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Sept. 22, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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HOW IT’S DONE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep419
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effective action going on right now is coming at the state level, states like Texas and Florida, and not from the Republicans in DC.
Danielle DeSouza Gill joins me. We're going to talk about Herschel Walker in Georgia and also about school choice in Texas. I'll explore why India is ambivalent about the U.S. right now, even though Indians are very pro-American.
And I'll discuss what is not shown in Ken Burns' documentary on the Holocaust.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
♪♪ America needs this voice.
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When we scan the landscape of American politics, we notice that there is very effective action taking place at the state level.
And I'm thinking now particularly of two states, Florida and Texas, which are really two of the largest, if not the largest, red states.
And the governors, but not just the governor, the The lieutenant governor, the political establishment in the states seems to be moving on multiple fronts.
It seemed initially in Texas that Greg Abbott got a bit of a slow start, at least in this term.
And he got battered a little bit because he had a mask mandate on, not for that long.
And this was, of course, at the very beginning of COVID. And then he decided he thought better of it.
And the mask mandate disappeared and it's never coming back.
Of course, in Florida, DeSantis went kind of full bore and decided we're not shutting the state down at all.
So we will deal with the pandemic, we will take the measures we need to, we will provide the treatments that we need to, but we are not closing off economic activity and we're not going to stop people from going to churches, none of that.
It turned out, I think, in retrospect, to be the right call.
And DeSantis has taken leadership in a number of areas.
I mean, it's almost like every week, or even in some cases every day, the guy comes up with something new.
Just off the top of my head, a few initiatives by DeSantis.
Number one, let's set up an election integrity unit.
In fact, I think he calls it an election police unit, and they've arrested a bunch of felons who have been voting.
So DeSantis is on that issue.
Number two, He is on the issue of woke corporations.
And of course, Florida got into a skirmish with Disney.
They pulled Disney's special subsidy that allows Disney to operate almost like a city.
DeSantis is all over the so-called ESG issue, the issue of, again, large corporate funds deciding that they will only invest in companies that are...
I'm inclusive in terms of diversity or companies that follow climate guidelines.
And DeSantis says, listen, if you want to do that, you could be my guest, but the state of Florida is not going to be investing in you.
We're not going to be putting our pension money where the pension money is being used as a kind of ransom for companies to move in a woke direction.
Now, the issue of the border and of illegals, which of course affects both Florida and Texas, I think actually Abbott is the one who had the idea of dispatching illegals off to progressive hotspots.
I mean, a genius idea.
The left is freaking out over it.
And by the way, it's kind of a good measure.
I use this also in my own public life.
I measure my effectiveness by the degree to which I freak out the other side.
If I merely have the other side kind of sullen, then I think, like, I'm not doing a good job.
I need to up the ante.
And Debbie goes, Dinesh, this is how you get into trouble.
This is how you cross the line.
This is how you say all those really offensive things on Twitter.
And I'm like, well...
But the point here is that Abbott came up with this idea.
But DeSantis, again, it doesn't really matter who comes up with a great idea, because the point is to adopt it.
It would be great to see people all over the country adopting these schemes, but they're only occurring.
But I'm glad the leading red states are doing them, Florida and...
Now, I want to contrast the energy, the activity by these states, particularly DeSantis and Abbott, with the kind of do-nothing, lethargic Republicans in Washington.
What What are the accomplishments?
What are they coming up with?
Okay, I realize they're not the majority, but have they put forward a bold agenda and said, listen, if you vote for us in November, we're going to be doing these 17 things, really, you know...
One week it's going to be this.
We're going to scale back affirmative action.
The next week we're going to be pulling the funding from the 87,000 IRS agents.
And the next week we're going to be doing this.
And the next week we're going to do an investigation into fetal pain.
And the next week we're going to be investigating Hunter Biden.
And the next week we're going to be calling Merrick Garland.
And the next week we're going to begin impeachment proceedings.
So the Republicans could be doing all this.
But you almost are dealing here with people who are relying on the unpopularity of Biden to give them the majority and are almost saying to the American people, we don't really know what we're going to do with that majority.
So, I'm glad we have a federal system where we're able to see energy occurring at the state level.
And I assume it's partly because these governors, these lieutenant governors, are more in touch with politics on the ground.
They're more in touch with their base.
Whereas many of these congressmen, yeah, they have offices in their home district, but they sort of live in Washington, D.C. To that degree, their psychology becomes part of the swamp.
And I wish that the national Republicans would take a page from the energy and innovation and boldness that we see at the state level so we can have a national party that we can be proud of.
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Danielle, this has been a crazy political season going on.
Let's start by talking a little bit about We're good to go.
A race that initially Walker seemed to be trailing badly, and trailing badly in a reddish or red state, so it was a kind of a bad sign.
It looks like now Walker has pulled even, and in some polls he is leading.
Talk a little bit about that race as you see it, and then I want to ask you more broadly about the MAGA races around the country.
Well, there's no question that Raphael Warnock does not represent the people of Georgia.
He is a radical leftist.
He's not an old Democrat or anything.
And Georgia is, of course, a red state.
And yet Raphael Warnock, he's a pro-choice pastor.
He's very radical. Of course, a big Biden supporter.
Big friends with Stacey Abrams, people like that.
He's definitely going to be hurt by the fact that Biden's done such a horrible job in office.
And yet, Herschel Walker, he's actually from there.
He's actually someone who's more in the way of a common man because he was a football player.
And of course, that's, you know, kind of a big successful thing.
But at the same time, he actually says in his speeches, hey, guys, you know, I'm not necessarily the smartest person.
But, you know, my values align with people of Georgia.
So I think that Hershel Walker should be doing much better.
So I'm either skeptical of the polling, or I think that, you know, maybe people perhaps just don't know him yet and don't know How bad Warnick is because Warnick is such a big orator.
He thinks he's the next Martin Luther King because he's a pastor and a church in Atlanta when in reality, you know, he's actually not a very moral person.
Martin Luther King was very much in the mainstream tradition of appealing to the founding.
I agree, Warnock might be pastoring Martin Luther King's old church, but he's a long way from being Martin Luther King.
I think with Walker, he was...
Because he came in from the world of athletics, was a relative newcomer to politics, he stumbled in some of the early interviews.
He didn't have the kind of verbal sophistication, perhaps, of someone who's speaking in church every Sunday, which is Warnock.
But on the other hand, it looks like people are now taking a closer look.
Well, Herschel Walker's getting better as a candidate.
And I think Georgia is also waking up to what it's going to be like if...
Bidenism comes full-scale to Georgia.
In other words, here's a chance to turn it back.
Georgia has two radical left-wing senators right now, Ossoff and Warnock, and it's clearly time to get at least one of them out of there.
Of course. And I think Herschel Walker's son, Christian Walker, should be his campaign advisor because he's super smart and funny and has a lot of great thoughts.
But I think when people look at Herschel Walker, they would see that, you know what, it's not about who It's not about any of that.
It's about who actually stands for the values of people in Georgia.
And in many ways, I think that's kind of how Trump is or other people, not in the same way as Herschel Walker, but he's not going to have these pre-prepared eloquent speeches.
He just says what he thinks and same with his tweets.
That's how those were. And so I think that people don't care about that anymore.
I don't know if that's why people maybe aren't, or why the polling isn't showing up as high for Hershel Walker.
Maybe it's because there's a lot of disinformation going on with Warnock, and maybe there's a lot of fear-mongering happening, and Stacey Abrams, of course, has a lot of influence in Atlanta.
But I think outside of Atlanta, most people are very Republican, and they should be voting for Hershel Walker.
I mean, the media, both national and in Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, very left-wing, so there's no question about that.
Let's talk about something a little broader.
McConnell, Mitch McConnell made a statement, not directly, but he kind of implied that maybe the Republicans will not take the Senate.
And his reason was that the Republican MAGA candidates are, in a sense, not the best.
I think he was implying that, you know, instead of having, let's just say, Blake Masters in Arizona, Or J.D. Vance in Ohio?
Or Oz in Pennsylvania?
Or Herschel Walker?
And instead, if you had, let's just say, some state senator or Republican congressman who is now running for governor or running for the Senate, the ticket would be better.
It's not obvious to me that that would be the case.
I don't think that these are bad candidates.
Do you? Of course not.
No, I think that McConnell is just upset because, you know, he doesn't get along with Trump and they have a falling out or something.
So McConnell doesn't want all these new MAGA people coming in because they're going to be Trumpsters and people from this era.
And then McConnell's like, oh, no, I'm going to have to deal with them and all this.
And the party really is moving, you know, in the MAGA direction.
That's where the Republican Party is moving, not in the McConnell direction.
So he wants more little McConnell's coming in.
And that's not what the Republicans actually want who are voting in these primaries, which is why when people get their Trump endorsement, they immediately win their nomination because people want those kinds of candidates.
And then when we look at these candidates, like you mentioned J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, or not Peter Thiel, I'm sorry, Blake Masters, who is backed by Peter Thiel, they're very intelligent people, they're successful people, but are also, you know, So I think that that's a great combination of people who should be running.
They should be really hardcore, but they should also be, you know, people who are up to the job of these roles, like being a senator.
I'm kind of chuckling because of the specter that you raised of little McConnells.
I'm just trying to imagine a whole bunch of people in their 20s who are like little mini McConnells.
Frightening, frightening idea, by the way.
Subject of a good horror movie.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, I want to talk to Danielle about school choice in Texas and elsewhere.
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I'm back with my daughter, Danielle D'Souza Gill, author of The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America, also the host of a weekly show on Epic TV.
It's called Counterculture with Danielle D'Souza Gill.
Check it out. Danielle, let's talk a little bit about school choice.
there was a very important law passed in Arizona, not just an experimental school choice program, but one that offers school choice to the entire, to all the parents in Arizona who have their kids in school.
And now I see an article in the Dallas News, majority of Texan voters favor school voucher programs, according to a recent poll.
And it looks like there is a movement of parents around the country, very unhappy with the public schools, want to have at least an alternative.
Of course, the unions, the public schools are pushing back.
They obviously want a monopoly because, you know, everyone succeeds when you have a monopoly.
People have nowhere else to go.
What do you think about this movement?
Is this something that you think has the potential to not only change the political landscape but also change education?
Yes, school choice is definitely the future because why should someone be trapped in a horrible public school?
Just because you were born in a zip code, that's not a nice area.
That's horrible and that's not really something that conservatives should stand for.
We want everyone to have opportunity and then for people to succeed based on their hard work, not for people to be, you know, trapped in a horrible school while other people have a much better public school.
And, you know, many of these public schools are bad.
Most of them actually are far behind, you know, students in other countries.
China is taking off and of course with COVID we saw these crazy shutdowns.
And so these other schools that are doing well, a couple public schools that are doing great, Those may stay open because people will want to use their vouchers there.
Those are good schools. They have good teachers.
So it's not to say that every school is bad, but the ones that are really underperforming, there's violence, there's crime, kids don't even want to go to that school.
They don't feel safe there. Why should those schools continue onward?
Those parents should have other options to send their kids to a better school and they shouldn't be, you know, held back just because they don't have the funds.
So I think that instead of these taxpayer dollars just going directly to a horrible school, they should go into the hands of the parents and that child so that they can then go to a better school or maybe a Christian school or something that aligns more with their values because also a lot of parents are probably looking at the fact that wokeness is seeping into schools and they don't want to send their kids to schools with those kinds of, you know, poisonous ideologies anyways.
I mean, I think what's interesting is that the public schools still have a built-in advantage because the public school is free, right?
Even if a parent gets a voucher, let's say a voucher for $7,000 or $8,000, the private school or the Christian school still might be $10,000 or $11,000, which means you'd have to still pay the difference.
So it's not as if parents are being exempted from paying any additional costs.
They might have to pay some additional costs, whereas there's no cost to send your kid to a public school.
And yet the public schools are screaming because they know they're so terrible that they can't even compete with an unlevel playing field that benefits them.
Right. And I think that, you know, sometimes what happens is the bureaucrats, these people who are in there so long, they just want to keep their job yet at the same time, didn't really want to teach during shutdowns.
And so those kinds of people, we can't have our entire public school system revolve around them.
We actually should reward teachers who work hard.
They stay overtime. They are very good teachers.
And so I don't know why we need to protect those people who are just leeches off the system.
And then, of course, the students are the ones who suffer in the end because they're in schools that are a horrible environment.
They can't even learn when they're there because there's so much chaos happening.
The classroom isn't in order.
The teacher just has to focus on the one troublesome student.
And so I think that It's just a bad system overall.
And sometimes there are children of special needs, all these other things.
So maybe a different school is best for them anyways, even if that was a good public school.
So I think the parents really know what's best in these situations.
And oftentimes these good public schools actually are brought down because these bad public schools are also taking funding.
They're wasting money. So we need to clean up this system.
You mentioned the issue of wokeness.
We'll now put money in the market and people on our side, conservatives, Republicans, will be like, you know what?
Why don't we create some new schools?
Why don't we create some unwoke private schools and some unwoke Christian schools?
And then we will have a choice not just between private and public, but also between a woke and an unwoke education.
Absolutely. I mean, I think it's sad because in a way, these Elite private schools are incredibly woke.
And then also a lot of public schools are now becoming incredibly woke.
I think because there oftentimes isn't a check on them.
I'm not sure what's happening with the parents associations or what's happening with the homes there.
But I think that probably just really good Christian schools is the answer or schools that are run by conservatives in other ways.
Because a lot of the time what happens is, at least when I first started going to schools like that, is there were people who were conservative.
There were teachers who were conservative.
Headmaster was conservative. But then a liberal comes in, takes over, and then they don't just let things continue the way they were.
They want to remake everything.
So then other teachers get fired.
They bring in new people.
There's all kinds of changes happening.
And then it's hard for us to then take it back, even though when they come in, they very easily enter because we let them in.
And yet we can't take it back.
So it's very sad.
But I do think we either have to take it back.
Parents have to step up and say, Maybe the board says, you know, we're done with this.
Or we have to then start these new schools.
And hopefully that happens naturally just because parents say, enough is enough.
And I just don't want my kid going here and learning this.
I'm not going to pay for that.
Excellent points. Danielle, thank you very much for joining me and look forward to having you back soon.
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The Biden administration is very concerned about India.
Why? Because India seems to be tilting or tilted in a pretty pro-Russian direction.
The Indians are not marching to the Biden street band.
And this is causing the Biden people a lot of discomfort.
Now, obviously, India is not alone.
There are many other countries that aren't marching either.
But those countries are not so much of a big surprise.
Iran, of course, is in sort of the Russian orbit.
China is, along with Iran, kind of an adversary of the United States and therefore doesn't mind making common cause with Russia.
Even some of the other Arab countries are kind of in the same boat.
But India has been moving in a pro-American direction.
The Indian people, I sometimes say, and I don't mean this scientifically because I haven't seen any real evidence of this, but it seems on the ground that there's a very strong pro-American sentiment in India.
When I probe it further, I realize that the pro-American sentiment is really aimed at the America of 50 years ago.
It's not aimed at the America of today.
It's not as the Indians are saying, yeah, we want more LGBTQ. Oh yeah, we want our kids to get pregnant out of wedlock.
Oh yeah, we'd like to see the trans phenomenon come big time to India.
Oh yeah, we want abortion on demand.
No, the Indians want none of this.
But what they do want Well, it's probably a caricature or an exaggeration to say they want the America of the 1950s.
But that's a pretty good way to understand it.
They want an America...
They want India to be a society more like the America of an earlier era, an era of upward mobility.
They want to have an open society, but also a society that is conscious of its own identity and its own roots.
They like the idea of patriotism or nationalism.
In India, Indians are very nationalistic.
Now, India in the Cold War had a pro-Russian tilt.
Part of this was because Kissinger convinced Nixon and convinced the United States to take a pro-Pakistan stance in the Cold War, and that caused India to go in the other direction and side with the Russians.
But today, India is energy dependent on Russia.
It also has strong military ties with Russia.
The Russians supply a lot of the Indian military equipment.
And so, India has been very reluctant to come out against this invasion of Ukraine.
Of course, the Indians say war is not a solution.
It's better to solve these things with diplomacy.
But the bottom line is the Indians are not siding with the Biden administration in embracing the type of sanctions that Biden has imposed.
The Indians are like, we're not doing that.
We're not following those.
Putin has been in touch with Modi and Modi, of course, is pro-American than previous Indian governments.
I think Modi would like to have stronger ties with the United States.
But I also think that Modi recognizes that under Biden and under the left, the United States is trying to We're good to go.
The idea of local communities.
The Indians like to follow a kind of customary way of life.
In fact, there are some customs, not always good ones, that endure for very long periods of time.
So the last thing the Indians want is some massive shake-up of their own society.
They don't necessarily want woke customs.
It's coming through the movies.
It's coming through television.
So it's coming through the, it seems, unavoidable influence of American culture.
But on top of that, you've got the pressure of the Biden administration.
Why come you haven't had LGBTQ month in India?
And the Indians are like, that's because we're never going to.
So I think the Indians have realized that this American model of today is not one that they want to uncritically adopt.
And so here's the Biden team trying to cajole India and kind of bring India into the American orbit, but the Indians are resisting.
And I guess part of what I'm saying is that the reason that they're resisting is that they don't like the values that the political left in America and in the West represent.
So India would be a much more willing partner of the United States and of the West.
If you were able to say to these cultures like India, hey, listen, we want you to have stronger trade ties We want you to reduce your dependence, military and trade, on Russia.
But we are not going to try to interfere with your cultural norms, with your religious norms.
We're not going to browbeat you on issues that are not important to you, but perhaps important to us.
The Indians, I think, would be much more receptive.
But as it is, you can see on all fronts a certain anxiety about entering into full partnership with the Biden administration.
And it's based upon, I think, a legitimate and understandable resistance to some very bad things that the Biden administration represents.
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I'd like to talk about, for a couple of segments, about Ken Burns, the famous documentary maker, and his most recent series, which is a multi-part, in fact, six and a half hours, on, it's called The U.S. and the Holocaust.
A little bit of a background on Ken Burns.
Most of you probably know who he is.
It's probably most famous for a really wonderful documentary series that he did, now it seems like 25 years ago, on the Civil War.
Now, while I know that work very well, I've seen that probably three or four times, and I think it is a kind of masterpiece.
If you've never seen it, It's well worth watching, and it's available on DVD, and it intercuts beautiful archival footage, photographs, letters from Civil War veterans on both sides.
In fact, it follows one soldier on the Union side and one soldier on the Confederate side.
And it's very profound.
And even the discussion of the various battles, the movement of the war toward the Confederacy, and then, of course, the movement after Gettysburg toward the Union, all of it described vividly and fascinating.
Now, I haven't seen most of the other Ken Burns work.
He's done The Brooklyn Bridge.
He did baseball, he did the West, he did jazz, he did Muhammad Ali, the national parks.
He's also done documentaries on the Second World War and Vietnam.
So this is really his, the historical documentary is kind of his specialty.
And Ken Burns, I would say politically, is left-leaning, but not like a far-left activist.
In fact, he got blasted for the Civil War because he had, as his main commentator, a Shelby Foote, who was a Southerner and somebody, I wouldn't say sympathetic to the Confederate cause, but not somebody who was unwilling to describe the Southern cause the way the
Southerners saw it. You know, in good history you don't suspend analysis or evaluation, but you don't begin with it.
You begin by saying, let's try to understand the conflict the way the people who fought in it understood it.
And since there are two sides, let's look at each side from its own point of view.
Once you've done that and fairly presented that, you can then say, all right, well now we're going to try to adjudicate which side is right on this point or on that point.
It's unlikely that any side is right on every single point.
I think Ken Burns tried to bring that kind of balance to the Civil War documentary.
And I don't know if because he was chastised for it, you know, the left was like this.
Basically what the left wants is out and out propaganda.
And they were unhappy that he even had Shelby Foote or certainly had him as the main source.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about Ken Burns' new documentary on the Holocaust.
Not so much for what's in it, but for what's out of it, or what he doesn't cover.
Now, he has every right, of course, to pick his topic.
And his topic here is the American response to the Holocaust.
And... And Ken Burns begins, of course, by conceding that we today kind of commemorate or at least remember the Holocaust.
Of course, it's famous, the famous phrase associated with the Holocaust, which is never again.
There's a Holocaust museum right off the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Kind of remarkable in and of itself.
I mean, think about it. The Holocaust did not occur in America.
It happened thousands of miles away in Europe.
And yet here we are when, you know, the Museum of Natural History, the Museum of American History, you've got all this Americana in Washington, D.C. in a series of museums that talk about the Wright Brothers and now talk about Albert Einstein at Princeton and talk about all this stuff,
American history, replicas of American presidents, the Cutlery and the dresses of American First Ladies and then, somewhat anomalously, the Holocaust Museum.
Now, it looks like what Ken Burns is trying to do here is say that the American response to the Holocaust was inadequate.
And in that, he's right.
Americans didn't, first of all, know fully what was going on.
Second of all, there was kind of an isolationist sentiment that what's happening in Europe is none of our business.
And it's a European war.
I mean, today we call it World War II, but you have to think about it.
All of the world was not equally involved in this war.
To some degree, World War I and II were European civil wars.
America, of course, got pulled into both.
When we come back, we'll talk more about Ken Burns and the stuff he decided not to cover.
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I'm talking about Ken Burns' new documentary on the American response to the Holocaust.
And I want to get to a part of the documentary where Ken Burns is talking about how even though we look at the Holocaust as happening over there.
Ken Burns tries to show that there were very bad things happening over here.
And Burns' point, it's kind of a conventional point, and others on the left have made it.
There's sort of parallel threads of racism and anti-Semitism occurring, let's just say, on this side of the pond.
And then Ken Burns drawing on some recent scholarship, scholarship by people like James Whitman and others.
James Whitman, by the way, the scholar who's written a book called Hitler's American Model, The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.
And what Whitman shows is that the Nazis were able to devise the Nuremberg Laws in part by looking to the example of American laws and specifically the segregation laws of the American South.
And the Nazis were like, why don't we devise policies for Jews that look something like what the policies that we see devised in America for blacks?
But the point that Ken Burns covers over is who devised those policies in America?
Who made the policies that Hitler was enthusiastic about?
He says Hitler was enthusiastic about some racism going on in America, but he doesn't say who's racism.
Why? Because Ken Burns is playing the progressive game.
Let's blame America.
Let's blame the South.
Let's blame the white man.
And unmentioned in this catalog of evildoers are A, the Democrats, and B, the Progressives.
You might say, wait a minute, what do the Democrats or the Progressives have to do with any of this?
When Hitler praised what's called the Lebensraum, or the taking over of land that doesn't belong to you, and Hitler goes, we've seen this happening in America, I'd like to do some of this in Europe, he was referring specifically to Andrew Jackson.
Let's remember Andrew Jackson is the founder of the Democratic Party.
And Jackson's bloodthirsty policies of displacing the Indians, the Cherokee in particular, driving them further west, seizing their land, this became a model for Hitler.
So Hitler was inspired by the example of the founder of the Democratic Party.
Then when we talk about the fact that the Nuremberg Laws were patterned on the segregation laws of the South, you have to ask which party put those laws into effect.
And here's the point. Every segregation or Jim Crow law in the American South, bar none, It was passed by a Democratic legislature, a Democratic here meaning Democratic Party, a Democratic legislature signed by a Democratic governor and put into effect by Democratic officials.
So the Democrats were and are the party of racial segregation.
And so when the Nazis...
The Nazis, who were national socialists in Germany, were looking, if you will, to their progressive counterparts in the United States in the South and saying, in effect, we want to be like them.
We like their laws.
The Democrats, of course, didn't explicitly call themselves socialists, but the Nazis realized that they were left of center in this regard.
And the Nazis admired them.
And then finally, a third parallel.
Hitler and the Nazis were very excited by eugenic laws that had been adopted by American progressives going all the way back to the earlier part of the century.
Woodrow Wilson was part of this.
These were laws that basically were Margaret Sanger-type laws.
Let's find people who are weak, Who are uneducated, who are, from our perspective, inferior.
Many of them are racial minorities.
And let's discriminate against them, segregate them, and perhaps even worse, in some cases, kill them.
And the main form of killing advocated in the United States was euthanasia, was infanticide.
The progressives were champions of both.
And Hitler knew this, and the Nazis knew this.
And so, in fact, there are comments to the effect that the American progressive eugenic policies are far ahead of those in Nazi Germany, and the Nazis need to Create policies once again inspired by, drawn from, taking a page out of the book of American Progressive.
So all these parallels are very clearly there in the historical record.
But of course, Ken Burns realizes it would be a little radioactive for him and would probably bring him far more abuse than he got for the Civil War.
And so very prudentially, very carefully, and I would say very opportunistically, He decides to leave these details out.
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We have now arrived at one of the most famous episodes in the Odyssey, and that is Odysseus' encounter with the Cyclopes, with the Cyclops named Polyphemus.
The Cyclops is a kind of a, well, monster is probably too strong a term, but essentially a kind of one-eyed figure, very strange.
They're not immortals.
They're mortals. They have their own island, by the way, traditionally thought to be Sicily, at least over the centuries.
The island of Sicily is identified as the place that Homer seems to be describing here.
How do people, by the way, know that?
Well, they really look very carefully at what Homer says.
Homer says things like, the Cyclopes were lacking in customs.
Very interesting phrase, lacking in customs.
They put trust in gods, do not plant their food from seed or plow, and yet the barley, grain, and clustering wine grapes all flourish there, increased by rain from Zeus.
So this causes then scholars to think about what possible Mediterranean land could Homer have in mind here.
This is how the candidate of Sicily emerges.
Homer goes on to write,"...they hold no councils, have no common laws, but live in caves on lofty mountains." So again, what's a landscape that has caves?
"...and each makes laws for his own wife and children without concern for what others think." So Homer here seems to be describing a division, a distinction that would later be clarified philosophically.
Homer's not going to do a philosophical separation, but a distinction between civilization and barbarism.
There's no question that the Cyclopes are presented as barbarians.
And what is the kind of hallmark of barbarians?
Well, first of all, they don't really have customs that come down, so there's no inherent respect for the past.
And you may say, well, why is that a mark of civilization?
Well, by and large, because what happens is with respect for the past, you have ideas that are tested that then endure because they're passed along through education, whereas essentially if someone was trying to imagine someone coming into the world Having no tradition, no background, so in the case of the West, no enlightenment, no reformation, no scientific revolution, no renaissance.
We're just kind of going to start life from right now.
And we're going to sort of kind of make it up as we go along.
Well, obviously our life is going to be less developed, less serious, less sophisticated, less civilized than people who have tried various things over the years, figured out what works, figured out things that don't work, and then transmitted those over the generations.
Now, the other interesting thing about the Cyclopes is they don't really have laws that apply to the Cyclopean community.
Homer says each makes laws for his own wife and children.
It's almost like you've got the dictatorship, the local dictatorship of each Cyclops.
He's got his own family.
He tells them all what to do.
So it's patriarchal in that sense.
But there is no polis.
There's no community. And then we find out that the result of this kind of society is that there's kind of no development at all.
Here's Homer. Cyclopic people have no red-cheeked ships and no shipwright among them who could build boats to enable them to row across to other cities as most people do, crossing the sea to visit one another.
So other people, in other words, have trade.
They go visit other places.
They're familiar with other people's customs.
The Cyclops, the Cyclopes, don't do that.
They stay put.
They stay on their island.
They don't go anywhere. In fact, they don't know how to go anywhere.
I'm not slightly reminded here, and I don't mean to carry the analogy too far, but think of the American Indians.
They were here in the Americas.
They were here for a very long time, in fact, thousands of years.
And obviously they have a fairly big continent to walk around, but they don't build ships.
They certainly can't cross the ocean.
There were ships that came to the Americas from other places, but they weren't American Indian ships that got to Europe or went to China or any of that.
By and large, the American Indians to this degree were like the Cyclopees.
And so what happens is that Odysseus' ship is covered in fog.
They don't really know where they're going.
Homer writes, none of us, now remember we're in the narrative of Odysseus, none of us could see the great waves rolling in toward the land until we rode right to the beach.
And then they're so exhausted that Odysseus says we fell asleep.
And When they wake up, they can see that they're in a strange place.
They can also see the, they say, we saw the Cyclopean Island.
We saw their smoke.
We heard the buying of their sheep and goats.
And Odysseus is troubled.
Odysseus basically says, my loyal friends, stay here, the rest of you, and I will go and check out these people.
And then a kind of Odyssean line that appears many times in the Odyssey, at least four or five times.
I go to check who those men are.
Find out if they are wild, lawless aggressors or the type to welcome strangers and fear the gods.
This is Odysseus basically saying, again, let's see if we can expect any hospitality or zinnia from these people, as we'll find out.
No is the answer.
They are going to be the very opposite of Zenia.
And so when we pick it up tomorrow, Friday, we'll talk more about the Cyclopes and their unhelpful habit of eating people.
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