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Oct. 6, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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LONG ROAD HOME Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep429
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This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
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Coming up, we're going to be joined today by Mark Cash, nephew of the legendary country singer Johnny Cash.
We're going to talk about the new documentary, Long Road Home, that's going to be featured on my local channel starting this weekend.
A big story, a high-profile arrest by the Los Angeles DA, no less.
It vindicates the work of True the Vote.
I'm going to be talking about that.
And I'll explore the significance for conservatives of Elon Musk going through with his agreement to buy Twitter.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
♪♪ America needs this voice.
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I'm seeing a lot of anxiety on social media, particularly on Twitter, about what's going to happen when Elon Musk takes over Twitter.
This is what I call the The anxiety of the totalitarian, because these totalitarian—and, you know, when we say totalitarian, we normally think of Stalin or Hitler, but there are lots of little Hitlers, or at least you may say that the Hitler sensibility— The sensibility of shutting up my critics.
The sensibility of allowing me to say anything I want, and if anybody goes against me, I'm going to make sure that they are kicked out, excommunicated, ostracized, made into pariahs, their life ruined.
This strain is really...
Even though the left keeps calling the right authoritarian, there's no one on the right who feels this way, who...
Who enjoys this totalitarian impulse.
But on the left, many people do.
I'm not saying all do, but many do.
And their worry is not that Twitter is going to kick them off.
In fact, I had a tweet in which I basically said that Elon Musk should take all these progressive blue checks And just ban them for a week.
I mean, ideally for a month.
But my point is not because I like banning people.
It's just to show them what it feels like when you are given that treatment.
It's actually to educate them in free speech.
And they would go berserk.
So I think Elon Musk should do it just for fun and also for this, as I say, powerfully didactic or educational purpose.
These are people who are really angry, not because they're going to be kicked off.
They're angry because Elon Musk is not going to kick people like me off.
He's not going to kick people like Jack Posobiec off.
He's not going to kick people like Donald Trump Jr.
off. He's going to allow Twitter to be truly a platform where you can actually debate, discuss, and have a free exchange of ideas.
If it's legal, you should be able to say it.
It's such a simple and obvious principle, and yet these platforms have really deviated, betraying, by the way, their own history, betraying their own early idealism, and by the way, betraying the message that they gave to Congress when they got special congressional protections, what we sometimes call the 230 protections.
So that's the first thing.
It's just a delight to watch these people, nasty people, writhing in agony over what's coming on Twitter.
And really, all that's coming on Twitter is free speech.
And you know, I bet it's going to blow up.
And by blow up here, I mean in a good sense.
It's going to expand the reach of people like me who have been In subtle ways, restricted by Twitter.
Shadow banning, turning the dials so that there's not proper replication.
And the reason we know this is that even when they were talking about Musk taking over Twitter, suddenly my Twitter following exploded.
I gained like 200,000 or 300,000 new followers.
And contrast this with right after the election, when my Twitter following dropped by like 200,000, from like 1.9 million to like 1.1.7 million.
Musk, it looks like, has very big plans for Twitter.
And by that I mean not just he's going to take it over and run it well, but he made this very interesting statement, a tweet, which was unexplained, but we can kind of cogitate about it.
Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.
Wow. I think what Musk is saying here is that Twitter is a part of a bigger plan.
And what's that bigger plan?
The bigger plan is to have a single App, a single mechanism where you can, in a sense, live your online life.
And I think what he means by that is you can shop, you can communicate with people, you can do everything on one app.
Now, no one has succeeded in doing that, by the way.
There have been dominant apps and there have been dominant websites that have cornered this or that aspect of the market.
For example, think about the E-commerce dominance, let's say, of Amazon.
Or think, for example, about the digital platforms, how YouTube dominates the market in terms of videos, although Rumble is really picking up.
Facebook was for a long time a virtual monopoly.
I think it largely still is.
And Google as a search engine.
I would much rather have a single app in the hands of Elon Musk.
Frankly, I would rather have free speech everywhere and not in centralized control.
But these Silicon Valley moguls have betrayed their libertarian roots.
They have shown that they are unworthy to run these platforms.
And so having a guy like Elon Musk who does believe in free speech is a start.
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You need to use promo code DINESH. Just a couple of days ago, October 3rd, the New York Times published an article, an investigative report, How a tiny elections company became a conspiracy theory target.
That's the headline.
It goes on to talk about election deniers.
I'm just going to read a few lines because it'll give you a very familiar flavor of the kind of rhetoric we've been hearing now for almost two years in this country.
A group of election deniers unspooled a new conspiracy theory about the 2020 presidential outcome.
Continuing, using threadbare evidence or none at all, the group suggested that an election company, Connick, had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about 2 million poll workers in the United States.
Now, interestingly, what group are they talking about that is spreading these conspiracies and election lies?
True the Vote! Yes, True the Vote!
Now, this is not material covered directly in 2000 Meals, but True the Vote has been doing this work for now, I believe, about a year.
And they disclosed it in a series of events, notably something called the PIT, a kind of public event online in which they talked about their research into this company, Connick.
And the basic idea here is this.
These election companies, and let's back up for a moment.
We have been assured now by the left For the longest time, that regardless of what you think about mules, the simple fact is machines are secure.
The simple fact of it is that software is secure, no problems whatsoever, none at all, most secure election history.
This is all very familiar territory.
And so when True the Vote came out, they basically said that this election company, Connick, has collected a great deal of very specific and personal information.
We're not just talking about the names of poll workers, but who they are, in some cases, the identities of family members, phone numbers, addresses, where they live, all this data.
is being stored on Chinese servers.
And obviously, that means you don't have to really separately prove this, that the Chinese authorities, the Chinese government has access to this information.
And moreover, that the guy doing this is himself somebody who was educated in China.
His name is Eugene Yu, Y-U. He's the founder of this company called Connick, by the way, based in East Lansing, Michigan.
And, of course, the New York Times not only ridicules this idea, in fact, goes on to talk about how this is just part of the ongoing right-wing conspiracy by a, quote, far-right group and so on.
But then, yesterday...
Boom. The Los Angeles district attorney, we're talking now about Eugene Gascon.
Yes, that Eugene Gascon, the leftist, the progressive.
But the fact that Eugene Gascon is a leftist doesn't mean that his office is made up entirely of leftists.
It turns out that's not necessarily the case.
And so there is an election integrity group.
And what happened is in this progressive DA's office comes an arrest.
Eugene Yu is arrested and as part of an investigation, and I guess charges are going to be forthcoming and so on, of what?
Exactly what True the Vote said, namely that his company was illegally storing data on U.S. poll workers, which by the way, Connick had earlier agreed to keep in the United States, to have access restricted to U.S. citizens, but no.
But this data is evidently just as true the vote said being stored in servers in China.
Now, this has caused a major, you may almost call it emotional earthquake.
And I see in the forefront of the people who are palpitating are the so-called debunkers of 2,000 mules.
Why? Because this goes beyond mules.
Here we're talking about machines, the very machines we work here with.
Machines couldn't be more safe.
The data couldn't be more safe.
All this nonsense about foreign intervention in our election, foreigners having access to the data, preposterous, absurd.
And so this kind of circus routine we've been hearing now for two years straight.
And it turns out that piece by piece, the whole edifice is kind of falling apart.
In other words, we're raising the possibility that we have a problem bigger than 2,000 mules.
Even CISA, the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency, now talks about machines being vulnerable.
It says, we don't know the vulnerability was exploited.
There's no evidence it was exploited in 2020.
Be that as it may, you told us that there was no vulnerability.
You told us the machines were secure.
You told us that the software was secure.
Here I have in front of me a long article, Texas Tribune, very much the same tone as the New York Times.
A lawsuit alleges Texas True the Vote hacked data and targeted small election vendor with racist defamatory campaign.
Now I love the racist thing here.
This is where Texas Tribune, by the way, even though it's in Texas, it's a left-wing progressive media outlet.
And they're implying that the fact that this is a company that's run by a guy named Yu, a Chinese guy with a Chinese name, somehow means that to focus on this company and talk about its illegal conduct is bigoted. Leave him alone. He's Chinese.
You can't say anything about him.
Well, as it turns out, the problem is not that Yu is Chinese.
The problem is that Yu is a guy...
Who has roots in China, has set up companies in China, has actually begged the Chinese authorities to let him use his software to manage Chinese elections.
Now, Chinese elections aren't really elections.
They're essentially elections between one party candidate and another running for office.
And Yu is okay with all that.
In fact, he has all this rhetoric about how he admires reform in China.
He wants to put his company at the service of all the great things that are happening in China.
So this is a guy, it's not as if his background screams loyalty to the United States.
True, the vote was kind of on the right track here.
And now they have been stunningly vindicated by an arrest.
And the beauty of this is an arrest really not really by Ken Paxton, the conservative, you know, attorney general of Texas.
No, the arrest is by George Gascon, the district attorney of Los Angeles.
Irony of ironies.
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I'd like to talk about the result, or perhaps I should say lack of a final result, in the Brazilian election.
An election, interestingly enough, that bears real similarities with things going on in the United States.
First of all, right before the election, the polls showed that Lula da Silva, who is the left-wing socialist candidate, was leading, and was leading decisively.
He had over 50% of the vote.
Bolsonaro, who is the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, was way behind with something like 36% or 37%.
So this looked like it was going to be like a blowout election.
And the left was kind of salivating over this because, oh yeah, Bolsonaro is another Trump.
He's an authoritarian.
He's disgraced Brazil on the world stage.
He's expressed doubts about the COVID vaccine and so on.
The results of the election come in, and it's basically a tie.
Now, it's disturbing that it is a tie because this Lula da Silva is bad news.
Not only leftist, but this is sometimes a redundant phrase, corrupt, deeply corrupt.
And in fact, served some time, I believe, in prison for corruption scandals that Lula da Silva was, in fact, the prime minister earlier and was mired in corruption scandals.
So in any event, not only does Bolsonaro tie, which means there's going to be a runoff election, and that alone came as a surprise to the media, to the left, but a bunch of the Bolsonaro candidates, people who had been demonized by the media, also won their races, strengthening, if you will, the conservative hold on the parliament.
And so you have here one of the left-wing activists quoted in The Guardian.
The Guardian is a good source for how the left is thinking.
Maria Cristina Fernandes, a political commentator in Brazil, she goes, Bolsonaroismo is becoming a political project with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The degree of conservatism they have managed to insert into the Congress is something permanent.
And we'll take a very long time to reverse.
So you can see the academics, they want to reverse it.
But their point that they're trying to make, and this is Fernandes talking again, the media and the whole world was outraged by Bolsonaro, but the people do not share our thoughts.
So you have the elite, you have all the kind of the media, the chattering classes, the deep state.
But she goes on to say, there's a divorce between the press and the intellectual elites and the people.
So, how did Bolsonaro tie this election?
We're now talking, there's another woman, Consuelo Diegues, author of a book on Brazil's right.
It's called The Serpent's Egg.
And she goes, their reasoning, meaning the reasoning of the Bolsonaro people and of the right, is, I don't want this crook Lula, and I don't want these lefties coming along championing things like gay marriage and abortion.
So you see here what's going on.
We are suddenly seeing something that I really didn't think was possible, or at least wasn't likely, and that is the emergence of an international right.
Look, for example, at Georgia Maloney in Italy.
She sounds like Bolsonaro.
Look at the Bolsonaro campaign.
It's basically, it's free markets, It is a championing of the ordinary people and upward mobility.
It's let's protect our borders and protect our sovereignty as a nation.
And it's let's protect law and order and let's protect cultural decency.
We don't want to have a spread of the kind of cultural depravity that has become normal in many parts of America and the West.
We don't want that in Brazil.
This is the pushback of traditional cultures that's going on.
We go off to the runoff and no one can say exactly what's going to happen.
There was a third candidate in the election who got a small percentage of the votes.
Apparently both sides are kind of negotiating with that guy.
There's some rumors that Lula Da Silva will offer him a spot in the cabinet if he endorses Lula.
But you know, interestingly, when things go to a runoff, it's not necessarily decided solely by the votes of that guy.
It's decided by a kind of reassessment of the situation.
And the momentum right now is not on the side of Lula da Silva, but on the side of Jair Bolsonaro.
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Guys, just recently, Debbie and I were really delighted to watch a fantastic documentary.
It's based on Johnny Cash, the legendary country singer, and the Cash family.
It's called Long Road Home, the Cash family's untold story.
It's riveting, it's fascinating, it's heartbreaking in parts, and it's faith-affirming, it's inspirational.
I'm thrilled to say I'll be offering this documentary inside of my Locals channel.
You'll be able to either buy the movie and stream it or subscribe to my channel and you'll get the movie included in that.
And I'm going to start by playing a short clip from the movie after which I'm going to bring on Mark Allen Cash, the nephew of Johnny Cash and actually one of the central characters of this documentary.
So let's watch the clip and then I'll introduce Mark Allen Cash.
Here we go. It's a darkness that I can't describe.
It's a hopelessness.
Walk the Line is a sweet Hollywood movie, but that's not the real deal.
I think it was really hard for Dad to trust anyone.
Being in the Cash family, there's an expectation as not being a letdown.
You know, I thought I was tough until I got that phone call.
Guys, I'm thrilled to welcome to the podcast Mark Allen Cash.
Now, Mark Allen Cash is the nephew of Johnny Cash.
In fact, he's the son of Johnny Cash's brother, Tommy Cash.
And he's a musician and songwriter in his own right.
As I mentioned, he's a key figure.
In fact, one of the most, I think, appealing and interesting characters in Long Road Home, the Cash family's untold story.
Mark Allen, what a pleasure.
Thank you for joining me.
This is a heck of a documentary, and I gotta say, I think what really struck me about it is the way in which, first of all, the Cash family is full of just interesting characters, but also all of you were so self-revealing.
You just opened up your mind and your heart, and of course, the Johnny Cash family home, and I almost felt like I was I had a window into your family.
I mean, I've been a Johnny Cash fan, but I didn't know anything about the family.
And at the end of this film, I felt like, wow, I really feel like I know you guys, including you.
Well, thank you so much.
First of all, I'm honored to be with you this morning.
That was first and foremost, the honesty.
You know, we had to be very vulnerable.
We had to open up doors that we hadn't opened before.
And just honesty was the only way we could do this.
And so I think everybody was brutally honest, you know, if I may say.
And yes, it's not always comfortable to be open when you're part of this family, especially.
But that was the only way that we knew that we had to be.
Now, tell me, Mark Allen, you've got in Johnny Cash this sort of superstar.
Maybe I can just start by asking you something that's not directly addressed in the film.
What is it, do you think, that made your uncle such a superstar?
Was it the fact that he had...
I mean, to me, he has a very unique voice.
In other words, if you hear it anywhere, even if you're doing something else, you're like, that's Johnny Cash.
And there are not that many singers where you can say that they're instantly recognizable.
I don't just mean the sound of the voice, but what he's singing about has a very Johnny Cash stamp on it.
Well, you know, somebody told me the other day, he said he wasn't the best singer in the world.
And I said, no, but you listened.
When he had a message in a song or a message when he was talking, there was something about him that was just genius because he knew how to relate to the common people.
He knew how to get his message across.
He knew people.
There's two things that I think really made him the icon that he was, and that was his ability to be honest and his ability to Be able to address anybody in the world to get on their level.
He could talk to the President of the United States of America on the phone and hang up and talk to a homeless guy five minutes later on the street.
He just knew how to trim tab his personality and his thoughts and behavior to be able to communicate what he wanted to to that person.
And he could come down a level or come up a level to talk to the president.
He was just amazing. He was a brilliant, fascinating human being.
But he loved his family.
He took care of his family.
He made time for everybody.
He was not arrogant.
And sometimes the red carpet gets to folks that are in the entertainment business.
And it didn't to him.
He'd rather walk down a dirt road than he would a red carpet any day, you know?
I mean, you know, Mark Allen, I was a kid in India.
I'm an immigrant. I came to the country at the age of 17.
And I remember hearing a boy named Sue when I was probably in my teens.
And it just sort of turned my head.
And I was halfway around the world.
And I was like... Who is this guy?
And then, of course, later Folsom City Blues and then some of the spirituals.
They have a very distinctive timbre.
I think it's the emotionalism in the music, but it's also in this documentary.
I mean, you're like that. You sing like that, and your voice is like that, and you talk like that.
And so, I mean, I gotta say, I see in you the distinctive stamp, obviously, of your dad, but also of your uncle.
Well, thank you so much.
And a woman told Uncle Johnny one day, he said, Mark sounds a lot like you.
He said he can't help it.
I'm just, you know, I'm amazed at his talent and amazed that Johnny Cash never realized how famous he really was.
He did not. That's the only thing I think he didn't get is how famous and how much of a, you know, he said, he made this comment.
He said, 10 or 15 years after I've passed, nobody will care about a shirt that I had or a guitar that I once owned.
And, you know, he was wrong about that.
We have people come to the farm here in Bonacqua, Tennessee daily and are just shocked to see anything that he held on to or that he caught deer or the property that he walked.
He said, when you come off stage from 100,000 people, you have to come back to you.
And he did that at the farm by walking the creek and just being alone to come back to him and God.
God was very important to him.
He was very spiritual. And, you know, he went through some really tough times, but he was able to overcome those hard times with God and just by doing the next right thing in life.
Let's take a pause. When we come back, we're going to talk about those hard times.
Hard times not just for cash, but many members of the cash family.
Alcoholism, addiction, but also the sort of tenacious way in which you ultimately were able to overcome those things.
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I'm with Mark Allen Cash, the nephew of Johnny Cash.
We're talking about this really wonderful documentary.
It's called Long Road Home, The Cash Family's Untold Story.
It's going to be uploaded to my locals this weekend, and you're going to be able to see it either by streaming directly or joining my channel.
You'll be able to watch the movie.
You won't regret it. It's something to plan for the weekend.
By the way, if you want to check out my locals, just go to dinesh.locals.com.
There will be a specific link to the movie, but I'm going to get it today.
I'll be posting it all over the weekend.
So you're going to look for it, please.
Mark Allen, great to have you.
And, you know, this is a movie that...
Initially, I didn't really know where it was going to go, but where it goes is kind of into a deep and dark place.
It goes into the depths of depression, alcoholism, addiction, not just in the Cash family, but also in the other people who were around Johnny Cash, and he was part of it.
And here's my question.
You're a musician. You were on the road with your dad, and then you were on the road on your own, and You've been in the lonely hotel rooms in town after town after town.
And my question is, is that where the kind of addiction gets started?
That this is a very dislocated life, perhaps?
And is this why so many kind of musicians and guys who do the tour fall into this path?
Or do you think there's some other reason for it?
No, that's very insightful, the insight that you have there.
It is. You know, it's difficult to, you know, and Elvis faced the same thing.
You're around all these people that absolutely adore you, and they would do anything for you.
Then you find yourself alone.
And you can't really, for them, not as much for me, but they couldn't just take a walk.
They couldn't just go out and get a bar of ice cream and come back to the hotel room because people would mob them and even hurt them, not meaning to, but trying to get to them or trying to get a piece of clothing from them or an autograph.
And so you find yourself surrounded by loneliness.
And that's a hard, hard thing to do to separate the two and to come back to yourself, as Uncle Johnny said.
So you might take a drink or a drug to ease the pain or to fill the hole in your chest.
When the wind blows through that hole, it really hurts.
There's a big hole in your chest that you're trying to fill.
And so you find that a drug or a drink fills that hole.
However, it's only temporary.
And that's not what you do.
You don't realize that it's a temporary fix.
So then the hole gets bigger and you take more to try to close that hole.
And as time goes by, you realize, hey, I'm fully addicted to whatever this is.
You didn't mean for it to happen.
You didn't see it coming. And before you know it, your life is consumed with drugs and alcohol of one or the other.
And then come the problems of being late, not showing up.
Mistreating people around you.
It grows from there into this horrible sea of despair.
You have Johnny Cash's grandson in the documentary.
He talks about being incarcerated multiple times.
Your aunt said something, I think, very striking about you, that you had reached such a low point that at one point you were almost buried in snow with your hands sticking out and somebody saw you.
I don't know if it was the police or the rescue workers who saw you.
I mean, so it looks like, I mean, you're a man who has come, you could almost say face to face with death.
Yes, I have many times.
And even to the point to where I was ready to take my own lives.
I couldn't take it anymore.
I couldn't take the loneliness and the despair.
That's why I'm so happy about this film.
If we help one person, one person get help, as my sister says in the film, who filmed this with us for three days, flew home and died from sources of the liver.
Paula got sick and died quickly.
And you talk about being brokenhearted.
I miss my baby sister every day.
But, you know, she says in the film, if you or someone you know has a problem with alcohol or drugs, please seek help because your opportunities will cease.
And it stops right there and shows her date of birth and death because it killed her.
And, you know, so yes, to answer your question, many times I put myself in a situation where I could have been easily killed or died, like the snowstorm that got caught in.
The police told everybody in that town not to go anywhere that night.
Well, after several drinks, I decided to walk down to another hotel.
I fell into a drainage ditch.
I couldn't get out.
The snow was piling on top of me.
And every time I moved my arm or my body, it got worse.
That snow just came down and impacted me more.
A woman saw me fall from her window.
If she hadn't have been watching out her window, I would have died because the police, she called the police 9-1-1 and said, I saw this guy fall in front and he can't get out of there.
And they, about 17 police officers, jerked me out of that hole and rushed me to the hospital.
I couldn't feel my right hand for over 90 days.
I came very close to death.
So, this is a very serious, serious, serious issue.
And I thank God for him and you for helping us get this out.
Because this doesn't, and a critic said, you know, this is not the Cash family.
Some members that didn't make it in the music business, they're trying to get a name for themselves.
It's not that at all.
That all falls by the wayside.
This is a documentary that I hope will help one person call a treatment center or call a family member and say, hey, I'm ready for help.
You know, I don't want to die.
I don't want to be like Paula.
I don't want to be like Mark or anybody.
And I want to get help.
If we can save one person, we've saved their life.
I'm grateful. I want to ask you a favor, and that is to see if you'll play a little bit of the theme song of this movie, which is your song, and it's wonderful.
But before you do that, I have one more question for you.
In the beginning of the film, we're in the Johnny Cash family home, and we're introduced to the sort of Let's call it the people at the top of the family tree, which is to say Johnny Cash's parents.
It seems like they were very straight-laced, very religious, very down-to-earth and practical.
My question to you is, I heard you say somewhere in the film that...
That a higher power and faith helped you find your way home.
And my question is, do you think it was a little bit of the faith that came down from Johnny Cash's parents that you were exposed to, you might have kind of pulled away from, but ultimately that's what helped show you the long road home?
Absolutely. And you know, my grandmother sat me down in 1983.
She said, Mark, I want to talk to you.
And she sat me down.
My dad had gone to the bank for her.
And she described today's world in 1983.
She said, you're going to see these things.
You're going to see all these things.
And it scared me to death.
And Dad got back from the bank and I went behind her and I said, Dad, you know, she's...
And he said, no.
When we got in the car, I told him what she had relayed to me.
And he said, Mark, it's all in the Bible.
It's all in the Bible.
She knows what she's talking about.
She was so strong spiritually.
And there's no doubt in my mind where they are today.
And she did. She passed that down.
And she always said to me, you know, as long as you put God first, everything's going to be okay, you know?
And she did. That spiritual foundation from her and Papa Cash was passed on to, of course, my dad and the rest of the Cash family members, but then on to us.
And my dad and my mom have always been spiritual, and thank God I have.
So the spiritual foundation was laid early in our lives, and thank goodness it did.
Wow. This is remarkable.
And it's a remarkable documentary, Long Road Home, The Cash Family's Untold Story.
Let's close out, Mark Allen, if I may prevail on you, just to give us a little hint of your song, Long Road Home, that is the theme song for this documentary.
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
It's been a long road home It's been a long road home It's been a long road home Back to you It's been a hard few years Running from my fears Trying to find a way Back to you Thank you,
Mark Allen Cash, for joining us.
I really appreciate it. My honor.
Thank you so much, sir. We're good to go.
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You'll feel the difference. Odysseus is in the underworld and he encounters, as I mentioned last time, the great Greek warrior Ajax.
And Odysseus tries to reach out to him, tries to, you may say, make amends.
Because earlier, Odysseus, and remember, Odysseus is narrating the story to the Phaeacians.
And he says, as the souls were coming toward him, one of them held back.
Only Ajax kept back, enraged, because I won Achilles' armor when the case was judged.
The hero's mother, Thetis...
Gave the arms to me.
I wish I had not won this contest.
Very interesting remark by Odysseus.
I'm kind of sorry I won it.
Why? Because I got the armor, yes, but I really lost my friendship with a great man.
And Odysseus approaches Ajax.
Please, Ajax, son of mighty Telamon, can you not set aside your rage against me about those cursed arms, not even now, in death?
We Greeks were struck by grief when you were gone.
We mourned as long for you as for Achilles.
Blame nobody but Zeus.
He ruined us.
So you have this striking attribution of blame here to the gods.
Essentially, Odysseus is saying that this was part of a larger scheme that I wish had not occurred.
I certainly didn't orchestrate this one.
I may have orchestrated the Trojan horse, but I didn't engineer this one.
I didn't make it so that the arms came to me instead of to you.
And since we know that our fates are to a degree determined by the gods, not perhaps certain ultimate fates, but at least the way things go in life, certainly the gods have an influence as we've seen throughout the Iliad and throughout the Odyssey.
Essentially, Odysseus is saying, you know, can we leave it behind now at this late stage?
Subdue your anger, he closes his remark to Ajax, and then we get this.
He did not answer.
He went off and followed the spirits of the dead to Erebus.
Essentially, Ajax will not be appeased, will not be consoled.
And you can just imagine the kind of blow this lands on Odysseus, because this is a man whose friendship, whose approbation, a restoration of their previous comradeship, he really wants it, Odysseus does, but he's not going to get it, not even here in the underworld.
And then we find that Odysseus looks around and he sees a lot of interesting characters, some of them famous, some of them not.
And we also see some kind of, let's call them notorious criminals from, really from Greek mythology.
And these criminals are being punished here.
Here in Hades.
And this is a little bit of a surprise.
I say that because, by and large, in the pre-Christian world of the Greeks, you don't have heaven and hell.
You don't have the good place where the good people go or the people who are sorry and repent of their sins.
You don't have the bad place where wicked people are punished for their misdeeds and for their unwillingness to take responsibility.
By and large, Hades is where kind of everyone goes.
And everyone has sort of the same fate.
But interestingly here, there appear to be some exceptions.
People who are seen as particularly atrocious, let's call them like the worst of the worst, are actually tortured here in Hades.
And I want to highlight too, I saw Titius, son of Gaia, stretched out nine miles.
When Leto, Zeus' concubine, was traveling to Pytho, he raped her.
So, this guy, Tidius, raped a concubine of Zeus, of the supreme god himself, and we find that two vultures sit on either side of him, ripping his liver and plunging in his bowels.
He fails to push them off.
This is Tideus' punishment.
And then we see Tantalus, by the way.
Tantalus is a famous figure in Greek mythology.
And here's Tantalus, basically for his sort of blasphemy against the gods.
Here he is. He's buried in water to his chin.
He's parched. He's thirsty, but he cannot drink.
When the old man bent toward the water, it was gone.
Some god had dried it up, and at his feet, dark earth appeared.
There are beautiful figs and apples that sprout out, but when he goes to eat, he can't.
And so it is the frustration of desire on a continuing basis.
This is Tantalus' torture.
And by the way, this is the root of the modern word tantalizing.
Tantalizing here meaning tempting.
Well, here's Tantalus in Hades.
He is tantalized by the desire to drink, by the beautiful aroma of these fruits, but he is not able to satisfy that desire.
And so he remains in a kind of perpetual state.
I want to focus in this episode on the meeting between Odysseus in the underworld and the great Greek warrior Achilles.
Now, Odysseus knows that Achilles is dead.
He expects to see him in the underworld, but the surprise comes from the other direction.
Achilles turns to Odysseus and says, in effect, What are you doing here?
What kind of operation are you mounting?
You're alive. Why are you here?
And there's an element of subtle humor.
What will you think of next?
It's almost as if Achilles is saying, Odysseus, you're really clever.
You kind of find yourself in these bizarre situations, but here in Hades, really?
And And then Achilles asks Odysseus, can you tell me, from the land of the living, what about my father Peleus?
How is he doing? Does he still have a good standing among the Myrmidons, or have they sort of cast him aside now that I, Achilles, am no longer around?
And Odysseus basically says, I can't tell you.
I don't know. Because, remember, Odysseus has not been home.
He has no news. And here's Homer keeping a masterful control of his narrative.
Never once does he elapse in terms of...
Never once does he reveal what Achilles...
He doesn't have Odysseus saying things that Odysseus is not in a position to know.
And then Achilles says this.
He goes, Odysseus, you must not comfort me.
You must not comfort me for death.
I would prefer to be a workman hired by a poor man on a peasant farm than rule as the king of all the dead.
And this is a bombshell.
In some of the translations, the word is used, not workman, but a slave.
Basically, Achilles is saying is, you know what?
I died in glory.
I wanted to have all this kleos when I was alive.
But you know what?
Here, being in Hades, in the land of the dead...
Looking back, I would rather be a slave on a poor man's estate, on a poor man's farm, than be where I am now.
And so this is Achilles giving us a completely different take than he gave us in the Iliad.
In the Iliad, remember, his mother, Therese, had offered him two fates.
You can have glory...
But you're going to die soon, young, or you can go back and live in your home country and you will live a long life as king and then you will die in your bed.
And Achilles chose the former.
He chose Kleos. He made the choice that every Greek warrior is making.
I would rather go down in a blaze of glory.
But interestingly here, it's not that Homer is sort of changing his mind or having Achilles change his mind.
It's almost as if in life, while we're in the living, The ancient Greeks value kleos.
I really value what people are going to say about me when I'm gone.
But what Homer's telling us here is that that doesn't matter to you, or at least to your own soul, or your own shade, as sometimes the term is used, when you're dead.
Your perspective is now a completely different one.
Achilles, dead and in Hades, is not the same as Achilles on Earth.
Achilles on Earth might value kleos, Might value what people are going to say through the generations, through the centuries.
Hey, wow, Dinesh on his podcast in 2022 is going to be talking about Achilles.
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