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July 15, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:01
FRIDAY ROUNDUP Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep372
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com That's friendofdinesh.com Coming up, Debbie and I are going to chat about a series of events from Jill Biden's reference to Hispanics as breakfast tacos.
To the Supreme Court, to the latest diabolical scheme by George Soros.
I'm going to examine the rapid secularization of America, asking whether this country is going the way of godless Europe.
And I'll examine in some detail the scene where the great Trojan warrior, Hector, meets with his younger brother, Paris, and Helen of Troy.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
One of the distinguishing elements between America on the one hand and Europe on the other is that America has traditionally been a more religious society.
Religion in general, but Christianity in particular, more firmly anchored in American belief as well as American practice as compared to pretty much all of Europe.
And I'm even using Europe generically to include Australia and Canada.
There's been a dramatic secularization of Europe over the past, really, century or so, but especially since the middle of the last century.
And what it means is that fewer Europeans believe in God, and far fewer than that number go to church.
And then if you look at people who go regularly to church, that number is even smaller.
For those of us who have visited Europe and seen the cathedrals, these gorgeous ecclesiastical buildings, and many of them are largely empty.
Not that there's no one in them, but there's just a knot of people and sometimes very old people with rosaries, and you're like, wow, this place could hold hundreds, and instead I see only tens of people.
There are more tourists in the churches than there actually are believers and worshippers.
But it looks like religiosity in terms of belief and practice is declining in America also.
Recent Gallup value survey, the number of people who believe in God in America, down to 81%.
Now, 81% may seem still pretty high.
It is high compared to Europe, but it's low compared to other societies around the world.
When you look at societies in Asia, Africa, South America, Central America, the levels of belief in God are higher.
In fact, they approach 90% or 100%.
And here, 81% is down from 87%.
And that's only a few years ago.
So it's a six-point decline in a pretty short time.
Now, interestingly, one of the explanations that's given for this is politics.
In other words, belief in God is going down dramatically among Democrats.
Among Republicans, it remains really high.
The Republican Party to that degree has loosely become a kind of Christian party, or at least a party in which people who are believing Christians can feel comfortable.
And Democrats are not only more secular themselves, but they argue that the Republican Party It has politicized religion, has politicized Christianity, has enshrined a certain kind of hostility to,
say, trans people or LGBTQ. And so, secular values are belief in equity and equality, and are driving Democrats and are driving people on the left to become even more secular.
Now, if this theory were right, you might expect that liberal churches would be gaining members, that the conservative churches would be the churches for the Republicans, and then you'd be seeing kind of flourishing Episcopal and Methodist and United Church of Christ.
All these churches would be full of liberals, but no.
What's happening is that the liberal churches are losing members even faster than traditional churches.
And so, to such a degree that you have one analyst, in fact, he's quoted in this article here, saying that the Episcopal Church will be, if not dead in the next 20 years, it will be, quote, on life support.
So, I think what's happening with the liberal churches is that they have become themselves so pluralistic, so multicultural.
Oh, who's to say what way is right?
We have one way, but we're not saying it's the only way.
We're not saying Jesus is the only way.
And people go, well, if he's not the only way, why are we here?
So, in a strange way, once you lose the proselytizing impulse, you sort of lose your reason for existing, at least as a Christian.
And so all of this might seem to lead to the idea that people in America are becoming atheists.
They're becoming, you know, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins types.
But it turns out that while the number of atheists is going up slightly, most people aren't going there either.
Where are they going then?
They're going to this amorphous I'm spiritual, but not religious.
I am a spiritual person, but I don't go to church.
Yes, I believe in God, but it's not the God of the Bible.
So what you have is that the new venues for religious talk, oddly enough, are now The Net, the bar and yoga studio, book clubs and book conventions,
And also you see the sprouting of all this kind of, I would call it, almost perverse types of spirituality, astrology, Wicca, neo-paganism, the cult of excessive fitness as a fitness itself becomes a kind of religion.
And then I've mentioned before how wokeness itself can be seen as a kind of religion.
Think about it. It's got all the liturgy of religion, right?
Atone for your unearned privilege.
Which is a kind of original sin.
Kneeling as a form of protest.
You've got a sort of whole woke theology.
You've got, don't say this, don't say that, this is the correct word, and so on.
And people who are not in line with it are heretics.
They need to be hounded. They need to be chased.
They need to be ostracized.
So all of this is a sort of almost displaced Christianity.
But now given, I would say, a secular...
And in many ways, far more destructive form.
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Debbie and I thought it'd be fun to do a few segments in which we review a bunch of things that have happened this past week, a kind of a weekly roundup.
But I thought maybe I'd start by asking you about Jill Biden.
Yeah, her taco statement.
So first of all, I think it really goes to the heart of the matter, and that is that these people are actually racist.
They are. And as I told you before, they use Hispanics to advance their cause, to advance their power, to stay in power.
And so it doesn't surprise me that she said something that horrific about Hispanics.
First of all, she's wrong.
Oh yes, we're as unique as breakfast tacos.
I mean, first of all, comparing Hispanics to breakfast tacos is just blatantly racist.
I mean, I love the fact that a number of Republican, Hispanic women have been making terrific videos hitting back.
They've been making so much fun of her.
Sort of, this is a taco and this is a Hispanic.
What's the lady's name that just did that?
She put a little post-it.
Carmen Amandarez Jackson.
She's running in District 16, I believe.
In Texas. In Texas. And so she had a little video that was just hysterical about, you know, eating, oh yeah, Jill Biden, I'm eating a breakfast taco right now.
She picks up the breakfast taco and then she pours out all of the contents inside the taco and then she goes, An empty shell like Joe Biden.
That's you. That's you, Joe Biden.
It's hysterical.
It's so funny. I'm so happy that she's doing that.
Now, I had a conversation with my mom this morning about Hispanics and leaving the Democratic Party, and she said, you know, Debbie, there's a lot that are not.
She goes, they're very, very dumb.
My mom, my 86-year-old mom saying this, right?
She A Hispanic herself.
And she says, you know, and you know who's down here?
Is that Beto guy.
And I go, oh, you mean fake Mexican.
Robert O'Rourke, a.k.a.
fake Mexican. Yes, he's down there campaigning in McAllen, in Brownsville.
She thinks she's been to Harlingen, but she's not sure.
Anyway, he's making his rounds down there.
She goes, and people love him.
I'm like, oh my goodness.
Well, first of all, anybody that loves him...
I don't care if you're Hispanic or not.
But, especially if you're Hispanic, you can't possibly fall for these people.
I mean, really. It's a...
It's a stage act that he's putting on, this idea of being the JFK of the Hispanics.
That's kind of what he's going for.
It had a little bit of an appeal years ago when he ran against Cruz.
He was a figment of the media.
But now that you see Beto up close, you basically see that you've just got this kind of immature collegiate leftist.
Well, he's a socialist.
I mean, let's call it what it is.
That's what he is. He's a socialist.
Marxist, socialist, whatever you want to call it these days.
But that's what he is. And that's how he would govern.
So, you know, just...
He might fool some people.
I don't think he's going to fool most.
I don't even think most Hispanics.
Hey, let's talk about a different story, a more grim story.
This was the... For a while there, the media was reporting about this 10-year-old girl who had to cross state lines to get an abortion because she had been raped.
Now... The story was very suspicious because no details about this were coming out.
Raped by whom?
Raped where? Under what circumstances?
Who filed criminal charges?
Has anyone been arrested?
Not a word about it.
And so a number of people, me included, but also the political scientist Jonathan Turley and others were like...
You know, it doesn't sound like this is even true.
We're getting so few details that it sounds like one of these cases where the left just made this up, almost like it's tailor-made for their narrative.
Well, it turns out they didn't make it up.
It turns out there is a 10-year-old, but guess what?
The reason we got nothing about it, the reason no details, the reason no reporting on the circumstances is...
The rapist was an illegal alien from Guatemala.
And the whole girl was too.
She was trafficked, was she not?
Yes. Well, it was Gerson Fuentes, charged with raping and impregnating a 10-year-old girl.
And so the media was covering up for the illegal.
Why? Not just because they cover for illegal generally, but because they wanted this to be a case about abortion.
They didn't want this to be a case about what it really is.
And what it really is, is a case of sex trafficking caused by their policies.
Right. By their very policies.
So they bear direct responsibility for the fate of the 10 year old because they've got this policy, Biden does, of working hand in hand with the cartels to bring all these traffickers, all these guys into this country.
And if you think about it, this is probably not an isolated case.
I'm sure there are a lot of ten-year-old girls coming in from South and Central America that are brutalized by men coming across the border.
And the Democrats should be held responsible for each one of them.
So the Democrats create the problem.
They cause, in a sense, indirectly by their permissiveness, the rape to occur.
And then they use the little girl as a kind of pawn to go, hey, we know we can't have an overturning of Roe versus Wade because we've got 10 year old girls who are getting raped.
Well, the reason the 10 year olds are getting raped is because of you.
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Feel the difference. Desperate to retain their control over Hispanics.
In fact, desperate to help Hispanics to go the way of the blacks.
The Democrats are pulling out all the stops.
Here's a news report, Fox News.
Soros says, Is making a takeover bid for a conservative set of radio stations.
Spanish radio stations.
Spanish radio stations.
It's called Radio Mambi.
And evidently there were conservative hosts and so on in these stations.
But Soros' idea is he doesn't want Hispanics to get...
To hear the truth, you mean?
He doesn't want them to hear the other side.
Let's not even necessarily call it the truth.
And so what's happening is that some of the prominent hosts, here's Dania Alexandrino.
She goes, listen, I'm not staying with Radio Mambi if it's being taken over by George Soros.
So the conservative stars of this Hispanic radio network are deciding to look for the exits and I hope look for alternative...
Media creations where we can keep alive a conservative presence because it's one thing for Hispanics to be sort of moving toward the Republican Party, but you need that diet of information, knowledge, to partly deconstruct what's being put out by Telemundo and Univision.
Telemundo and Univision are mouthpieces.
They're basically the Spanish version of CNN and MSNBC. I mean, let's face it.
Actually, I didn't see this. Alexandrina, this is the radio host.
She's going to be joining another host named Lourdes Ubieta.
And this is at Americano Media.
So, a recently launched conservative news organization that is basically gobbling up these radio personalities.
So, this is really good. There's that one.
Of course, there's El American, which has been trying to get the Hispanic, conservative Hispanic...
And so I hope that there's way more that are going to pop up because for every conservative station that Soros takes over, I hope 10 more conservative stations Are born out of that.
Well, I mean, you see how Soros, this is a guy who has, it's almost like he's, you know, he's kind of gone all in with the devil.
And by that, I mean, he's taking his billions.
Absolutely. And I've told you, I've told you before, it's not just in America.
This man is trying to make the entire world communist.
And he has taken all of South America, at least most of it, all of the communist takeover in South America, partly responsible for Soros.
In South America.
So this man is not just looking at America.
Of course, America is the big prize for him.
But he has decimated South America.
I mean, we know that he tried this in Hungary.
In fact, the Soros organization has been expelled from Hungary and I think is prohibited from activities in Hungary because they were trying to subvert the government over there.
So he's had mischief in Eastern Europe.
In Asia, currency manipulation.
So this is a very bad guy.
He's dangerous. But...
From a distance, I admire the fact that here's a guy who is committed to his worldview, who funds innumerable organizations, almost like a venture capitalist of leftist activism.
And we need more of this on our side.
Oh, absolutely. And the sad thing, honey, is that we do have people, maybe not in his perspective, Sure.
I mean, the Koch brothers have as much money as Soros.
Well, okay, so if they do. But we just don't have the, I don't know if it's the activist blood that we need to have on our side to combat this.
Because this guy uses his money very effectively on their side.
We don't have that on our side.
I mean, recently, Elon Musk, you know, trying to buy Twitter and all of that.
But, you know, Elon... You need to be the Soros that we need on our side.
Well, with Elon Musk, I think his red pilling is not complete.
And what I mean by that is that he tries to portray himself as a moderate who's just sort of now slightly right of center in the landscape that's been caused by the Democrat shifting left.
We need a little bit more of a warrior spirit against the left.
Now, I think Elon is on the right side of that, but what he isn't is he isn't a militant in the way that Soros is.
And you need to counter these guys, like Soros, with a creative militancy on our side.
Exactly right. Because we don't have the funds to be able to do that.
I mean, we can put out movies here and there and try to influence the culture that way, and we have.
But if we had Soros' money, oh, you wouldn't...
I mean, we've typically, by and large, been making movies...
The 2,000 mules was even less, but in the $5 million range, we'll then use another $5 million to market them.
But this is not in the scale of what Soros is doing, which is putting in billions.
Now, we have resources on our side, but many of them...
Even think of Fox News.
They've got tremendous resources.
If I were Fox, I'd hire 100 investigative reporters overnight, mobilize them to dig up all kinds of information on the left, its leaders, look at their tax returns, look at what's going on in their ordinary lives.
Think of what we could do if we not only had the resources which are available, but if they were deployed effectively.
In that sense, we have to say that George Soros, although on the dark side, can be a sort of model for our side as well.
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The Supreme Court has been making some terrific rulings recently.
Now, not all of them. There was a ruling that didn't go our way.
This was a ruling on the Remain in Mexico policy, where a couple of conservatives joined with the liberals.
But by and large, it's been, you know, whack, whack, whack for our side on gun rights, on religious freedom, of course, the big Dobbs abortion decision.
But you are making an interesting point about the fact that this, in a sense, has been a kind of a close call, that the court has delivered in this way.
It could have been otherwise. Well, you know, I always point out the Venezuelan model, the Hugo Chavez packing the court model.
And so the way that Venezuela was able to really lose its freedoms, all its freedoms, is that Hugo Chavez packed the Supreme Court To rule in everything in his favor on the left.
He became a rubbish fan. Exactly.
And so every time we have a ruling and it's six to three, I always think about what if it was reversed?
What if they had six and we had three?
All the freedoms that we would have lost by now.
First of all, we would have probably lost a religious freedom by now.
Yes. We probably have lost our gun rights by now, Second Amendment.
Free speech. Free speech, which conservatives actually have lost as a whole, but we would have lost it formally.
Formally. And so I think of all of these things, and I'm just horrified.
Well, you continue down the road.
I mean, equal protection of the laws, freedom of assembly, so that liberal courts, it turns out, are not only bad on the economic front, in which they defer to the state, they are supporters of centralized government.
I think the point you're making is that we have basic liberties in the Bill of Rights.
Which was supposed to be outside of political control.
In other words, neither party has the right to infringe those rights.
Those rights are in the Constitution.
Now you can amend the Constitution, take the First Amendment out, that's not gonna happen.
So you're talking about canceling these rights through interpretation.
Right. Well, look what they did with Roe v.
Wade. How and where was abortion in the Constitution, right?
But they manipulated it to say that it was, the language, right?
So think about that and then think about all these other things.
I mean, I just, I feel like we are, it's a ticking time bomb with these people.
If they are elected, if they continue to be elected, if people continue to vote Democrat, if they vote for Democratic president, I feel that we will lose our freedoms because they will shape the Supreme Court to their favor.
And when I say to their favor, it's anti-founders.
So, anti-constitution.
They'll change the constitution.
And they'll continue to demonize our founders.
So the point I think you're making is that the chasm between the two sides is wide enough that, unlike in the past where we could say, listen, we'll argue about taxes, we'll argue about how to fight the Soviet Union, but we do agree that free speech is a good thing.
We do agree on equal rights under the law.
What you're saying is we actually don't.
No, we don't. We don't agree even on those things.
No. And their America would be a nightmare for us.
Their America is what they want for us.
And conversely, they're acting as if our America is a nightmare for them.
That somehow, you know, if you listen to the hysterics of these women who are like, whoa, the court has overturned Roe versus Wade.
And even though I'm in New Jersey or I'm in California.
Right. But they act as if they feel threatened.
And you have to believe that at a certain level, they are freaked out.
They're not purely play actings.
No. They're politically freaked out.
Right. But the media has a lot to do with that, too.
The media has kind of gone along with this notion that now women cannot have abortion, you know?
Right. And so they are not saying, listen, if you live in a liberal state, you can not only have an abortion, but you can basically deliver the child and, you know...
What is it called?
Smother. Smother it to death, you know, which is horrific.
But it happens. It happens more than you know.
Apparently, a recent poll shows that majority of Democrats' young people want to abolish Supreme Court.
And see, right there, you see that on the Democratic side...
You know, they keep talking about subversion of democratic government.
Well, democratic government in the United States, constitutional democracy, has three branches.
And the court is a part of this constitutional democratic scheme.
So it is against that scheme to want to abolish the court.
Right. They want to abolish this court, but they want a court that will do their bidding.
Yes, absolutely. So it's very scary.
And again, you know, I feel like what are our grandchildren's children?
What America are they going to be living in?
Well, part of what they seem to say is that they don't like the court because they're majoritarian.
The court is undermining majority rule.
But see, this cuts both ways because if the left is saying that when they are the majority, they get to run roughshod over our rights...
That means that when we're the majority, we get to run roughshod over their rights.
But you know we never do.
We never do. But more importantly, our constitutional scheme was designed so that neither side would have...
So that we couldn't do that.
I mean, this is what the founders meant by tyranny of the majority.
And that seems to be now, for the Democrats, not a danger to be avoided, but a recipe to be pursued.
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For our last segment together, before I turn to the Iliad, We thought we'd do a playful segment, and this is our word game.
And you can play too, but we're going to play WNIR. And the way that this works is that I pick a word, and it's usually a really difficult word, but...
Usually a word that I like.
And then what I do is I come up with four definitions of the word, all of which are fairly plausible, but obviously only one of which is the correct definition of the word.
Debbie's job is to react to my definitions and say which one she thinks it is.
And just for the record, I don't know what these words are.
Right, I gave her the words right before, so we can put them up on the screen, but Debbie doesn't know the meaning of either of these two words.
So we're going to do them. You might know them, but if you don't know them, then you need to join the guessing game.
We're going to do two of these words.
So here's the first one. So this word is antediluvian.
So, anti, A-N-T-E, anti, D-I-L-U-V-I-A-N, antediluvian.
All right, honey. So, there are four possible meanings of this word, okay?
You can make a note if you want to about which one you think it is.
So, the first one, antediluvian, well, as you know, the word anti means like before.
Before, okay. So, before the invention of writing.
If something occurred before the invention of writing, it's antediluvian.
That's the first definition.
The second one, anti can be before, but it can also mean behind.
And so antediluvian is somebody who is leading from behind.
Remember how people said about Obama is leading from behind?
It's an antediluvian strategy.
Leading from behind is the second definition of antediluvian.
The third one. Before the flood.
We're talking about the ancient flood in the Bible.
Antediluvian means before the flood.
And so metaphorically, it means really very old.
And so you can say something like, you know, I was an antediluvian character entered the room.
I looked over and sure enough, it was Joe Biden.
He's so old that it's almost as if he existed before the flood.
Antediluvian. And number four...
Antediluvian is, there was a Roman soldier in ancient times named Deluvian.
And antediluvian means someone who's against him.
So being anti the Roman soldier Deluvian and his forces would be antediluvian.
So those are the four definitions.
Which one do you think it is?
Gosh, well...
Okay, I'm going to scratch out the number four.
You don't think it's the soldier? I don't think it's the Roman soldier.
I just... I'm going to also take out the very old before the flood.
Okay. So...
And I'm going to probably take out the anti-behind leading from...
I'm going to go with before invention of writing.
Before invention of writing.
Oh... Close, but incorrect.
Oh, no. Actually, antediluvian means before the flood.
Oh! Because diluvian, think about it, diluvian is like the deluge.
Diluvian is from the same root as the deluge, which is a flood.
So, antediluvian before the flood.
Okay. All right, so that's...
I would have said antediluvian. Whatever, but diluvian?
Diluvian. All right.
Here we come to our second word.
Okay, scratch off...
Alright, so honey, you are currently zero for one.
But you have a chance to even the score here.
This one seems harder to me.
This one seems harder even.
So this word is steatopagus.
S-T-E-A-T-O-P-Y-G-O-U-S. Steatopagus.
Okay. First definition.
Okay. Steatopagus is a type of ancient dinosaur.
In fact, it's a short form of Steatopagus rex.
So, you know, you have Tyrannosaurus rex and so on.
I've never heard of that one. You have Steatopagus rex.
It's just one of those creatures who are really weird looking and existed 200 million years ago, eliminated ultimately by an asteroid.
So the first one is Steatopagus rex.
Okay. Number two... Steatopagus means getting sweaty under your armpits.
So it was kind of like I was doing my exam or I was, you know, I was listening to Kamala Harris talk and it was making me very uncomfortable.
And so I felt myself getting a little steatopagus.
Third, steatopagus just means it relates to slumber and it means really sleepy, really lethargic, really inactive.
Steatopagus. And fourth, steatopagus.
No, I cannot believe you put this one in there.
The fourth one is steatopagus means having an extremely large buttocks.
Steatopagus. Like, I heard a violent sound.
A large object entered the room.
It was steatopagus Oprah Winfrey.
So, steatopagus is an adjective referring to a person with a giant butt.
Which one do you think it is?
Okay, I don't think it's that one.
Okay, what do you think it is of the other three?
I think it's sleepy. Number three, so you don't think it's steatopagus rex, and you don't think it's sweaty under the armpits?
No. You think it's lethargic or sleepy?
I think so. Honey, I hate to tell you, you're wrong again.
You're a zero for two.
Steatopagus, in fact, means having a large butt.
That's what it actually means.
Oh, no way! Yes.
So... Why don't...
I mean... Really?
That's what it is. Look it up.
Steatopagus. Wow.
I mean, that's the one I thought was like your invention.
Well, that's why I knew you would think that.
So there we go.
So the point of all this is to have fun while expanding your vocabulary and learning unusual words that will surprise people.
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For more information, call 855-565-5519 or visit StandWithIsraelTour.com In Book 3 of the Iliad, we begin by seeing the great Trojan warrior Hector, the eldest son of King Priam, approach his younger brother Paris, and he scolds him.
He says, I'm now quoting, Can't you just hear it?
The long-haired Greeks chuckling and saying that our champion wins for good looks, but comes up short in the fighting.
You're nothing but trouble for your father and your city, a joke to your enemies and an embarrassment to yourself.
So this is the elder brother, Hector, reading the riot act to Paris and basically saying, yeah, you're a great seducer bringing Helen over here.
Look what it's got us.
You're a disgrace to your family and to your country.
Look at all the harm you've done.
This chastisement gets to Paris and Paris agrees with Hector that Hector should propose a one-on-one duel between Paris and Menelaus.
Menelaus, of course, the husband of Helen of Troy.
And basically, Hector says, listen, if you get killed, you get killed.
But this is a way to...
You want to fight over Helen?
Fight over Helen.
And the winner gets her.
And this will spare the rest of us...
All this hardship and all this bloodshed.
Now, of course, Menelaus, who's a seasoned old fighter, quickly agrees to this idea.
Paris is not exactly known for his prowess on the battlefield.
And sure enough, in Homer's description, Paris is taking a massive beating In fact, he's on the verge of being killed by Menelaus.
And then we have, well, divine intervention.
Divine intervention in the form of Aphrodite.
Now Aphrodite is on the side of the Trojans.
But most especially, she's on the side of Paris.
I need to pull back at this point and describe a scene that is part of the story of the Trojan War, but is not in the Iliad at all.
It's not clear whether or not Homer knows this story.
He probably does, but he doesn't allude to it anywhere in the Iliad.
It's called the Judgment of Paris.
So evidently, Before the Trojan War, in fact, before Paris even met Helen, there was an argument among the three of the goddesses on Mount Olympus.
And they all went to Paris and they said, you should pick me.
In other words, they wanted Paris to pick one of them as their favorite, as his favorite.
And And Hera, the wife of King Zeus, said to Paris, If you pick me, I will give you command over many cities.
I will give you, in a sense, political control and superiority.
And then Athena, the goddess of war and also of justice, says to Paris, If you pick me, I will give you great strength in battle, and I will give you great valor.
And Aphrodite, the goddess of love, basically said, If you pick me, I will give you, as your wife, the most beautiful woman in the world.
So, Paris...
I'm about to say, being a man, picked Aphrodite.
But I want to emphasize that when I say this, I hold myself back because Paris, in picking Aphrodite, goes against the values of his own society.
In the values of ancient Greece, of the Homeric society, if you will, Paris should absolutely have picked military glory first.
Control over a major city, second.
And marrying the most beautiful woman in the world, third.
But instead, he goes the other way and he picks Aphrodite.
And so this is the beginning of the problem.
Because having picked Aphrodite, who's the most beautiful woman in the world?
Well, it's actually... Aphrodite is not the most beautiful woman because she's a goddess.
She represents, you may say, physical and sexual love.
But the most beautiful woman in the world is Helen.
And so, since Aphrodite promised the most beautiful woman in the world to Paris, so happens she's married to Menelaus, this is the beginning of all the difficulty.
You can see here how divine action, and in fact the so-called judgment of Paris, is the beginning of the Trojan War.
Because the gods themselves have now arranged for Paris to abduct Helen.
Now, again, as I say, the action works on the divine level and the human level.
But let's fast forward now.
And here we are. Paris is taking a beating from Menelaus.
He's lying prostrate on the battlefield.
He cannot get up.
He's about to be speared.
And what happens? Aphrodite goes onto the battlefield.
Aphrodite whisked Paris away with the sleight of a goddess, enveloping him in mist and lofting him into the incensed air of his vaulted bedroom.
Aphrodite sort of saves Paris.
And here again, I want to emphasize that Aphrodite can't be a fiction of Paris's imagination.
Aphrodite actually goes on the battlefield, lifts him up and carries him, puts him into his own bed in his bedroom, and then goes, well, to get Helen.
I've been talking about how the goddess Aphrodite rushes onto the battlefield, grabs the Trojan prince Paris, and saves them from slaughter at the hands of Menelaus.
And right away you may have noticed something that might, in a sense, be a problem, which is to say...
Wait a second. You've got the Greeks and the Trojans.
And why are the Trojans relating to the same gods as the Greeks?
It may seem odd when you have two different people.
The Trojans are now in modern-day Turkey.
And it would seem that as a different civilization, they would have different gods.
And why would Greek gods, in this case Aphrodite, intervene on the Trojan side?
Well, as it turns out, in the Homeric epics, the Greeks and the Trojans have the same gods.
They don't worship different gods.
Not only do they have the same gods, they pray to the same gods.
Now, the gods may take one side or the other, but it's the same panoply of gods that both sides are appealing to, in the same way that in the American Civil War, the North and the South, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out, prayed for a different outcome, of course, but to the same god.
Not only do the Greeks and the Trojans have the same gods, they also speak the same language.
They speak Greek.
And it's not because Homer thinks everybody speaks Greek.
In fact, he describes other peoples allied with the Trojans who speak other languages, incomprehensible to the Greeks.
But the Trojans and the Greeks will meet on the battlefield.
They will talk to each other.
In some cases, they will taunt each other.
I'm going to kill you. Wait till you see what I'm going to do to you, and so on.
And they are perfectly understandable to each other, so they're clearly speaking the same language.
I think that the reason that Homer does this is to humanize the Trojans, to make it really clear that you're not dealing with some alien barbarian force, different gods, different language.
We can't really understand what they are.
They sound like twittering birds or barking dogs.
No. These are people who are human like we are, meaning the Greeks.
They're human like the Greeks are.
They speak the same language.
They're part, in a sense, of the same civilization.
Now, here Aphrodite deposits Paris in his bed and goes to get Helen.
Now, interestingly, this is the first interaction we get between Helen and Aphrodite, but also between Helen and Paris.
This is the sort of, quote, happy couple that are the cause of this war.
And yet, when Aphrodite goes to get Helen, Helen doesn't want to go.
Aphrodite is like, let's go see Paris.
And Helen's like, I'm not going.
And Helen basically feels degraded, feels disgraced.
And Aphrodite gets furious with her.
Aphrodite basically says, you better come with me or I will make both the Greeks and the Trojans hate you.
And what is the fate of a woman who has caused all this trouble, who is now despised by both sides?
It's not going to go well for you, Helen.
And so reluctantly, Helen goes to see Paris.
And the first things that she says to Paris are...
Downright unbelievable. Quote, back from the war, you should have died out there beaten by a real hero, my former husband.
So here's Helen. Not that she's in love with Menelaus, but she knows that Menelaus is, in fact, a very good warrior.
He's a very good fighter. And the first thing she says to Paris is, why are you here?
He should have killed you. I wish he killed you.
And so, right away, you begin to get, as a reader or listener to the Iliad, a sense of the deep futility of this war.
Because, think about it, Greeks and Trojans are dying by the, not the tens, not the hundreds, but ultimately the thousands, over this supposed romance between Paris and Helen.
And yet, the first glance you get of Paris and Helen They're not in a romantic frame of mind.
Paris himself feels a kind of defensive guilt.
Guilt not over having abducted Helen so much, but guilt over all the suffering that he's causing to his fellow Trojans.
He's been chastised for this by Hector, his older brother.
And Helen is just downright contemptuous and dismissive of him.
Now, again, I talked earlier about this issue of displacement.
How is it that Helen is talking about Homer is describing to King Priam the major figures on the battlefield.
And why is this occurring in the ninth year of the war?
This should be occurring at the beginning of the war.
So Homer doesn't mind giving you this kind of displacement.
It should occur earlier, but it's occurring now.
And similarly, why are Paris and Menelaus fighting a one-on-one battle in the ninth year of the war?
If they wanted to avoid all this suffering at the beginning of the war, they could have said, hey, listen, let's not have countries fight over this.
Why don't you and I have a one-to-one battle on the battlefield?
Whoever wins keeps Helen.
The whole Trojan War can be avoided.
But again, in a technique of narrative displacement, that does not occur in the first year of the war, which is not covered in the Iliad.
Homer brings it into the early part of the Iliad.
It's occurring in the ninth year of the war.
But it leads to this dramatic encounter between Paris and Helen, in which Helen, far from saying, hey Paris, come join me, essentially says, not only take a hike, but I wish you were dead.
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