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Aug. 24, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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DOWNWARD SPIRAL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep399
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Coming up, looks like Joe Manchin is on a downward spiral, very much like Liz Cheney, and for the same reason.
I'll examine leftist arguments if Republicans are against democracy by asking the question, was America founded as a democracy in the first place?
And I'm going to conclude my discussion today of Homer's Iliad and kind of ask the question of why we read these very old books from faraway places.
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.
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Many people, me included, are annoyed with Joe Manchin.
Why? Because Joe Manchin seems to play a now familiar, tediously familiar, and downright exasperating game.
The game is this, that Manchin tells his constituents that he is not an ordinary Democrat.
He's not a Democrat of today.
He might be a Democrat of old, but he's not a Democrat like today's Democrats.
He's not a Pelosi Democrat.
He's not a Schumer Democrat.
He's a West Virginia Democrat, which means that he is a centrist, he is a moderate, he tries to bring parties together, and he is driven by, really, West Virginia values, what's good for West Virginia.
And this has allowed Manchin to be elected and reelected.
How? Because he gets the moderate Democrats of West Virginia, and then he gets a fair amount of Republicans, who are, by the way, a majority In West Virginia, Trump won the state decisively.
And these are people who trust Manchin to live up to his end of the bargain.
In other words, to be what he says he is.
And Manchin then turns around, and this is not the first time he's done this, and betrays the bargain.
So he holds out, giving people hope and encouragement.
Yeah, that's Manchin, and Manchin is going to remember he's not a normal Democrat.
And then at the end of it, what Manchin does is he cuts a deal with the Democrats.
Maintaining his standing within the party.
And so here's this very influential Democrat at a critical time when the Senate is 50-50 and Manchin knows he has the power to swing things one way or the other.
He holds out and then he swings with the Democrats.
So he ends up, in the most recent case, approving a giant spending bill that's basically a worthless...
Non-inflation curing.
Add to the problems of this country.
Get into all the climate change nonsense.
And Manchin professes not to be for all that.
I want to fight inflation.
And then he signs on to a bill that even its advocates, who know something about economics, are now conceding, well, this is really not going to do much about inflation.
So you think to yourself, you know, aren't West Virginians going to wake up to this madness?
I mean, here you have a state that is, in a sense, electing a guy that doesn't represent the state, that turns on and betrays his own voters, and does it repeatedly.
And so, are the voters of West Virginia sort of like the battered spouse who keeps coming back for more?
Well, as it turns out, there's some recent poll numbers, and these were actually talked about by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press.
He had a very interesting comparison between Liz Cheney and Joe Manchin.
So, a comparison I wouldn't normally have thought of.
I mean, you don't put those two together, but they're similar in this one respect.
And that is, they are thumbing their nose in a kind of blatant way at their own constituents.
In Liz Cheney's case, and Debbie and I discussed this on the podcast yesterday, there's kind of an ulterior motive.
And Liz Cheney's motive is, I'm now playing to a new constituency.
I'm playing to the left.
I'm playing to the media. I'm playing to MSNBC. And maybe Liz Cheney sees her future as the head of a liberal foundation or a college president of some sort.
But what about Manchin?
Well, it turns out what Chuck Todd points out is that Liz Cheney's approval rating has dipped to 28% in Wyoming.
I mean, think about it. She once had a dynasty.
She could probably command approval ratings of 70 or 80% or higher.
It's dropped into the 20s.
But Manchin has an 11% approval rating right now in West Virginia.
And this means, I think, That there are progressive Democrats, and there aren't a whole lot of those, but they're mad at him.
But it may be that the Republicans of West Virginia have realized that this guy is bad news.
This guy is not as bad as the worst of the Democrats, but in a sense, he always ends up on their bandwagon.
He ends up in their camp.
So by succumbing to them in the end...
We get Nancy Pelosi.
We get Schumer.
And the West Virginians are getting Schumer.
And to the degree that they're voting for Manchin, they're voting for Schumer.
They're voting for Pelosi.
So I think what you see is that West Virginia, and while Liz Cheney, of course, had her day of comeuppance, And Harriet Hageman trounced her decisively, what, 35-point margin?
Now, Manchin has two years, and for some politicians, it's like, okay, you know what?
I've got two more years to bamboozle the people of West Virginia.
I'll try to make them forget that I voted for this big spending bill.
Hopefully, people have short memories, and so I can reemerge as kind of centrist Joe Manchin.
I'm going to be defending West Virginia.
Even as he sells West Virginia out as a practical matter.
So I think it's time for West Virginians to give Joe Manchin the boot because we are paying dearly for their, so far, willingness to stick with this guy.
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One of the consistent themes of the left these days is to attack conservatives and attack Republicans for somehow undermining democracy.
They're passing voter suppression laws that undermine democracy.
They're engaged in partisan gerrymandering that undermines democracy.
They want to uphold the filibuster, which is a restriction on democracy.
And there's an interesting article I want to discuss that is in The New Yorker by Louis Menand.
Louis Menand's a smart guy.
I've actually crossed swords with him a few times before.
He was one of the early intelligent critics of illiberal education, my very first book out in 1991.
And I think at that time, Menand was at NYU. He's subsequently been at Harvard.
He might still be at Harvard.
But in any event, he's got this essay in The New Yorker called, American Democracy Was Never Designed to be Democratic.
And I was reading the article and kind of laughing through it because he's right.
Now, let's see what Menand is trying to say because he's trying to give a left-wing message to the left.
But the message happens to be one that we can heartily endorse, even though we're coming from the opposite end of the political spectrum.
Basically, what Menand is saying to the left is, listen, you keep complaining that the right is undemocratic.
And you're acting as though we have a pure democratic system in this country.
America is a kind of democracy across the board.
And the right is somehow acting in a sort of way that subverts that.
And Menand goes, but America's never been a democracy.
The founders weren't believers in pure democracy.
America has democratic elements, but it also has republican elements.
And quite frankly, it has very clearly undemocratic elements, by which I mean elements designed explicitly and deliberately to cut against democracy.
And Manan's point is, isn't your beef, he's telling the left, not with the right, But with the American system itself.
So I think what Menendez is calling for is maybe a reexamination.
He doesn't really say he wants the American system to be like overthrown.
But I think what he's saying is let's focus on the problem.
The problem, he says, is really the American system.
It's in the Constitution. It's the way the Senate is structured.
The Senate was never structured to give people from large states and people from small states The same proportional weight.
In fact, the Senate was structured to make sure that small states also have two senators, the same as large states.
Why? This way the large states wouldn't simply politically overrun the small states.
And partisan gerrymandering is, in fact, a two-man game, by which I mean Republicans do it, Democrats do it, too.
The Supreme Court was designed and is, in fact, a kind of undemocratic institution, by which I mean justices aren't picked by election.
They're nominated not for four years or six years, but they're nominated for generally lifetime terms.
Their job is to affirm the Bill of Rights, to protect rights that are individual rights that were deliberately put in there, into the Bill of Rights, into the Constitution, to be secure.
From majoritarian overthrow or from majoritarian overriding.
Even the majority doesn't have the right.
95% of Americans don't have the right to tell you what religion to practice.
98% of Americans don't have the right to tell you what you can say or what you can believe.
Your rights to assembly, your rights against unreasonable search and seizure, these are immune So, Manant knows all this, and I think part of what he's doing is he's basically reminding the left that we have a system.
Now, there are some conservatives who say, you know, we don't live in a democracy.
And the founders, while they do have statements where they kind of, they distinguish democracy from their own republican system of government, what the founders are really doing is they're talking about ancient democracy, which was direct democracy.
The ordinary citizen deciding directly about what the government should do.
We obviously don't have that.
We have representative democracy.
We elect other people, people like Manchin, like Liz Cheney, and others, to act in our stead, representative democracy.
So the American system has democratic elements.
It has Republican elements.
It has anti-majoritarian elements.
And I would argue this is part of what makes the system so durable and so strong.
When you think about revolutions, when you think about constitutions, there are a lot of countries that have had 30, 40, 50 constitutions.
They overthrow one, they do another, they overthrow that one, they pick up another one.
You have countries that have had revolutions that have failed.
Think of the Russian Revolution, think of the French Revolution, which failed when you had the terror, and then the overthrow of the revolution with the coming of Napoleon.
The American Revolution has endured since really the 1780s.
The Constitution has endured, not without amendment, but still live in relatively few amendments.
Again, going back more than 200 years.
Why is that? There must be something particularly resilient about such a system.
And I would argue that this is a system that far from needing to be somehow abridged or changed is a system whose virtues we need to rediscover now.
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Feel the difference. Guys, we have a new guest for you today, someone who hasn't been on the podcast before, but I'm looking forward to this.
It's Matthew Peterson, co-founder and president of a group called New Founding, and their website is newfounding.com.
Matthew Peterson is a publisher of Return, and he's also the president of the Firebrand Super and founder of the American Mind, a publication of the Claremont Institute, and Matthew, welcome to the podcast.
You have been making a very interesting case that I want to talk to you about, that it is not enough to complain about the wokeness of American corporations.
Because, as I understand it, here we are subsidizing them and using their products even as we complain about them.
We need a more well-thought-out strategy, and you have one to recommend.
So let's begin by talking about the problem and about the way in which, you may say, we are implicated in it.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think that a lot of your audience feels this.
You and I feel this. There's a frustration when our own money, our own lifeblood is being used against us, right?
I mean, you can say you're going to boycott, say, Amazon or Target, but the fact of the matter is that's very difficult to do, and it really is not a practical strategy.
And so what is going on right now is now they're using your 401k, they're using your investments and these large financial vehicles, turning it against you to keep these corporations woke.
And so I think what we have to get away from is the idea that, well, go woke, go broke, eventually it will all just turn around.
It's not going to turn around anytime soon unless people band together and do something.
And the question is, you know, what do we do?
But I think the problem is people feel stuck and they need to realize if they don't that billions of dollars are under the thumb of woke capital.
And that's not changing anytime soon.
There's no working professional in tech, media and finance who's, you know, leans right and is quietly sitting there waiting to get fired if their views are known, who thinks this is going to turn around anytime soon.
So that's the problem, I think, and it's a very, very serious one because that money funds the left's entire project.
I mean, couldn't one extend the diagnosis even further by saying that precisely the same scenario applies to woke universities?
Both universities get money from state legislatures.
That's part of how the state universities get funded.
Private universities are funded by, obviously, by tuition, but also by alumni contributions.
And so we are, through the universities, bankrolling both the indoctrination, but to some degree the moral corruption of our own offspring.
And again, what you're saying is this is not a problem that fixes itself.
It's something that needs an organized response.
So let's shift to the organized response.
Talk about the way that you think about it and what do you think conservatives need to do?
Yeah, so first, what to do about it.
I mean, I can't control the largest corporations in the world.
And I think there's, you know, absolutely, we should be putting pressure on them.
There's efforts to get shareholders together.
That's all A-plus stuff.
They need to do that. But they're sort of like big ships that have been cannibalized by the pirates, you know?
They're going to last a while, and they're not going to change.
What we can do, though, is make them feel threatened.
And that's not through boycotts.
That's through funding alternatives.
So what I notice is, and what's heartening, and what your audience should take heart in, it's a silver lining in these times, is that there are plenty of small mom-and-pop shops and medium-sized, small-to-medium-sized businesses throughout this country A lot of them based in red state America, but not exclusively so, of business owners and CEOs who have had it with this stuff.
They can't stand this stuff.
And they are perfectly willing to fly a different flag, especially when they know now it's in their financial interest to do so, because they can become the non-woke alternative to the larger company.
And that's what gets me excited because that's all of a sudden where you draw blood.
When they notice that, wait a minute, these companies are actually starting to threaten me around the margins or a little bit more and a little bit more.
You take a $10- $15 million company and change it into a $50- $60 million company, everyone in that sector is going to notice.
And that is what we need to do.
But in order to do that, we need a positive vision of what our movement is about.
And this is the biggest thing I think the right has to work on.
You can't defeat that positive with a negative.
Wokeness is like unto a religion.
It does give people an opportunity to engage in virtue and vice and public reconciliation, right?
All these things that matter to people.
It gives their jobs meaning.
As sad as that is to say, right, for us, looking at how terrible this is, it gives the meaning.
What are we doing on the positive?
It can't just be we're neutral.
Business is going back to neutral.
We need a positive vision of an American way of life that is obviously pro-human, pro-family, but we need to show that.
We need to show what that looks like.
And then you can sell products and services around that because it's an attractive vision.
And if we can start doing that, we start to shift billions of dollars out from underwoke capital.
This is very important stuff, Matthew.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, I'd like to explore more concretely how this can be done.
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The recession, too, is real.
Again, they're denying it.
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I'm back with entrepreneur and strategist Matthew Peterson.
He's the co-founder and president of newfounding.com.
Check it out. Also founder of the American Mind, a publication of the Claremont Institute.
Matthew, in a sense, it seems to me you're recommending, well, let me loosely call it the Fox News model.
Because as I remember, for decades, you had a number of organizations that would criticize bias in the media.
The media is so left-wing.
But conservatives didn't have any alternative.
And then Roger Ailes came around and said, well, if we're right that half the country is not being served...
Why don't we create a new channel and people are going to flock to it because there's a demand for it and we're just supplying to those customers.
What you seem to be saying is that this is also true across the board.
It's not just in media.
People don't want to subsidize woke corporations.
In fact, what you're saying is there's a market for anti-wokeness.
Am I right in understanding you?
And if so, tell us how that market can be tapped.
Yeah, I think Fox News in the beginning is a perfect example because it was saying we're going in a wholly new direction.
We're going in with the news and with entertainment, right?
With everything. And I think now the problem is usually whose editorial vision is at the top, who sees what unifies half plus the country, right?
And can get that right.
And so right now that half plus the country, we're atomized.
We don't have a lot of outlets to see even how half the country lives.
It's not allowed. You're not allowed to show that on TV. You could not show a happy, successful, conservative, traditional family on normal television.
That would never get greenlit.
We all know this. Well, that's devastating.
And that really hurts.
And this is why all these forms of media are so, so important because they help sell products and services, right?
They bind it together into a movement.
We don't have that. So that opportunity, I think, is there now.
How do we get there? That's a difficult question, right?
But first... The absolute first thing we need to realize is we have to think a lot bigger than we've been thinking in the past.
We have to think, what would actually solve this problem?
Have the attitude of a winner.
What would winning look like?
You know this yourself from what you have gone out and done, right, in terms of media.
You have to think, what does it take to win?
And if that takes alternative institutions, then damn it, that's what we're going to do, right?
But I think the difference now is it's much more practical than it was in the past because the demand is there.
Because people are pining for this.
And because the wokeness is so all-pervasive, anything that goes in the other direction stands out immediately and people gravitate towards.
So, you know, we can get into some practical details, but that I think is the, you know, that's the move.
The Fox News is the model.
We need to build new things, but they have to be identified as part of a movement.
Let me give you one example just real quick in politics.
It might help people understand where we're at.
In the commercial and cultural space.
You know, politics right now is really hard.
It's hard for people to look at who's the real America First candidate.
You know, who's really going to move us forward, right?
And they're looking for some credentialing body, almost to say, this person is good.
This person is establishment.
This person is a grifter. Like, they want to see that.
You know, they want to see someone tell them, what are the good ones?
It's the same way with companies.
It's the same way with products.
They need that curation.
Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah.
I know that, for example, even in the Christian space, you have coalitions of Christian entrepreneurs.
If you want a Christian realtor or if you want to support Christian business, there are sort of directories where you can do that.
Would it be right to say that kind of where you're pointing is that we have to create, and I'll put this in the most ambitious way possible, we have to create our own America inside of America.
And by that I mean our own schools, our own universities, our own comedy, our own movies, so that we can live in that America inside.
Hopefully in peaceful coexistence with other people who want to live in a different sort of America.
But this allows us to flourish in a world where we are not constantly being battered by the other side and forced to pay them to batter us.
Absolutely. I think that's absolutely it.
We need an economy within an economy, a culture within a culture.
And there's no reason we can't have that, because we have the numbers, and we have the desire, and we have the need.
I think it's giving people permission to realize it's okay to think that way.
And one thing that people will say is, well, Matt, what you're describing is going to tear the country apart.
And I would say the country is already being torn apart.
This could actually help us retake America.
It's the only way out is through.
We have to band together and start to reward the businesses and the culture that we want and build the things we want together with people of like mind.
The idea that that would be considered wrong in some way is ridiculous.
I mean, that's going to destroy you at this point if you stay in some of these places or you let your kids be educated by these people.
And so you see winning examples all around.
You can say in education, look at Hillsdale, look at what Larry Arnn, another fellow Claremontster, Look at Fox News, what they did.
Regardless of where it's at now, what they created was amazing.
What Ailes' vision was realized.
No one thought it was possible. And now you have all these people.
The first sign of what's going on is all these people moving across the country.
And it's not just blue locusts from blue states moving.
You have significant evidence that places like, it's not all roses, but places like Texas and Florida are redditing They're becoming more conservative.
And so people are moving.
And you also see any business that kind of plants a flag for just five seconds, people will flock to when they say it's not woke.
So really where we're at is thinking we need the most talented people out there to start banding together.
In finance, tech, and media to start thinking about how we incubate the things that are needed that will really help drive a movement, light a fire that just, you know, starts lighting itself all over the place.
Matthew, these are great ideas, and maybe I'll just recommend you start thinking about, and I can help you with this as well.
we should do some sort of a summit where we explore all this in more concrete detail, because I'll tell you that, you know, the donors, the billionaires on our side, they know there's a problem, but they don't have a clear understanding of what it is and what they can do about it. Very often their solution is something like, let's have a dinner for Joe Manchin to make sure, to try to see if we can get him to hold out for like one more week before the lions start eating us. And this, I think you're, what you're saying is hardly a viable
long-term strategy. Hey, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Here we go.
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I want to talk in the next couple of segments about the University of Tennessee.
And the reason I'm doing this is because...
It illustrates the way in which the problems that we're dealing with, in this case, a kind of woke infiltration of the universities, is a problem that is not only on the other side, but to some degree our fault, our side. Why?
Because we are in a position to do something about a problem.
Now, if you are in a position to do something about a problem and you don't, It doesn't fall.
You caused the problem. You're not the cause of it.
Somebody else caused it. But you can fix it.
And if you don't fix it, well, in that sense, you are allowing the problem to continue.
I won't say that you are an accessory to it, but you are at least a kind of enabler of it.
You're in a position to prevent it, and you don't.
Now, Recently, there was a very eye-opening series that came from a guy named John Saylor.
John Saylor is a kind of academic researcher, and he talked about the University of Putting out its diversity action plan.
And this action plan is unbelievably ambitious.
It infuses the whole diversity idea, not just by the way into the humanities, not just into the social sciences, but even into places like economics.
Even into places like chemistry, even into places like the College of Veterinary Medicine, the college, the Haslam School of Business, the College of Law, the College of Engineering.
In all these places, you have to essentially demonstrate your fidelity to wokeness, to diversity and diversity.
To inclusion and equity.
And equity here, by the way, is not equality.
Equity is equal representation.
And so all of this kind of ideological rot has crept into the University of Tennessee.
And if you follow John Saylor, by the way, you can follow him on Twitter, at John D. Saylor, he has the receipts.
I mean, he has chapter and verse, and it's a long series.
And all he does is he includes Sections from the university's own policy documents.
So he's got the goods on the University of Tennessee.
Look, in the College of Engineering, students are required to write a two-page essay reflecting on their own biases.
And this is in the College of Engineering.
So apparently your biases, your racial biases, can creep into engineering.
You're supposed to somehow...
So this kind of...
I mean, this almost reminds you of what happened in some of the extreme socialist countries where, you know, the science became infected with Marxist ideology, and ultimately the science itself kind of ground to a halt.
And Russia, which was once in the forefront of science, basically dropped to a backward country.
So this is a serious problem at the University of Tennessee, but the point I want to make is, it's a serious problem in a Republican state.
Now, what does this mean?
What it means is that the University of Tennessee Chancellor, this is Don D. Plowman, who has been pushing all this.
And by the way, not surprisingly, a lot of this stuff goes all the way back to George Floyd.
Because right after George Floyd, everybody sort of takes a bow, and everybody takes a vow, and they say, we've got to remake the whole university now in light of this incident, and we've got to have diversity and equity and inclusion in everything we do, stretching from top to bottom.
So think about it.
For two years now, the University of Tennessee has, in a sense, declared what it's about to do.
It declared what it's about to do, remake the university along diversity lines, then it set about doing it, a two-year process.
Now that process has reached its fruition, so they're actually putting it into effect.
And the question is, why aren't Republicans who dominate the state, who dominate the governorship, who dominate the legislature, who actually appoint people to the board that runs the University of Tennessee, who are responsible for the choosing and advancement of the president and other top officials, why don't the Republicans who are in a position to fix the problem, fix it?
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I'm talking about the University of Tennessee and the woke ideology that the university is now promulgating the result of a two-year process.
And the point I'm making is that Republicans have the power to block this To stop it?
In fact, to promote its exact opposite.
And yet, the weak-kneed response of Republicans at the University of Tennessee, in Tennessee, shows, I think, a broader problem, and that is Republicans never take the full measure of the problem, never assess what their own power is, and never use it.
So let's look at what Republicans are doing and not doing.
First of all, The chancellor of the university, this plowman, is an appointee of the University of Tennessee president.
His name is Randy Boyd.
Okay. Well, how did he get there?
Well, turns out he's appointed by the university board of trustees.
Well, who appoints them?
It turns out every single one of these trustees is nominated and appointed by the governor of Tennessee.
And who is that? A Republican.
Bill Lee. So when a Republican is nominating the trustees who picked the president of the system, who then picked the chancellor of that particular university, who does the power reside with?
The Republicans. Republicans control almost three-fourths, almost 75% of the statehouse.
They have held at least 70 out of 99 seats since 2012.
In short, this is a state that we control.
And so it would seem obvious that the Republicans are in a position to change and, first of all, to stop all the bad stuff that the University of Tennessee is doing, to basically stop this woke stuff in its tracks, and to advance honest learning, real debate, free speech at the University of Tennessee.
Now, I won't say that the Republicans are doing absolutely nothing.
It turns out that they have a bill that is making its way through the legislature, and the bill basically says that college students and staff can sue the university if they are being discriminated against on the basis of, quote, Divisive concepts.
So, in other words, if the university is trying to force you, for example, to utter woke precepts or woke ideology, you can fight back by suing the university.
Now, this is a very limited and defensive measure because think of what it concedes.
It concedes that the university can push woke propaganda.
They can do it through the classroom.
They can impose all kinds of administrative penalties.
And if you object...
You need to have the power to either fight back or get an exemption.
It's kind of like saying that they can push woke religion, but if you have a different religion, you can say, hey, listen, I don't want to be under the woke umbrella.
I want to be granted a kind of exemption or immunity.
I'm a conscientious objector to woke ideology.
So they're carving out a little space.
In which the Republican or the conservative can live inside of this woke institution.
But this, of course, begs the question, why do we have a woke institution?
Why aren't the tables completely turned?
Why isn't this a conservative university where liberals have to be conscientious objectors?
Why shouldn't liberals basically get the right to sue the university if they're forcing Christian nationalism on its students?
Why aren't the Republicans, in other words, in a Republican state?
Making this a university that reflects Republican values.
Why not? Well, Dinesh, that's because universities aren't here to promote Republican values or Democratic values.
Well, the other side doesn't see it that way.
They're using the universities over which they have control to push their ideology, and they're doing it relentlessly and mercilessly.
So if you now take this kind of Olympian position, this position that neither goes with both sides, we're going to try to stay above ideology.
Well, first of all, the University of Tennessee is not even doing that.
In a Republican and conservative state, we are getting left-wing propaganda.
Stupid propaganda that probably the majority of students can't even believe is being taught.
It's being pushed by the faculty.
It's being pushed by the administration.
They're using their power.
And that's the point. They're using their power.
But the trustees are not using their power.
The governor is not using his power.
The Republican legislature is not using its power.
So when we are in a position to do something about it, and we don't, then who except ourselves do we have to blame?
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November 30th through December 9th, 2022. For more information call 855-565-5519 or visit StandWithIsraelTour.com I've completed my discussion of Homer's Iliad.
I hope you've enjoyed it.
I hope you found it stimulating and interesting and perhaps in some ways profound.
I think it is. And hopefully these introductions, and that's what they are, to these works will inspire you to go take a look at the works themselves.
Now, with Dante's Divine Comedy, some of you tried it and you're like, I'm having difficulty because there's a lot of classical and biblical allusions.
And it is true.
I sort of thinned those out when I was interpreting Dante.
With Homer, you have some of that, but you have less.
So there are classical allusions, typically to myth, to Greek myth, and to the actions of various goddesses and gods.
And there are times when there are minor gods and goddesses, you may not really know who they are, but it's not going to matter because this is a story that propels itself forward, and Homer, the bard, has a great sense of narrative power.
And by the way, something I think I've observed but is worth noting, is he never loses track of the storyline.
Even if he leaves Patroclus in a book and he goes on to three other books, when he comes back and picks him up, he picks him up exactly where he left off, and he also remembers the time factor, what exactly was going on at that time.
So these are marvelous books, and it's good to read them together.
In other words, make your way through the Iliad, the Iliad first.
The Odyssey, by the way, assumes that you're familiar with the Iliad.
By the way, just like the Iliad assumes that you kind of know the story of the Trojan War, you know that there are events that are going to come after the Iliad that you know even before you read the Iliad.
So you know, for example, Achilles himself is going to die.
You know that Troy is going to fall.
Homer assumes that both his original audience and the We, the audience today, in a faraway time and a faraway place, do know the story.
Now, we read great books, and you can ask the question, do we read these books because of their relevance and applicability to us now, or do we read them because of their irrelevance and inapplicability?
In other words, we want to go into a completely different world that is removed from our own.
We want to escape the provinciality of 21st century America.
Think of it. When you go, for example, hiking in the Amazon, you don't go because you want to see America.
In fact, you're going because you want to see something different than you're habituated to in America.
And I would argue that we read these ancient books from faraway places Both to discover what is remote and different, alternative ways of living, completely different scales of values in some respect.
I mean, think about somebody today who would go around saying, I live for honor.
I don't care about anything else.
And I'm defining honor in such a way that it is not some internalized sense of honor.
It's not just that I privately believe that I'm honorable.
I don't care what public opinion says.
I don't care what other people say about me.
I have this unshakable, impregnable, inner sense of honor.
No. In the Homeric sense, we would want to find somebody today for whom honor meant what other people say about you and what other people say about you now while you're alive and what other people say about you when you die.
Interestingly enough, this kind of faraway concept does in fact exist in modern America.
It exists right now.
It doesn't exist probably where you live or where I live, but it exists in America's inner cities.
There's an essay I just happened to read recently.
This is from the May 1994 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.
It's called The Code of the Streets.
It's written by an urban anthropologist.
I've referred to him before in the podcast.
His name is Elijah Anderson.
And he talks about the fact that in the inner city where material possessions are scarce...
Material possessions become a mark of your social importance.
So the kind of dress that you wear, the outfit you have, the type of sneakers that you wear is a public signal.
And the key point is it's a public signal.
It's not just for your own consumption.
It's for other people to see that you are somebody to be what?
Well, somebody to be respected and somebody to be feared.
Think about the ancient Greek concept of time or honor.
This is time that is represented in material possessions.
Well, we have that in the inner city.
And it's also represented in the form of, if you have less, I have more.
And kleos or glory is what other people say about me, what people in the inner city call your rep or your reputation.
When you first read the Iliad, it may seem downright crazy that this guy, Achilles, is making such a big fuss, such a big racket, threatening to retreat from the war altogether.
Why? Over a concubine.
And the point I tried to make while expounding that is it's not just over a concubine.
The concubine represents Achilles' honor.
It represents a prize that he has sort of won, that he deserves.
And out of that prize, or these prizes collectively, comes the sense of glory of your martial accomplishments in combat.
That's going to cause people to talk about you.
That's going to give you a good reputation.
And by the way, for the Greeks who did not have any kind of developed sense of immortality, this was the only immortality you could have.
What are people going to say about you after you're gone?
Will they even remember you at all?
Very interestingly, we'll see that these very same concepts of Kleos and Timee extend out into the Odyssey.
Now, the Odyssey is a very different kind of epic, and I'll start my discussion of the Odyssey tomorrow.
In a way, you could say that while the Iliad is a war epic, The Odyssey is a peace epic.
And while the theme of the Iliad is honor and glory, the theme of the Odyssey is, in fact, homecoming.
So they seem very different.
Yet the same themes in the Iliad resonate in very different contexts in the Odyssey.
And vice versa.
So the two epics are closely and beautifully interconnected.
And that's why it makes sense to read them kind of in companionship, the one with the other.
But the point I'm trying to make is that these books continue to have a value for us, both because of their remoteness and strangeness.
And they allow us to contrast another world with the world we live in.
And at the same time, they are startlingly relevant, startlingly familiar, and they deal with universal themes that have endured from the days of Homer to our own.
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