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Sept. 12, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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OF CABBAGES AND KINGS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep411
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Coming up, Queen Elizabeth is dead.
And there are some people who say that she was a symbol of British colonialism.
I'll review an essay I wrote, well, a couple of decades ago now.
It's called, Two Cheers for Colonialism.
I'll review Victor Davis Hanson's argument that the rest of the world is not woke.
It's unwoke. But it wants America to be woke, and I'll tell you why.
David Limbaugh and his daughter Kristen Limbaugh Bloom join me.
We're going to talk about their new book, The Resurrected Jesus.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
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Queen Elizabeth is dead at a very advanced old age, in fact, approaching a hundred years old.
And initially, I wasn't going to really talk about this at all, in part because I'm not one of those sort of royal watcher types, and I don't follow the intricacies of the royal family.
I've been observing this really at a distance.
Sometimes I've been to England a number of times.
Debbie and I are planning to go again next year.
In fact, we have tickets to Wimbledon.
I'm really excited about that.
Very good tickets, I should add.
Debbie's like, why?
Why are you bringing this up?
Anyway, I don't know why.
But, you know, you can't go around London without seeing symbols of royalty everywhere.
And not just royalty from now, but also from the past.
And in some sense, it crosses your mind that, you know, what is the function of royalty today?
Now, if you read the tributes, and there are many to Queen Elizabeth, they emphasize her stoicism, her kind of dignity and grace.
I think part of it is that she came from an older world, and there was something very old world about her, even in modernity.
Now, this is not to say that the royals weren't Many times, kind of woke.
And they utter all kinds of gobbledygook about the climate and about a bunch of other issues.
And in this, I think they are merely kowtowing to the media.
This is a way that an aristocratic and ancient institution makes its peace with kind of the modern woke media.
It's kind of like, we will sing your sheet music and you will agree to, in return...
Praise the monarchy and praise the fact that even though our work isn't really work, it's things like cutting a ribbon or sitting in a cathedral.
And I remember there was actually a tribute to the queen for sitting in the cathedral and wearing a mask.
Why this is considered like a Herculean accomplishment, I have no idea.
But nevertheless, this is a kind of a bargain between the royalty and the media.
I think the problem for the royals is that they don't know whether to be ancients or moderns.
Now, Queen Elizabeth clearly in that sense was an ancient, by which I mean...
Almost a creature from the 19th century.
And then on the other hand, you have the moderns.
Though now the age of the moderns with the royalty began with Lady Di.
And Lady Diana was the quintessential modern.
And Emoting in public and these are my feelings and, you know, I'm here as a princess and I'm here.
She was kind of on a personal journey.
Now, if you think about what it means to be a king or a prince and royalty, it's not about being on a personal journey.
So contrast the queen for whom the queen always spoke in the language of duty.
I see this as a task.
This is a kind of assignment that I've been given, you may say, by history.
And I'm discharging it with a sense of Of acceptance and perhaps even of obligation.
I think the problem for the royalty is that both the old virtues and the kind of new style are today, you have to ask why.
Because to some degree, I suppose Charles is a little bit more like his mom now.
I think we're good to go.
I think we're good to go.
Harry and Meghan Markle, this is sort of the grotesque progeny.
And so you have to ask, if you've got people who would rather have a Netflix deal than live in Balmoral Castle, they'd rather be actors or they'd rather be on Dr.
Phil. By the way, Daddy, my daughter, is on Dr.
Phil. They're doing a taping today.
But these are guys who'd rather be with Oprah and Dr.
Phil in Hollywood than they are carrying out their traditional duties.
The question is, what are they doing with royal titles at all?
And by the way, I think the palace is sort of aware of this.
And they've now come to the view that they'd be better off if Markle...
And her puppet, which is to say her husband, were subtracted from the royal register completely.
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Many decades ago, my countryman Gandhi was asked, what do you think of Western civilization?
And he famously replied, I think it would be a good idea.
Now, this is Gandhi being kind of pungently witty in a way that he isn't known for being.
But what Gandhi's saying is really two things.
One is he's saying that the Western powers under colonialism did not live up to their own standards.
And in this, I think he had a good point.
But the other thing is he's genuinely saying that our complaint with the West is not That we have Western principles that are being brought to India.
Our complaint is that this is not being done in a fair or adequate way.
We want Western principles, Gandhi seems to be saying.
But on the other hand, we want them to be...
Brought to India in a kind of humane and decent way, a way consistent with Western principles themselves.
Now, how far this way of thinking is from sort of the modern left, and I say this because when Queen Elizabeth died, you've got all these people denouncing British colonialism.
Queen is not exactly a symbol of British colonialism, but I suppose just to the degree that she represents the monarchy...
She represents the late stage of British colonialism.
By the way, British colonialism began to unwind really after World War I. It had unwound itself largely by the 1950s when countries like Ghana and India, of course, in the 1940s got its independence.
And then we've been living since then in the post-colonial era.
But... Several years ago, I wrote an article.
It was initially published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, subsequently in the San Francisco Chronicle.
It was called Two Cheers for Colonialism.
And I kind of stole the title from Irving Kristol, who once wrote a book called Two Cheers for Capitalism.
And it's significantly two cheers and not three, because I can see that the motives of the colonialists were to sort of take advantage of the countries that they subdued and ruled.
I'm not claiming that colonialism to that degree was benign in its motive.
But what I am claiming is that colonialism, although it was harsh for some of the people or many of the people who lived under it, Nevertheless, proved beneficial for its descendants.
Now, today, if you go around India, yeah, in the universities, you're going to find a few people who are basically, well, similar to here.
They've been sort of brainwashed into this kind of reflexive, everything Western is bad, you know, hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go, all this kind of nonsense.
But the typical Indian does not feel this way.
The typical Indian today, very different than the typical Indian of my youth, Basically recognizes that India is in many ways better off because of colonialism.
Let's say India had not had any Western influence at all until the 20th century.
India would be a latecomer to Western technology.
India would be a latecomer to principles of human dignity, human rights, separation of powers, checks and balances, western courts of law.
India has all that.
The English language, the best writers in the world today come not from Britain per se, But they often come from the far-flung colonies of Great Britain people who are natives, people who come from places like Trinidad and places like India who have learned the English language, in a sense, as one of the legacies of colonialism.
And, of course, people are, well, what about all the things that the British stole from India?
Yeah, the British took raw materials from India, notably To feed the textile mills of Manchester and so on.
But let's remember that it's not the British who made these countries poor.
Many of these countries have been poor since time immemorial.
Their poverty is really the result of not having had We're good to go.
Many countries around the world, think of places like Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is now, of course, under Chinese subjugation, but Hong Kong before that.
Think, for example, of Singapore.
Think about the so-called Asian tigers that have made dramatic economic progress.
India is now making dramatic progress in technology.
All I'm saying is that All of this is, in part, the legacy of Western civilization and the legacy of British colonialism, reluctant though some people may be to admit it.
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The historian Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent article in American Greatness.
And I want to summarize it for you because I think it contains a profound theme.
The profound theme is this.
While we are going woke, and by we I mean the United States under Biden, the Biden regime is pushing us in a woke direction, and so is the left in this country.
But this wokeness is also occurring in other Western countries as well.
And then you have, says Victor Davis Hanson, the unwoke world.
And the unwoke world is made up, first of all, of a number of America's adversaries.
Russia is unwoke.
China is unwoke.
Iran is unwoke.
But, says...
Victor Davis Hanson. There are many other countries that exist in a kind of no-man's land.
They're neither firm allies nor are they enemies.
And they're unwoke, too.
Saudi Arabia is unwoke.
And India is unwoke.
Now, says Victor Davis Hanson, what the United States is doing through its wokeness is repelling these countries that are unwoke, that don't want what the United States has to offer through wokeness.
They don't want to be flying LGBTQ flags on their embassies.
They don't want to be browbeaten about expanding access to abortion rights.
They don't want any of that.
They're attracted to the United States, but not for that reason.
What they actually want from the United States is trade and technology and markets.
And they admire the American culture of several decades ago.
Almost you could say they like 1950s America and not the America of the 21st century.
And then, says Victor Davis Hanson, The Pentagon is putting on recruiting manuals showing cadets in high heels and emphasizing diversity and inclusion.
This is at a time when the Pentagon hasn't shown that it can win a war against a bunch of tribesmen from the 14th century.
I'm thinking here, of course, of Afghanistan.
The army is losing its recruitment.
It's demonizing the kind of people who were at one time most likely to go into the military.
and these were by and large working class Americans who would look to the military as an avenue of upward mobility and also an expression of their patriotism, and these people are being demonized in the name of white supremacy.
The Biden administration has been using its kind of woke climate theories to undermine the oil production, production of natural gas.
They are undermining our economy through redistributionist policies that don't focus on growth, and as a result, we have inflation, but we also have economic stagnation.
Corporate America is deeply imbued in the so-called ESG, environmental, social, and governance.
It's like, we're not gonna invest based upon profitability.
We're gonna invest based upon how enlightened you are in following climate goals.
And Victor Davis Hanson goes, wow, I mean, what a remarkable situation in which our adversaries are viewing us with some bewilderment, but also with a kind of delight because they go, man, this is our adversary not focusing on bettering its education, not focusing on its competitiveness.
not focusing on new technologies.
Really, its eyes are not on the future, which is where our eyes are, but its eyes are on the past.
And in the name of rectifying the ills of the past...
what woke ideology is doing is weakening the United States and assuring the United States that it will have a brief moment at the front stage of history that the United States is going to fall behind its adversaries and nothing could make its adversaries more pleased than that.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast a, well, a formidable father-daughter duo.
David Limbaugh, brother of Rush Limbaugh, a lawyer, a political commentator, an author of ten national bestsellers, including Jesus on Trial.
We're here to talk about the new book that David and his daughter, Kristen, have written together.
It's called The Resurrected Jesus.
Now Kristen Limbaugh Bloom is the oldest of David and Lisa Limbaugh's five children.
She lives with her husband, Sam, and son, Zeke, in Texas.
She's a producer for Fox News and a personal assistant to Fox News host Sean Hannity.
This is her first book.
Guys, welcome. Great to have you on the podcast.
And David, maybe I'll start with you.
This is a remarkable topic, the resurrection of Jesus.
Now, every Easter we go to church and typically the pastor will read the biblical account of the resurrection and give a sort of a restatement of it.
Probably you're trying to do something maybe broader, maybe somewhat different in the book.
Talk a little bit about how what you're doing in the book, you and Kristen together, is different from the typical Sunday sermon that we're accustomed to hearing once a year every Easter.
Well, what we're doing in this book is going through Paul's final seven epistles, the prison epistles that he wrote while he was in house arrest in Rome, and the three pastoral epistles which he wrote to his colleagues Timothy and Titus and we go through every chapter and verse of these books and then add our own insights and commentary and commentary from the great scholars and early church fathers And then the new thing about this book is we add prayers throughout the text and designed to be interactive prayers,
topical prayers directly connected to the text we're talking about, and hopefully to get the reader more into the book and ultimately into the Bible.
These books are to help unpack the Bible for the lay reader.
I'm not a theologian. Kristen's not a theologian.
To unpack it and make it less intimidating and ultimately inspire readers to read the Bible for themselves because we believe it is the Word of God.
Do you think, David, does the book also have an apologetics component?
By which I mean, does it seek to persuade people who might go, I don't know, did the resurrection really happen at all?
Or is it really aimed at the believer to strengthen and reinforce the believer's faith?
Well, I think the Bible is its own apologetic, and so we discuss the Bible, and therefore, to that extent, it's an apologetic.
But it doesn't aim to be an apologetic.
Like my first Christian-themed book, Jesus on Trial, that you alluded to, setting out the reasons for the faith.
But it does go through the Early church history and how it unfolded and how the heresies and different difficulties Paul was dealing with from the early churches and how he corrected them and encouraged them and gave them instruction for Christian living.
And he sets out the gospel, as you know, in his 13 epistles, especially Romans and Ephesians, where he sets out Christian doctrine more clearly than any other New Testament writer, in my view.
And so that's what we have here.
And I believe because the truth is so compelling, It will persuade readers if they'll just get into it and engage.
Christian, let me turn to you.
Paul is a very interesting figure because he was, strictly speaking, not an apostle.
He wasn't one of the twelve.
And yet he is a hugely influential figure in Christianity.
And it seems that his focus, Paul's focus, is not so much the day-to-day life of Jesus, which is, of course, described in the Gospels, But to focus on the significance and meaning of Jesus' death and resurrection, let me start by asking you this.
You know, Jesus died for our sins, and the sacrifice in that sense was with Jesus' death.
What is the importance of the resurrection?
In other words, why is it so significant, so central to Christianity that Jesus didn't just die, the atonement, but sort of resurrected into heaven?
Why is that such a central concept in Christian belief?
I love that question, Janesh.
Well, first off, the significance, the main significance of Jesus' resurrection is that he conquered death once and for all.
So what Paul writes to these different churches and the books that we cover is that Death has been conquered, and we now are citizens of Heaven.
When we accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, His Holy Spirit is imprinted in our hearts, and so He literally lives inside of us.
And before Jesus' death, that was not the case.
Now we have the power and the authority of Jesus himself, of God himself, living inside of us, and we have access to that, and we can communicate with him on an individual level.
And so Jesus' resurrection changed the entire world, and it brought the Gentiles into the opportunity for resurrection, whereas before, God's chosen people, the Israelites, were the only ones with access to Yahweh, God, the Father. And so the significance is truly incalculable.
It changed the world forever.
It allows us to speak to our Father on a daily basis and to carry out His purposes.
We are now disciples, so to speak, because God wants to use each and every one of us as different members of His body to carry out His will on the earth.
Christian, would you say that the resurrection of Jesus has the...
Well, I think of it as having a double significance in a couple of ways.
One is that it is a prelude to our own resurrection.
In other words, resurrection isn't just Jesus.
It offers the promise that we will also...
But I think the second thing that to me is really interesting is not only does it offer a kind of vista of an afterlife, in other words, an afterlife in which we can have eternal happiness with God, but it also changes the way we live now.
And that's what I really want to ask you about.
What does the knowledge of Jesus' and our own resurrection do for like our ordinary life?
How does it change our lives now?
So what Paul writes, and I love this phrase, is that we are now citizens of heaven.
We should view ourselves as living with one foot in heaven and one foot here on the earth.
We have access to the knowledge of God, as you said, because the Holy Spirit lives inside of us.
And so now we have the hope and the assurance that whatever trials we face here on earth, and we know that we will because Jesus promised us that we would, but we can overcome these things.
We can continue fighting the good fight of faith and know that it is not just a hopeful thought that That good things could happen to us.
It's that we know we are imprinted in heaven.
We have citizenship in heaven that we will have eternal life.
The Bible says that this life is but a vapor.
It is so short in the scheme of the eternity that we have ahead of us.
And so if we walk forward and every single day understand that this day is a little world of its own, we know that We have our Father in Heaven that we're going to be with one day.
But while we're here, we have a duty and we have a mission and we have a calling to connect with Him, to get discernment and direction from Him, and really to bring others into this eternal glory with us.
Great stuff. Let's take a pause.
When we come back, more with David and Kristen Limbaugh Bloom.
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Feel the difference. Guys, I'm back with David Limbaugh and Kristen Limbaugh Bloom.
They're the co-authors of a new book, The Resurrected Jesus.
We're talking about the book and about the resurrection.
David, Kristen was saying a moment ago that we live a sort of a dual existence.
Here we are in the world, but at the same time, we have, through the Bible, the knowledge of being citizens of heaven.
I want to ask you about the The oddity of inhabiting simultaneously an earthly city and a sort of divine city.
You know, Augustine calls it the city of God and the city of man.
There are some people and there are some pastors who interpret this to mean that we have a kind of flimsy existence in the world.
We should not be Active in the world.
We should be looking longingly to the next world.
And it's sort of a recipe, they think, for a withdrawal from the political sphere.
Why? Because life is short and eternity is going to last a lot longer than our short lives.
I want you to talk about our dual relationship between the earthly city and the heavenly city.
And what is the argument, if there is one, does Paul make one for engagement, you may say, in both cities?
I reject this idea that Christians need to be apathetic.
In fact, when you think about it, that is the ultimate selfishness.
We are called to be evangelists to the rest of the world.
We have a duty to proselytize.
We have a duty to share our faith because, after all, eternal life is at stake.
Whether or not you're a full-blown five-point Calvinist or not, you still have a duty to evangelize because we are God's agents on this earth.
If our existence on earth were not important, He wouldn't have put us here.
And so I believe we have a duty to fight for the truth.
These entire letters, these epistles...
Paul is insisting that the early churches adhere to the truth because when false teachers come in and introduce their heresies and false teachings, it dilutes the gospel.
And that, in effect, dilutes Christianity and the possibility of its spread.
And if you do that, you don't have people being exposed to the gospel and thus to the possibility of eternal life.
Jesus, I want to branch off a little bit on this.
Jesus did not come to unite us, as is the common myth that the liberals appropriate.
He came, as he said, to divide father and mother, brother and sister.
Why? Because he is the truth.
I am the way, the truth, and the life.
Satan rules this world.
He's in opposition to me.
A lot of people under his spell are going to continue to be in opposition to them.
You cannot reach across the aisle and compromise with people who are so manifestly Illogical and driven on emotions and actually driven by unseen spiritual forces, dark forces, evil forces.
You have to engage in the world and do what you can to stand for truth, to stand in the breach for Jesus Christ, and to try to spread that word.
Of course we should unite in the church, and Paul says that among believers, and we should try to get more people, as many people as we can, to become believers.
But the last thing we can do It's compromise with the truth because then I think you're insulting and discrediting the work of Christ.
I think it's interesting, David, that the miracle of the resurrection is so fundamental to Christianity.
And in fact, Christianity is really a religion of miracles, right?
I mean, there are some miracles, of course, in the Old Testament, but not as many as in the New.
If you look at other religions, they either have no miracles at all, or they have maybe one or two, but they're very incidental.
I know in Islam, at one point, it says that Muhammad took this sort of night journey into heaven.
But, of course, Muhammad's an ordinary man.
He's not the son of God.
He's not God himself.
So, talk for a moment, if you will, about the centrality of miracles in Christianity.
Because a miracle, it would seem, requires faith.
A miracle is a suspension of ordinary experience.
And so, Christianity, in that sense, is founded, is it not, on this central proclamation of faith.
There's no question.
And the supernatural is real.
It's not something we can see, but today's secular scientists would argue that if you can't feel it and touch it, it's not real.
And Christianity depends on our acceptance of the supernatural.
In fact, God's creation of the universe was supernatural.
He breathed it into existence.
His decision to create mankind, knowing that we would fall from grace, and it would require His Son, To become a human being and suffer the indignities of human existence and die for our sins so that we could be redeemed by faith in Him.
That is a miracle that a God could make Himself man and then live among us and allow us to place our faith in Him and become believers and live eternally.
The prophecies in the Old Testament are miraculous.
Imagine an omniscient God who knows in advance the things that we're going to do.
And the things that everyone is going to do.
Knows all the hairs on our heads.
That is ultimately what What led me to Christ from a skeptic to a believer was the prophecies in the Old Testament, how miraculous they were.
And there's so many other prophecies that Jesus unveiled.
And yeah, but I want to make a distinction here, Dinesh.
Even though there are supernatural aspects of the Bible and God is supernatural, Our faith does not depend on something that is unseen.
That is to say, there are reasons for our belief.
And I think there's overwhelming evidence that the Bible is true and that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
We don't base our faith on something phony or fake or just a hope that might be there.
You study the evidence and you will become You will become convinced that Jesus lived and walked among us, that He is the Son of God, He's fully God and fully man, and that the only way to eternal life is to place your faith in Him.
Christian, let me turn to you.
I mean, as I think about the resurrection, I mean, first of all, it's interesting to me that Paul does appeal to earthly evidence.
He talks about the number of people who have seen Jesus after his death.
I think he mentions 500 people.
He says some of them are dead, but others are still alive right now.
The other thing is the psychological point that you have these apostles who go to their deaths Why would they do that in defense of a lie?
So I'd like you to talk a little bit about the sort of plausibility of the resurrection, even though, granted, it's a miracle none of us have seen someone resurrected.
Nevertheless, the Bible goes out of its way, it seems to me, to show that there is a kind of human plausibility.
This is, even though a far-out event, it's an event that we don't have to suspend our reason to believe that it occurred.
Right. I mean, my favorite instance, actually, of Jesus' resurrection is the cover of our book.
It's Doubting Thomas. And Jesus appears to His twelve disciples, and He's in the flesh.
And I think that what's so beautiful about that story that we read is that Thomas said, even though I can see you, I can't believe it until I can feel...
I'm sorry, before he saw Jesus, he said, I won't believe it until I see it, until I have felt the holes that were nailed through his hands.
And I think that one of the heresies that was actually going around in the churches at the time was that Jesus was not fully man.
And as Christians, we know and we believe that Jesus is 100% man and 100% God.
And so I think this is a beautiful...
Instance where God showed that he was, even though he's resurrected, he is not just a spirit being.
He is still the man, the human.
And he said, Thomas, feel the holes in my hand.
Feel the hole in my side.
And some people, you know, he's known as doubting Thomas, but I heard a wonderful sermon one time, actually, that tapped into the grief that Thomas was going through.
And that Jesus actually was...
Specifically calling Thomas out because he knew what Thomas was wrestling with, that the grief of somebody that he thought was his savior and his best friend probably wasn't who he said he was because he died and they weren't expecting that.
And so he says, Thomas, come here.
I know exactly what you needed and this is it.
And I think that's a beautiful depiction of God's heart.
So many of us Not of us, but so many Christians and so many people who are not Christians don't understand how compassionate God is, don't understand that He understands our weaknesses, and that is exactly why Jesus came, so that He could have the human experience, so that He could say, I know exactly what you're going through.
He has been tempted in every which way, and He overcame it.
He dignified every human emotion by overcoming the temptation to sin and to give in.
It's a temptation. And so by seeing Christ's humanity and yet overcoming the humanity of the temptation and the sin is what I think so many of us can hold on to and really just marvel at that this God made himself a tiny baby in a woman's womb and went through all these different injustices while he was on earth and yet loves us so much that he did it just to save us.
Guys, the book is The Resurrected Jesus.
Kristen Limbaugh Bloom, David Limbaugh, thank you very much for joining me.
Really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Dinesh.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. The closing scene of the Telemachy, the first few books of the Odyssey, the part that focuses on Odysseus' son, Telemachus, these books close with a plot on the part of the suitors.
To kill Telemachus.
Let's remember, Telemachus has denounced the suitors in public.
He then went on a journey to see Nestor in Pylos, to see Menelaus in Sparta.
And Telemachus is on his way back, but the suitors, it turns out, are ready for him.
We see one of the suitors say,"'Give me a ship and 20 men, so I may watch and catch him in the strait.'" And then Homer tells us Penelope is actually distraught because she has word of what's happening, that the suitors are planning to kill her son.
Penelope was soon aware of all the suitors' secret plots.
The houseboy, Miran, told her, since he had been outside in the courtyard and he had heard the plans they were devising.
So the point here from Homer is that as the Telemachy ends, things are really bad.
And this is really why Homer has given us this sort of long...
And by distraction, I mean he has moved away from Odysseus, the center of the action.
Odysseus is now going to make his entrance at the beginning of Book 5.
So we've been told Odysseus is on the island of Calypso.
He's being held prisoner.
But then Homer focuses really on what's been happening in his home country of Ithaca.
And he has been building up the troubles that So that we have Penelope besieged, Telemachus now being plotted against, and so it is overdue, let's say, for Odysseus to return home.
Things have really gotten out of hand, and something is going to break.
Now, as Book 5 begins, we have from Homer a kind of restatement of what we had at the very beginning of the Odyssey.
In other words... Homer takes us back.
It's kind of a cinematic cut, and we cut back now to a scene with the gods.
And here is Athena talking to the other gods, specifically to Zeus, and saying, hey, we've got to get this guy Odysseus out of Calypso's island.
Hey, we've got to get him home.
And now you might say, well, Homer's already told us this at the very beginning.
Why is he doing it again here?
Well, think about it this way.
We've been through four books of the Odyssey.
Now, each book, if you were to recite it, takes about an hour.
So in terms of the bard reciting the story at, let's say, a religious or just a festival in ancient Greece, The story is already four hours long.
It's kind of like watching two movies.
So Homer, rightly I think, says, alright, now that we've laid the scene in Ithaca, now that we've seen how bad things are over there, we're going to come back to Odysseus now.
We're going to start here. We're going to bring Odysseus on stage, so to speak.
But I need to sort of restate where we are.
I've got to remind the listener, the reader in our case, of where Odysseus is.
You have Athena appealing to Zeus, and Athena is saying to Zeus, you know, Odysseus was really a good man.
Quote,"...Odyseus ruled gently like a father, but no one even thinks about him now.
The wretched man is stranded on an island.
His son has gone for news of his lost father in Sandy Pylos and splendid Sparta.
They plot to kill the boy when he returns." So this is a daughter, Athena, making a plea to Zeus and basically saying, oh, look at poor Odysseus.
And listen to how Zeus responds.
He goes, ah, daughter, what a thing to say.
Did you not plan all this yourself so that Odysseus could come along and take revenge upon those suitors?
So here is Zeus essentially chastising his daughter and saying, listen, all this drama from you, but hey, I think this is a clever scheme from you to set all this up, let things get out of hand so that your hero, Odysseus, can then sort of march in and bust up the bad guys.
But nevertheless, Zeus relents and he tells Hermes, listen, you've got to go over to Calypso's island, tell her to let Odysseus go.
And then Zeus gives a little bit of a forecasting of what's going to happen to Odysseus.
This is a very Homeric technique, which is Homer doesn't hesitate to tell you exactly what's going to happen and then deliver it.
He's not counting on your suspense in which you have no idea what's going to happen.
Homer's going to tell you.
But this does not in any way diminish your interest and excitement and fascination with what it turns out is going to be perhaps one of the greatest adventures ever undertaken in Western literature.
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The image that Homer gives us, I think a very powerful image, is that Odysseus is longing to see, Homer writes, even the smoke rising from his home country.
Ithaca is known to be a fairly sandy and barren place, and Homer gives us this very lush description of Calypso's island.
Quote, Around the cave a luscious forest flourished, Alder, poplar, a scented cypress. It was full of wings.
Birds nested there, but hunted out at sea. The owls, the hawks, the gulls with gaping necks.
A ripe and verdant vine hung thick with grapes was stretched to coil around her cave.
So here is nature abundant in Calypso's island.
By contrast, Odysseus' homeland is kind of dry and parched and barren.
But yet, but yet, that's where Odysseus wants to be.
Now, let's remember, he has been prisoner in Calypso's island for seven years.
Seven years. During this time, all his men are dead.
In fact, they have been long dead.
And we'll find out as the story proceeds...
Largely through the flashback of books 9 through 12, how Odysseus' men all perished.
Some over here, some over there.
But here he is sitting pining on the seashore, and Calypso is approached by Hermes.
Now, she agrees to let Odysseus go.
She's a little sulky about it, and she basically complains, Why are the gods making me do this?
I rescued this man.
All his friends were killed.
I've taken care of him.
And she goes, And now you're making me let him go.
I actually would rather have him here with me.
And nevertheless, Calypso comes to Odysseus and basically says, I've decided to let you go.
Now, right away from Odysseus' reaction, we begin to see Odysseus' character and a number of his key traits.
In fact, what's remarkable is these traits are kind of coming to life for the first time here on Calypso's island because all this time while Odysseus has been on Calypso's island, he has been passive.
He is in captivity to a god or a goddess.
There's nothing he can do. It doesn't matter how clever he is.
He can't talk his way out of it.
He can't fool her and get away.
So he has been in a way not Odysseus.
He has been in this enforced servitude to this sea nymph, Calypso.
But now, for the first time, as soon as he has an idea that he might be leaving, he kind of springs into action.
But he springs into action in a very Odysseus way, which is he springs into action with caution.
You might expect Odysseus to go, Oh, you're going to let me go?
Great! Let's move!
Where's the ship? How do I board it?
Let's go hit it!
But no, Odysseus' reaction is...
Caution. Odysseus says to Calypso, before his first reaction, he makes her swear that she's not lying to him, that she's not tricking him, that this is not some kind of a malevolent scheme.
She's not trying to harm him in some way.
So Odysseus moves first by making sure.
He tells her to swear an oath by the river Styx that she means what she says.
And only then...
Only then does Odysseus begin to take action and you may say to become Odysseus once again.
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