as concubines and slaves. One will get Hector’s wife, Andromache, another will get Helen of Troy, another will get Hecuba, Priam’s wife, and still another will get Cassandra and yet another, Polyxena. The terror they feel is numbed by the fact that they’ve been through ten years of war and everyone they knew and loved is either dead or enslaved. Many don't know the story, and too bad if you don't, because if you don't know the Homeric cycle you are missing one of the great narratives. Some Christians will say: but we already have the Bible, why do we need them Greeks? It because, as my kids would say.

It's because there are already "intimations of Christianity" among the ancient Greeks, and even among the Romans. They had dimly sensed that life is a "mindless wilderness" unless there are institutions. The first and most important institution is marriage. Without that, most feel unsafe. It is the most crucial of all institutions, and without it, life is cold and dark.

The entire Homeric cycle is about the importance of marriage. When Paris chooses to elope with Helen of Troy (another man’s wife) the Trojan war begins. Many Marxists think that the cycle is about goods and getting booty, and trade routes, and this is emphasized in their writings (read Adorno's foolish take, for instance). But none of these things are as important as a person’s marriage. If you lose your business, you can start another one. Lose your marital partner, and there is devastation. Paris chooses Aphrodite over Hera, or hot love over married love, and steals a married woman, and sets off a conflagration. In doing so, he destabilizes his brother Hector’s marriage (Hector appears to be faithful to his wife, unlike most of the Greeks?), and Paris gets his brother killed, as well as his mother and father and his sisters.

The Homeric cycle begins with a marriage festival to which the goddess Eris (goddess of conflict) is not invited. All good marriages contain conflict. Unless conflict is invited into a marriage, there can be no stability. It's part of it. Eris rolls an apple between three jealous goddesses: Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena. They each reach to pick up the apple and then ask Zeus to determine the fairest. Zeus defers to Paris.

Paris chooses Aphrodite. She's hot, but only in the sense that Paris Hilton is hot. Paris Hilton is a nut. The choice of Paris gets Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia killed (for whom the Trojan Polyxena is the symmetrical endpoint), and it is Agamemnon’s betrayal of Iphigenia that gets his wife Clytemnestra to kill him in turn. Marriage is the center of society and implies a commitment to the person to whom you’re married and to the children. People who break the commitment are threatening their partner. Threaten your partner and you threaten your own life. Figure it out. Nothing makes a person more vulnerable than a promise of marriage that is dishonored. This dishonoring destroys whole societies and brings everyone to ruin, even down to the next generation, and the next. What we see are the survivors of Paris’ poor choice. And the Greeks still don't get it: they are busy bringing home concubines which will complicate their lives even further.

Only Odysseus makes it back to his wife. He has to kill the suitors, and only through strategy does he survive. But his own choice of goddess is Athena, goddess of strategy. She helps him to get back to his family, and to help his son survive.

This kingdom is about making strategic choices.

Marriage is first. Of course the economy matters, too.

But the very center of life is marriage. Homer knew this.

(For those who don't know my fascination with myth specialist Georg Bachofen, and his theory of the centrality of marriage, let me be the first to admit that my reading of the Homeric cycle is deeply indebted to him and to his book Mutterecht, which has still not been fully translated from German into English, but does exist in French. An abridged and bowdlerized version is available from Princeton UP. It was edited by a cabal of Jungian feminists in the late 1960s, and changes Bachofen's intentions and ruins his message. Far preferable to read the original if you can read German or French.)