Aug. 26, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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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. | |
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| Coming up, Debbie and I are going to discuss how the left will stop at nothing in its desperate project to stop Trump from running again. | |
| I'll discuss how Liz Cheney's vanity project of running for president is likely to take away votes not from Trump, but from the Democratic candidate. | |
| I'm going to argue why it's time to take down the FBI, an agency that has become a danger both to justice and to public safety. | |
| And I'll continue with my introduction to Homer's Odyssey. | |
| This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show. | |
| The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies. | |
| We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth. | |
| This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast. | |
| Liz Cheney has declared that her... | |
| Post-election mission is to keep Trump out of the White House. | |
| And she seems to think that this is a noble calling. | |
| In fact, she's convinced her dad, Dick Cheney, that she is on this chivalric quest. | |
| And Dick Cheney made a commercial for Liz before the election, basically saying, Donald Trump is the most dangerous figure that... | |
| It's ever in all of American history. | |
| It shows you how much history Dick Cheney knows. | |
| But anyway, Liz Cheney is apparently considering running for president to keep Trump out of the White House. | |
| Now... The guys at Yahoo News and YouGov decided to run a poll and ask people, in a sense, project forward to 2024 and see what might the effect of a Liz Cheney candidacy for the presidency be. | |
| And the very amusing result of this poll is that if Liz Cheney were to actually run for president, she would actually help Trump. | |
| So, how is this even possible? | |
| Well, first of all... The survey was 1,500 or so, 1,563 U.S. adults, and it was conducted right after she lost the primary. | |
| And what people were asked is, listen, let's assume that the election is being held now, and it's just one-on-one Biden against Trump, and who would win? | |
| Well, Apparently, Biden would lead by four points, 46 to 42 percent. | |
| Now, we're all a little skeptical of these polls. | |
| With Biden's approval rating where it is now, it seems to be very doubtful these polls are totally reliable. | |
| But nevertheless, let's just kind of go with it. | |
| If the 2024 election were held now, one-on-one rematch, Biden would be slightly ahead of Trump, according to this. | |
| But in a three-way race, it's Biden and Trump and Liz Cheney running, let's just say, as an independent. | |
| You can fairly easily assume that Liz Cheney is not going to get the Republican nomination. | |
| Well, Trump would vault to an eight-point lead over Biden, 40 to 32. | |
| Liz Cheney obviously would be in a distant third place. | |
| So I think what's interesting about the survey, taking it even with a grain of salt, is what it's really showing is that Cheney is attracting support or votes, not from Republicans, but from Democrats. | |
| In other words, if Cheney is running alongside Trump and Biden in a survey, she's pulling Biden votes, not Trump votes. | |
| And Democrats were asked separately in the poll, what do you think of the idea of Cheney even running for president? | |
| Good idea? Bad idea? | |
| Are you indifferent to it? | |
| And it turns out that among Democrats, it's about even. | |
| About 30% say good idea, about 30% say bad idea. | |
| So she has a decent amount of Democratic support. | |
| Better than her. But for the Republicans, when they're asked the same question, they're overwhelmingly against the idea for running 70% to 10%. | |
| So, now, this to me is kind of fascinating because Liz Cheney, if you just look at her views... | |
| By and large, she is fairly conservative. | |
| In fact, prior to her crusade against Trump, no one thought of Liz Cheney as anything other than a conservative. | |
| Liz Cheney is not Susan Collins. | |
| She's not Murkowski. She's not Romney. | |
| She is actually on the right end of the spectrum. | |
| And so you have the rather bizarre phenomenon of Democrats saying that they would welcome Really a conservative Liz Cheney. | |
| So what it tells me is that Democrats are still deeply infected with Trump derangement syndrome because they don't even care about the fact that Liz Cheney doesn't agree with them on pretty much anything. | |
| Their view is that we want a champion to lead the cause against Trump. | |
| Maybe strategically they feel it's better to have that champion have an R on her name instead of a D. Because it maybe gives her a little bit more credibility, or at least it allows the media to pose like, oh, this is a bipartisan campaign against Trump. | |
| They're a concerned Republican. | |
| So Liz Cheney is playing a part, but it's a part that apparently Democrats like her to play. | |
| And of course, there was some evidence that there were Democrats who crossed the aisle and tried to put her over the top in Wyoming. | |
| They voted for her. The problem for her was there just weren't that many Democrats in Wyoming, and so there wasn't enough for her to make much headway. | |
| Liz Cheney has a package called The Great Task, and I think we all know what this so-called Great Task is. | |
| By the way, it's not just Trump. | |
| She wants to keep other election deniers away from power. | |
| Liz Cheney's problem is that what she calls election denialism has now become the mainstream way of thinking in the Republican Party, a party that no longer has a place for one Liz Cheney. | |
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| The Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. | |
| Wade, the so-called Dobbs decision, came out at the end of July, July 26 to be precise. | |
| And prior to that decision, a number of states had passed so-called trigger laws. | |
| And the trigger laws were restrictions on abortion that were unconstitutional at the time that they were passed. | |
| Why? | |
| Because Roe v. Wade was still in effect, and Roe v. Wade in effect allowed abortion on demand. | |
| So pretty much any law restricting abortion was knocked out, was at the very least put on indefinite hold while the Roe precedent applied. | |
| But these states in a sense were prophetic and they thought, well, there may be a time when abortion restrictions by states are going to be allowed. | |
| Roe versus Wade is going to be pushed out of the way. | |
| And so they pass laws. In case Roe is overruled, these new laws, so-called, would be triggered by that event and would go into effect. | |
| Well, they would go into effect 30 days following the Supreme Court decision. | |
| And since the Supreme Court decision was at the end of July, and here we are toward the end of August, And so three states, Idaho, Tennessee, and Texas, now have abortion laws that go into effect. | |
| Well, yesterday, which is to say Thursday. | |
| And these are all fairly stringent laws banning abortion in those states with relatively few exceptions. | |
| Now, Texas, of course, has had a sort of an abortion ban, which was the result of a law that was consistent with Roe, a law that didn't directly contradict Roe, that allowed private citizens to sue on this matter. | |
| And that law by itself Which, by the way, the left tried to topple. | |
| They tried to displace unsuccessfully. | |
| That law itself pretty much shut down the abortion industry in Texas. | |
| But the new law is even broader. | |
| And the Biden administration, knowing about it, decided to try to throw a little bit of a monkey wrench into the law. | |
| Now, the Biden administration has issued what's called a guidance, an enforcement guidance, which it has distributed in the state of Texas. | |
| And it basically tells the state of Texas that according to something called the EMTALA, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. | |
| This is a federal law, sometimes called EMTALA. This EMTALA Act, Emergency Medical Treatment Act, According to the Biden administration, means that Texas cannot have any abortion restrictions that endanger the health or the life of a woman. | |
| So if the life of a woman or her basic health is gravely endangered, you cannot restrict abortion. | |
| You have to let her go ahead with the abortion. | |
| And so Texas sued the Health and Human Services Act And the secretary, who's Xavier Bequeira, and basically said, no, there's nothing in this Emergency Medical Treatment Act that even talks about abortion. | |
| This Emergency Treatment Act was intended for other circumstances. | |
| The Biden administration is illicitly trying to use this law to now interfere with state laws that are being passed in Texas and elsewhere that do restrict abortion. | |
| So this went before a U.S. district judge, James Hendricks. | |
| And he decided, yeah, the state of Texas is right. | |
| And so he's issued a temporary injunction. | |
| He has blocked the federal government from enforcing this so-called guidance. | |
| And he says that the EMTALA, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, is, quote, silent as to abortions. | |
| So, what are we watching here? | |
| We're actually watching the sneaky efforts of the Biden administration to use other laws, laws that don't directly bear on abortion, to act like, well, there's a law over here. | |
| You better not pass any abortion restrictions because you're going to be violating this law in our opinion. | |
| So it's really good that the state of Texas, and we've got to give some credit to the Attorney General Ken Paxton here, is moving quickly to take this to court and to tell a judge, hey, listen, let's read the EMTALA Act. | |
| There's nothing in it about abortion. | |
| This is not a contradiction between a federal law and a state law. | |
| And so, here's the judge, quote, What the Biden administration was trying to do is create confusion and say basically, | |
| listen, you know, there's a dangerous step that Texas is taking here in restricting abortion. | |
| Why? Because doctors have got to do a careful weighing of the relative rights of the mother and the unborn child. | |
| And so if you restrict abortion, the doctors have got to act consistent with this Emergency Medical Treatment Act. | |
| And the judge goes, I've read the Emergency Treatment Act. | |
| It doesn't say anything about abortion. | |
| You're trying by some kind of intellectual sleight of hand to use this federal law to interfere with the state of Texas making decisions about abortion, which it has every right to do, and therefore your law, at least for the time being in its applicability to abortion, | |
| is null and void. We're good to go. | |
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| I go, stop sham wowing. | |
| Yeah, Debbie thinks I'm becoming the sham wow guy. | |
| You remember the sham wow guy? | |
| Yeah, he was really good at selling sham wow. | |
| Honestly, the sham wow guy was a genius. | |
| He was amazing. Right? | |
| The stuff he would do in the space of like 90 seconds. | |
| Well, from what I heard, the sham wow actually didn't really work. | |
| But he made it look like it was like the most amazing product on the planet. | |
| I mean, he just had a little sponge. | |
| He was really good. But it could pick up everything. | |
| Coke, he would, you know... He'd pick up coke on the couch, on the carpet, and then he would, like, wring it out and, oh, yeah, you can do it here. | |
| You can chamois your hair. | |
| You can, you know, just... I mean, I remember watching the commercial for the first time. | |
| It was probably soon after I came to America when I first saw the guy, and I was just almost mesmerized by him. | |
| But, of course, he is the classic, you know, salesman. | |
| Now, I have to say, with regard to the store, this was the idea of my daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill, who apparently has caught the entrepreneurial bug. | |
| And she and her husband are concocting all kinds of entrepreneurial schemes. | |
| So they're the ShamWow's. | |
| They're the true Shamwas. | |
| We went along with it. I mean, I must say, the store, they've done a great job. | |
| They actually designed the products, and it's got hoodies, it's got t-shirts, it's got caps, it's got, you know, it's got, what, mugs, all kinds of stuff. | |
| Your glass. Show them your glass. | |
| The glass I have. Well, the thing about it is, this is kind of a... | |
| It's kind of cool. It's kind of subtle. | |
| It says, Dinesh Unchained. | |
| Dinesh Unchained. | |
| So you can get a Dinesh Unchained glass together with my unapologetically conservative, all kinds of messages, by the way, on this merchandise. | |
| And some of them just downright funny. | |
| They're going to actually make you laugh. | |
| So that site, by the way, is just called shop.dineshjasouza.com. | |
| No Shamwa products available. | |
| I don't have the originals. | |
| Not yet anyway. Not yet anyway. | |
| Watch out, Mike Lindell. | |
| We might be getting pillows soon. | |
| Ha! Not to mention, there was a guy who tried to talk us into a coffee legal. | |
| Oh, yes! In fact, I gave a talk, and this guy had me, he had his sort of VIP reception at a coffee shop, and afterwards he's like, Tinesh, have you ever thought of going into the coffee business? | |
| Yeah, no. I'm like, no, I'm not going into the coffee business. | |
| Negative, negative. Okay, so let's talk about other things. | |
| Let's talk about Trump. It is that they're going after Trump like there's no tomorrow. | |
| And for no reason. | |
| Well, you know, here's the thing. | |
| This man was impeached twice on false charges, on made-up charges, or as they call it, trumped-up charges. | |
| And so now what they're trying to do is every time that you see... | |
| Let's just say you're not a political person and you're just reading the paper, you're reading a... | |
| News article on the internet. | |
| It says, You know, it's almost like they will stop at nothing, which is what this segment is called. | |
| Now, this is from The Guardian, which is admittedly left-wing, but Debbie's point is right. | |
| For a lot of people, The Guardian is a newspaper, or they see it online, and they're like, oh wow, Trump admits that he was in... | |
| Now, first of all, here's the point. | |
| There is no... | |
| Evidence that Trump did anything illegal. | |
| When Trump left the White House, the GSA, the General Services Administration, packed a lot of the boxes, which is normal to do. | |
| Trump himself is not going to be packing his own boxes. | |
| And so a bunch of these boxes end up, apparently about 15 of them, in Mar-a-Lago. | |
| Now, whether or not those boxes contain documents that belong, let's just say, to the national records, whether or not there are any classified documents. | |
| If Trump did not intentionally take classified documents with him, and by the way, Trump has the full power to declassify anything he wants. | |
| Trump can even say, by definition, any documents I take are declassified. | |
| So where's the illegality? | |
| So if Trump says, what the Guardian is doing is they're reading the Trump lawsuit, and Trump says, basically, I was cooperating with those guys. | |
| If I had something that should have been in the National Archives or should have been returned, I was perfectly willing to give it back. | |
| So they go, aha! Trump is admitting that he had illegal... | |
| Nonsense. He's not admitting that at all. | |
| And I don't really think that they think that. | |
| I think that they just want people to think that. | |
| So you're saying they're consciously twisting the... | |
| Exactly. Listen to this. | |
| Good morning. Donald Trump's lawyers have indicated, and they highlight, he unlawfully retained official documents. | |
| It's really, it's just unbelievable. | |
| I mean, it drives you, yeah. It drives me nuts when I see stuff like that. | |
| Because, like him or not, he's such a threat to these people. | |
| They will stop at nothing to demonize him. | |
| No amount of lying. I think if you were to tell these activists on the left, let's do a witch trial. | |
| Let's accuse Donald Trump, if we can credibly accuse him of being a witch, being actually a kind of instrument of the devil, saying that he puts hexes on people, he mixes things in cauldrons, and let's say we can get him on that. | |
| I bet you that most of these leftists would be like, let's do it. | |
| It doesn't matter if he's completely innocent of this. | |
| It doesn't matter that there are no witches. | |
| It doesn't matter that there are no hexes. | |
| Nevertheless, if we could get Donald Trump on that, that would be a task worth undertaking. | |
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| There are a couple of developments at the CDC that we want to talk about. | |
| Well, one of them, of course, is that... | |
| Fauci is exiting the stage. | |
| Yes. Finally. Yes. | |
| Well, you know, he's 81 years old. | |
| Who wants to work till they're 81 years old? | |
| He does. Well, I mean, first of all, he's not alone. | |
| He's not alone, right? No, I know that. | |
| Biden is pushing 80. | |
| Pelosi, I think, is over 80. | |
| Dianne Feinstein is what? | |
| 95. I don't know. | |
| Yeah. So these people, in politics, you find that I think it's like a drug. | |
| Power. Power. Power. It's intoxicating. | |
| Yeah, yeah. And so these people will, I mean, even if they're one foot in the grave, they're hanging on to power. | |
| Well, you know, I mean, they actually, you know, Fauci, I didn't know he was 81. | |
| He looks pretty good for his age. | |
| I'm just saying. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's true on the Republican side. | |
| Remember the event that you and I went to? | |
| Yes. This was some years ago. | |
| Yeah, but that person did not look like Fauci. | |
| I mean, they looked like they were about to talk. | |
| There was a Republican congressman who came to our event. | |
| We were introduced to him, and he, I think he was on I don't know. | |
| But anyway, it's just really, guys, leave it to the young people to take over. | |
| Enjoy your golden years. | |
| Now, with Fauci, interestingly, there's some speculation that he's worried about the fact that if the Republicans take Congress... | |
| They're going to start investigating him. | |
| Well, that too. But also, keep in mind that the CDC is also undergoing all these changes, of which the Republicans probably would have none of it, right? | |
| So, they, Dr. | |
| Walensky, okay, has said... | |
| That they realize that they kind of dropped the ball during COVID. That they would say one thing and then something else would happen. | |
| That they would talk about mask mandates and that you don't wear a mask and then wear a mask and then all of this stuff, right? | |
| That the vaccines would cause herd immunity, which we found out did not happen. | |
| So there was a lot of misinformation from the CDC. And miscommunication. | |
| And miscommunication from the CDC. But do you know what they claim is going to be the end-all for them? | |
| Fix the problem. | |
| Fix the problem for them? | |
| An executive council, get this... | |
| A new equity office that will help increase the diversity of the CDC workforce and ensure that the agency's activities take into account the role of diversity in public health. | |
| Okay, Dr. Walensky, let me just tell you, it's not the diversity problem that the CDC had. | |
| It's the political problem the CDC had. | |
| When you guys decided to go political, that's when people decided we're not going to listen to you. | |
| So it has nothing to do with diversity and everything to do with politics. | |
| So to put it a slightly different way, the CDC's real problem Is that they lost the confidence of the Republican or right-leaning half of the country. | |
| Exactly. Why did they do that? | |
| They did that because it became really clear from the beginning that the CDC favored one side over the other. | |
| The CDC was made up of Democrats. | |
| Fauci was a Democrat. | |
| Of course, Walensky is a Democratic appointee. | |
| I'll never forget that video of Fauci rolling his eyes behind Trump. | |
| Do you remember that? There was that. | |
| There was also the double standard in which Fauci was, you know, raising all these questions about Trump rallies, but then took a completely different line with regard to George Floyd protests. | |
| Or the illegals coming in. | |
| Or the illegals coming in. | |
| I forgot about that. Bringing in all of these, you know, diseases and COVID. And he said nothing about it. | |
| He stayed silent about it. | |
| So the hypocrisy is what made people not trust the CDC. I mean, what's interesting, I mean, honey, talking about you, you have been actually a long-time fan of the CDC. Oh my gosh. | |
| Oh my gosh. I mean, you live by the CDC. Yes. | |
| And for years, I practiced all of the CDC's guidelines. | |
| You know, not rubbing my eyes, washing my hands for 20 plus seconds. | |
| Sometimes I do it for 30. | |
| Well, you're a germaphobe. | |
| Pure rallying, disinfecting seats on airplanes. | |
| I've done that for over 20 years. | |
| And so when the CDC came out with their guidelines, I was, yeah, that's right. | |
| That's right. That's how you keep from getting sick. | |
| That's right. So I was never one of these like, oh, the CDC doesn't know what they're talking about. | |
| They actually do know what they're talking about. | |
| But unfortunately, you lose credibility when When you go political, when you say that it's okay for one group to do something, but not another group. | |
| Well, and moreover, I think the CDC should stay within the orbit of science. | |
| Oh, yeah! What do we know about the virus? | |
| Now let's remember that when you make policy decisions about lockdowns, about mandates, those are going beyond science. | |
| Why? Because they're taking scientific considerations, but they also have to take into account things like what is the impact of closing schools? | |
| What is the impact of closing churches? | |
| What happens when you lock down an economy? | |
| The CDC has no expertise in those questions. | |
| Yeah, but I mean, besides any of that, it's just, it's the fact that they go woke on us. | |
| I mean, and here's another evidence of the wokeness. | |
| They have on their website... | |
| Well, let's take a pause, honey. | |
| Why don't we pause? Because I want to go into this. | |
| When we come back, let's talk about the CDC's new woke vocabulary. | |
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| Feel the difference. Debbie and I are talking about how the CDC has eroded a good deal of its credibility by embracing all kinds of woke ideology. | |
| And a classic example of this is when you were showing me this... | |
| Yeah, so preferred terms for select population groups and communities. | |
| What are the preferred terms? | |
| So basically... | |
| They're saying don't use these... | |
| Let me do the first one. | |
| These are the terms that are now out. | |
| You can't use these terms. Don't say inmate. | |
| Don't say inmate. Don't say prisoner. | |
| Don't say convict or even ex-convict. | |
| Don't say offender, don't say criminal, don't say parolee or detainee. | |
| So let's hear what we should be saying. | |
| So the first one is people, persons who are incarcerated or detained often use for shorter jail days for youth detention facilities or other persons awaiting immigration proceedings in detention facilities. | |
| Partner, child of an incarcerated person. | |
| Persons in pretrial or with charge. | |
| You are a person with charge. | |
| You're with charge. Persons on parole or probation. | |
| Because, see, what they want to do is they want to make you a person. | |
| You're not just... | |
| You're not just a convict. | |
| You're a person that committed a crime. | |
| I mean, this is ridiculous. | |
| Similarly, apparently the CDC says that when you're talking about disability, you can't use disabled. | |
| You can't even use differently abled. | |
| You can't use afflicted, handicapped, hearing impaired. | |
| You can't even use wheelchair-bound. | |
| Instead... People with disabilities, people who are deaf or hard of hearing, people with an intellectual or developmental disability, people who use a wheelchair or mobility device. | |
| Now, quite apart from the kind of, I mean, think of all the time that has gone into composing all this nonsense. | |
| They probably had all kinds of committees. | |
| Oh, look at these. Homelessness. | |
| You can't call someone homeless. | |
| It's people experiencing homelessness. | |
| As if homelessness is an experience. | |
| They actually do this. | |
| A mental health, you can't say someone is mentally ill. | |
| You have to say... Wait, some of my favorite words here. | |
| Crazy. Insane. | |
| Why is the CDC talking about immigration status? | |
| They say you shouldn't call people illegals. | |
| You can't call them aliens. | |
| You can't call them even foreigners or the foreign born. | |
| You can't even call them illegal immigrants. | |
| You have to call them people with undocumented status. | |
| Or you have to call them asylum seekers, refugee or refugee populations. | |
| Then you can't use terms like senior. | |
| You can't even use high-risk population. | |
| Oh my goodness! | |
| Yeah, so this is an elaborate, almost an alternative linguistics that they're into here. | |
| And, oh, here we go to one of my favorite categories. | |
| We probably can't talk about it on YouTube. | |
| Well, I mean, I want to look at just the terms that they're saying you should use. | |
| Here are some of their terms that they like. | |
| They like LGBTQIA. They like pansexual, asexual, two-spirit, genderqueer, gender-diverse. | |
| So they have bought into this... | |
| Well, I mean, but what's really disturbing is the CDC is supposed to be about disease. | |
| It's a health organization, right? | |
| Yeah, about viruses, about, you know, bacteria, all that stuff. | |
| and yet they have taken on this this woke culture and now CDC this is why we don't take you seriously this is why what does this have to do with health This is why we can't take you seriously, because you're really not an organization that deals with health. | |
| Well, the CDC must know that there is a powerful countercurrent against all this nonsense. | |
| There's a whole bunch of Americans, I would say more than half the country, that are sick of all this stuff, don't want anything to do with it, don't want to be party to it. | |
| So the fact that the CDC is like, let's go with it, is part of a way of thumbing its nose in advance at those people. | |
| Yeah. It is, but it really bothers me even more than just the optics. | |
| That it's the CDC. It's the CDC, and yet they are complaining that people don't take them seriously, and they think that it's because they dropped the ball on COVID. But they don't even understand what they did, and that's what makes it more disturbing. | |
| They don't understand that they are playing politics, and that's why people don't like them. | |
| They think it's simply because they're not diverse enough, or they're not, or they didn't talk, they basically were too scientific, and they didn't really communicate with the people enough, that they were too scientific, too medical, or whatever. Well, Debbie's made the point that what would be very terrifying is that if you had a kind of Ebola type of pandemic. | |
| Let's say it was a virus that was 90% deadly. | |
| What would people do if the CDC came to you and told you to wear a mask? | |
| Or just take these steps. | |
| And what would happen is people would go like, well, you've already cried wolf. | |
| You've already given us a bunch of nonsense. | |
| We don't trust you now. And so even in a case where the CDC would be desperately needed in a genuine crisis and emergency, it obviously has thrown away. | |
| Thrown away, I think, is the right word. | |
| Its own credibility. | |
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| We are getting ready to begin our reading of the Odyssey, Homer's second great epic after the Iliad. | |
| And while the Iliad is a story of war and death, the Odyssey is a story of homecoming and of adventure. | |
| Now, the word for homecoming in Greek is nostos. | |
| In fact, there was an early epic that the ancient Greeks were familiar with called the nostoi, which was really about the attempt of the various Greeks, the Greeks who fought in the Trojan War, to get home. | |
| And some of them didn't make it home, some of them made it home, but it took them many years. | |
| Many of them, most of them really, had trouble on their way home. | |
| And where the Odyssey begins, there's only one guy who has neither died nor made it home. | |
| He is missing. There's no word about him in Ithaca. | |
| Ithaca is his hometown. | |
| He's the king of Ithaca, and this is Odysseus. | |
| The most cunning, not the wisest of the Greeks. | |
| The wisest of the Greeks is an old man named Nestor. | |
| Wise in age, wise in experience. | |
| But Odysseus is sort of the most crafty, the most scheming, the most diplomatic, the guy who can kind of talk his way out of a situation. | |
| This is the hero of the Odyssey. | |
| Now, before Homer's epics, the term epic really meant nothing more than story. | |
| That's all it meant. Any story that was a long story, that was in poetic form, that was recited, that's an epic. | |
| But so great was the influence of the Iliad and the Odyssey that after the Iliad and the Odyssey, epic came to mean works like the Iliad and the Odyssey. | |
| And the Iliad is about war and the Odyssey is about homecoming. | |
| And so, to this day, there are scholars who think that ancient epic is really divided into two categories, war epic and homecoming epic. | |
| And another way to look at it, maybe a more precise way, is to think of war epic and peace epic. | |
| A war epic obviously defined by death. | |
| And defined by the idea of kleos. | |
| Kleos is the glory that you get from your exploits in battle. | |
| But this glory is really only made possible, paradoxically, by risking your life, by putting your life on the line. | |
| So it could be the other person's death that brings you the glory, but your death is also being put on the table or risked in the process. | |
| Now, Peace Epic, it might seem, is not about kleos at all. | |
| It's about other things. | |
| But this is actually too sharp of a distinction because we find that the themes of Timae, which is sort of honor, and Kleos are present in the Odyssey. | |
| We'll see that Odysseus is very concerned about his reputation. | |
| By the way, his reputation, again, not defined by some inward sense that I am a wonderful or noble human being, but reputation explicitly defined by the external world. | |
| What do people around you say about you? | |
| And Odysseus' reputation in Ithaca, both when he is gone and then eventually when he returns, very important to him. | |
| So the real difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey is not that one cares about Cleos and the other doesn't. | |
| It's just that in the Odyssey, the concept of kleos or glory is relocated from the next world to this world. | |
| So, in other words, in the Iliad, your kleos is what people say about you after you die. | |
| The fact that we still talk about Achilles, we still remember him. | |
| That is Achilles' kleos extending through the ages and through the centuries. | |
| Odysseus is alive, and the war is over. | |
| He's now trying to make his way home. | |
| And so he cares about kleos, but for him, kleos is his reputation in this world and in this life and in the time in which he's actually living. | |
| So the idea here is that the kleos remains... | |
| It's not quite as central as it was in the Iliad, but it remains an important theme in the Odyssey. | |
| Now, the big theme in the Odyssey is Gnostos, which is homecoming, and it may seem that this theme is absent from the Iliad, but if you think about it, that's not true. | |
| In the Iliad, there is all kinds of talk about homecoming. | |
| In fact, Achilles doesn't want to fight. | |
| Achilles says, I'm going to pack up my stuff and do what? | |
| Go home. | |
| So Achilles not only wants to go home because he is insulted, but he later in the Iliad actually compares the The virtues of the home life, you might say. | |
| What if I were just a shepherd? | |
| What if I were to just return to my home country and live out my life, not worry about dying in warfare, not worry about kleos? | |
| So Achilles is very conscious of the benefits of homecoming and the benefits of living his life at home in the kind of normal way. | |
| Remember in a famous scene in the Iliad, the warrior Sarpedon basically says, why are we risking our lives in battle? | |
| And the answer is, because we're not immortal. | |
| We're going to die anyway. | |
| Even if we go home and don't fight, we're still going to die. | |
| Our lives are still short. | |
| So why not risk them in battle? | |
| Why not risk them in such a way that our reputations can live on beyond our death? | |
| So the point I'm trying to make is that there are linkages between the Iliad and the Odyssey. | |
| They have certain common themes, although the emphasis is different. | |
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| I'm now going to begin by reading the first few lines of the Odyssey, which right away set the theme and the tone for the entire epic. | |
| This is done, by the way, also in the Iliad, but here is how the Odyssey begins. | |
| Tell me about a complicated man, Muse. | |
| tell me how he wandered and was lost, when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy, and where he went, and who he met, the pain he suffered on the sea, and how he worked to save his life and bring his men back home. He failed, and for their own mistakes they died. Fools, they ate the sun god's cattle, and the god kept them from home. | |
| I'm out. | |
| Right away we encounter several interesting things, the first of which is simply the problems of translation. | |
| In the very first line that I read, tell me about a complicated man. | |
| And by the way, I'm reading from Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey. | |
| She's a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. | |
| This is a translation published by, I believe, Norton, the W.W. | |
| Norton Company. | |
| It's a hailed translation, but you see right away how difficult it is for translation to capture the richness of Homer. | |
| So, the first line of the Odyssey, in the first line of the Odyssey, Odysseus, who is by the way not named. | |
| Notice that in the passage I read, Odysseus' name does not appear. | |
| But nevertheless, Odysseus is described. | |
| And the phrase that Homer uses to describe him is... | |
| Polutropos. Now, what does polutropos mean? | |
| Well, it comes out of the word polu or poly. | |
| We know words like polygon, which poly means many. | |
| A polygon is a figure with many sides. | |
| And tropos simply means a shift or turn. | |
| So, Homer has this beautiful phrase, palutropos, to describe Odysseus. | |
| And this palutropos, he's a man of many turns. | |
| Now, in Emily Wilson's translation, tell me about a complicated man. | |
| Nah, that really hardly does justice to it. | |
| Yes, Odysseus is complicated, but think about the beauty of Homer's word. | |
| Now, I agree, you can't find a single word in English to talk about the man of many turns. | |
| There's a different translation, by the way, of the Odyssey, which talks about We're good to go. | |
| And what Homer wants to say is that this guy has been at sea for a while. | |
| He has been flung this way and that. | |
| He has been tossed and turned by the sea. | |
| So, in a physical sense, Odysseus is palutropos because he has been turned this way and that by the currents and by the force of the ocean. | |
| But... Odysseus is also Pallutropos, the man of many turns in another sense. | |
| He is Pallutropos in his mind. | |
| He is a resourceful man. | |
| He is a man who can see things from many angles. | |
| When he talks to somebody, he always pays careful attention to who am I speaking to and how do I convince my audience of what I want to get out of them. | |
| So Odysseus has this kind of plasticity, this malleability, this intellectual resourcefulness, and notice that the term polytropos captures all of that, and the translation just kind of misses all of it. | |
| Tell me about a complicated man. | |
| Now, right away, in the very beginning, we learn that Odysseus wrecked the holy town of Troy. | |
| So, here's Homer right away crediting Odysseus. | |
| With being the guy who won the Trojan War. | |
| Because the Trojan War, even after 10 years, had not ended. | |
| The Trojans had not given in. | |
| It wasn't until Odysseus came up with the scheme of the Trojan horse. | |
| And it was Odysseus, and only Odysseus who did that, came up with the idea, I mean, convinced the Greeks to do it, pulled it off. | |
| And this is really what caused Troy to fall. | |
| And then we read from Homer that he has been at sea trying to get home, trying to do a nostos, trying to achieve homecoming, but not only for himself, but also for his men. | |
| Remember, Odysseus is a leader. | |
| He took these men from Ithaca all the way to Troy. | |
| They've been away for many years. | |
| It's Odysseus' job to get them back. | |
| And yet, they don't make it back. | |
| Only Odysseus makes it back. | |
| And so right away, Homer the poet has a problem. | |
| And the problem is, what kind of a leader is Odysseus? | |
| He took all these men to Troy, and now evidently they've all been killed, and only Odysseus is left. | |
| Now, Homer needs only Odysseus to be left for the story to work, but he needs to give some explanation for why the men died. | |
| Was it Odysseus' negligent leadership that killed them? | |
| So Homer, right away, aware of the problem, dives right into it. | |
| And so when we come back on Monday, I will pick up the opening lines of the Odyssey, which set the scene for this remarkable story. | |
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