Most USAians think they are super smart. It’s kind of like being sophomores in the history of the world. We think we know everything. We bragged about what our rambunctiousness produced. But now we stopped making stuff and we think that being a weasel is our way out of everything. The new term for this weaselness is disinformation. And now we have retreated into bubbles babbling weasel phrases amongst ourselves in chat rooms.
Rudyard Lynch has a podcast called History 102. Rudyard is wise beyond his 24 years and approaches history from an anthropological angle. I was listening to the latest topic that he discusses with his co-host Austin Padgett. “Explaining the Age of Neo-Liberalism”. They explore the breakdown of society and bemoan the reality that nobody talks to each other anymore. Rudyard makes the observation “If you can’t talk about it, you can’t think about it.” These guys are addressing our current predicament of taking the same “facts” and coming up with two or more competing film stories.
One big reason for these muddled narratives is that we don’t engage in dialogue except amongst people who we agree with rather than at “a town meeting” or cafe or watering hole where one must look neighbors in the face and try to make a point and to try to see their point. The French, on the other hand, have their cafe society. They do their duty as citizens by talking “politics”. (“Politics” is a discussion, not a shouting match, of the way we wish to live our lives and what we enjoy and what gives our lives meaning). The French leave work and go out to a cafe and argue about life and art. They engage in conversation and often use dialectics in search of clues to the mysteries of life. Or at least that’s the way it used to be. When I was in grad school, after play rehearsal we would go to a bar, order pitchers of beer and discuss how we would save the world through art. When I did Off-Off Broadway theater in New York City, we would adjourn to Peter McManus’ Irish pub around the corner from the theater and argue about the choices our characters should make. We loved to look at all the angles and the contradictions.
But somewhere along the line those personal confrontations became fewer and fewer and didn’t seem to translate into our public lives as citizens. Historian Christopher Lasch in his book “Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” has a chapter called “The Lost Art of Argument”. In it he writes that “what Democracy requires is vigorous public debate, not information. Yes, we do need information but information that is “generated only by debate.” So, he takes the “information revolution” and turns it on its head. Information in and of itself is worthless without being debated. “Information, usually seen as the pre-condition of debate is better understood as a by-product.”
And how do we gather these clues? By asking questions. We take our ideas and subject them to somebody else’s arguments. If we passionately engage with the eagerness to learn, we may instead of changing somebody else’s mind find that we have changed our mind. So, we must listen carefully and be willing to challenge our own beliefs and to say “Maybe what I believe may be wrong.” How exciting and far less dull than passively taking in information from some newspaper or from so pundit.
Lasch gives a shout out to the social historian Ray Oldenburg’s “The Great Good Place” and with Oldenburg mourns the passing of the local watering hole, the cafe, the hair salon, the soda fountain steps and other places between work and home where conversations used to flourish. These were places like the soda fountain steps where kids listened to their fathers debate a local policy with vigor and good-hearted disagreement. Those places where professions mingled as equals are hard to find in the suburbs, but they still exist in small towns and big cities. I was lucky to spend many years in a small town where wisdom came from caring for cows and not from a book. Democracy dies if we hide in cul-de sacs furtively taking anxiety meds as we peer out of the drawn blinds or retreat to cocktail parties or book clubs where everybody is of the same class and tows the party line “Four legs good. Two legs bad”. So, I suggest this year that you get out and find a Cheers bar in your neighborhood or even better, a Star Wars bar and strike up a conversation with somebody who may see things differently than you do. If you don’t have one of those, then go to the nearest town that has one and adopt it as your own. And for heaven’s sake don’t get your information from a newspaper. You can get your questions there though.
My Odysseus
My Odysseus
For the Love of Cows
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”. So opens Homer’s Odyssey. Cowboy Clay and I recently went to see the Christopher Nolan movie of the same name. I had just finished listening to the Robert Fagles translation of the poem narrated with great gusto by Sir Ian McKellen. At the very end of the poem, I was thunderstruck by a scene. It is a scene that spoke to me as a cattle rancher’s wife.
The scene I’m talking about is at the end of the tale It is when Odysseus, upon his return to his kingdom of Ithaka, slays the one hundred and four suitors who had been pillaging his lands and harassing his wife for twenty years. He, with his son Telemachus, then goes to see his father, Laertes, who is living in the country taking care of the cattle and crops. He proves to his father that he indeed is Odysseus by speaking with fond memory of those crops which include “thirteen pear trees, forty fig trees, ten apple trees…fifty rows of vines” and a herd of very fine cows.
In celebration of the return to his land and its people (or oikos which is Greek for household), they butcher a beef and share the feast with their loyal servants, the swineherd and the shepherd and their children. Today, it would be like John Dutton of the “Yellowstone” series celebrating with his ranch hands at the Dutton Ranch. But this scene is not in the Nolan movie.
Homer emphasizes the Greek notion of “nostos”. Nostos means “the return” from war and a journey filled with strife. Nostalgia comes from this word. It is also a person’s personal journey to define his place in the world. Through the trials and tribulations of life, a person defines what is important to them. But this theme is not the main one in Nolan’s adaptation. In one scene, Damon’s Odysseus says that he is not sure he even wants to go home.
There are two examples in Homer’s Odyssey that emphasize “nostos” that are also not in the film. Odysseus is offered pretty good deals not to return home to Ithaca. Calypso offers him immortality if he would stay with her forever on her lush island. After he leaves her and is washed on to the shores of Skyeria, the king of the Phaiekians, Alkinoos, offers him the hand of his young daughter, Nauskiaa, and a large, beautiful and peaceful kingdom to rule over. But Odysseus rejects the young and beautiful gals to return to his aging wife and his own herd of cows. He rejects Alkinoos’ vast herds and land ‘o plenty for that of his less lush but much cherished pile of rocks called home.
Cows play another part in Odysseus’ journey home. He is told by the prophet Teiresias when he goes to Hades that if he goes to the Sun god Helios’s island, he and his men cannot kill the cows there because Helios loves his cows. Of course, his men disobey and eat a cow. But Odysseus, honorably, minds the words of the prophet and does not eat the meat of the cow. He also, as a cattleman, knows that nobody should come between a man and his cows.
Our ranch was not the Dutton ranch. Our ranch house was smaller than the Dutton Ranch’s bunk house. Cowboy Clay had a herd of beautiful white-faced brown Hereford cows, one of the oldest Hereford herds in the state. Clay’s place in the world is defined by his neighbors who helped round up his cows, his good wife and family, and his grasslands for his cows.
Odysseus was indeed a man of “twists and turns”. Odysseus was also described as smart and wily but could also be tempted by drinking too much wine. Besides loyalty to his household, he was also described as a man of great cunning (metis). And boy howdy can Cowboy Clay fix almost anything with the right tools and a whole bunch of baling twine.
Like Ithaca, Montana is not a pretty place nor is it charming like the New England towns I’ve lived in. It’s vast and rocky and literally stunning. “High, Wide and Handsome” is what John Kinsey Howard calls it in the book by the same name. Arizona, where Clay and I have moved, also has a plainness with it sandy landscape and adobe homes. But with bursts of colorful flowers coming out of scraggly cactus, it is quite beautiful and much softer than Montana. The mountains are rounded and not the craggy miles high peaks of Big Sky country. It is where, like in Homer’s tale “Dawn touches the sky with her fingertips of rose” and the sunsets are mesmerizing. It is like the Mediterranean in a way, as it has a healing aspect to it.
Clay is retired now. Tequila has replaced bourbon and branch. Our irrigation system waters cactus not alfalfa. But Clay knows what his place in the world was. It was raising cattle to feed people and provide for his household. I once asked him with a bit of pouty face why he always said that “the cows come first”. He’d smile with that sly grin of his (another feature he shared with Odysseus) and say, “Happy cows…happy wife.”
This is where the two tales diverge a bit. King Odysseus is finally home with his cows and has memories of his wild adventures fighting Cyclops and Sirens and such. Clay never left home until now. And he’s not even a cattle baron, let alone a king. There is a pretty big similarity though. When asked what Clay misses about Montana, he always says, a bit wistfully,
“I miss my cows.”
I can imagine that might have also kept Odysseus from yielding to the seductresses, Circe and Kalypso. It wasn’t just Penelope. Those herds of females were waiting for him too.
Cowgirl Cassandra
Note: First Odyssey quote come from the Robert Fagles translation and the “the fingertips of rose” quote is from the Daniel Mendelsohn translation.
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