Dr. Gay still President at Harvard and The Odyssey

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This is our weekend episode, so we do a little bit of culture in the coming episodes, and we're looking at literature through the ages.

So, this episode will have the Odyssey on.

So, we'll be looking at part of the Homer's Odyssey.

So please

hang in there with us

for the middle section.

But before that, we'll look at news and we have Claudine Gay,

Dr.

Gay, who

hasn't been removed as president from Harvard.

And the Harvard community seems to be doubling down on her.

So that is very interesting.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back to talk a little bit about Dr.

Gate.

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Well, Victor, I used to always ask you, and I'm a little afraid of this question here, but how are things going for you?

What, you think I'm Eeyore or something?

That I'm suffering job.

Things are going very well.

I'm very angry, of course.

My readers write and listeners sometimes say, how is your Echo diesel?

I bought a 1500 RAM.

I was told 12,000 pounds of...

towing capacity, torque, 400 horsepower with a six-cylinder diesel, 30 miles.

And you know what?

For 20,000 miles.

And then suddenly, as I said, turbo blows out.

Trump almost gets in a wreck.

One month to get into Jim Manning.

I'm now mentioning the dealer in Dainuba.

I go there for two months.

I mean, it's wait a month.

I take it in.

Two months to get the part.

And that's not their fault.

It's Ram.

I call Ram up.

I pay extra money for FedEx.

It's fixed, Sammy.

And then driving.

And guess what?

The turbo that was fixed, the hose blew out.

I guess it was

installed improperly.

And how long did it take to get back into the shop?

One month.

And now, October 17th, three days, four days.

It is now December 15th.

Two months.

Add it all up, five months.

I've had a new, fairly new truck that I can't use.

So

didn't somebody say, Did you call the dealer?

Yes, I talked to the dealer, the owner of the dealer.

I talked to the repairer.

I talked to the parts.

I even called Mopar and Ram.

I said to them, you know what?

I'll be quite willing to take this beautiful truck that hasn't run in five months and just pay me the blue book.

And I'll let you have the warranty that was very expensive.

I'll let you have the bed liner, the

bed top, everything.

Just give me the

market value affair adjudication of this truck.

And then you know what I'll do?

I will turn around and buy a new truck from you.

How's that?

And I will eat that cost.

No, no, no.

So I don't know what to do.

I'm completely frustrated.

And I know I'm whining, but

it's like me being stuck at the Dallas airport for 12 hours.

Same thing.

But I guess it's more animate because, you know, there's no excuse.

If somebody calls me up and says, hey, Victor, remember me, and

I need a blurb on your book.

And I sent you a text today.

Can you get it back to me in a week?

And if I don't get it back in a week, he calls and says, did you read my manuscript 400 pages in a week and blurb it?

Because I always read the thing before I blurb it.

I just don't blurb it.

But if I say that, I don't ever say to him, hey, it's going to be another month.

And then, oh, another month.

And then another month.

And then I wouldn't ever do that to anybody.

Especially when the dealer says he'll call me each week to keep me a prize.

So I'm very upset.

But that is a minor problem compared to the national scene of the president of Harvard.

Oh my gosh.

So 500 Harvard professors have supported her, even though they found

a lot of plagiarism in her articles and in her dissertation.

And I just want to give a shout out to Christopher Ruffo, who has done an extensive investigation on her plagiarism.

So he's done some great work there.

But what are your thoughts on Dr.

Gay?

Well, you know,

I've been at the Hoover Institution for 20 years.

And when I first got there, she was a professor of political science.

And how do I remember that?

I just remember that she came up for tenure, and it was quite controversial because she had published four,

four articles.

And I...

When you leave tenure, I was in the California State University system and you go to the Hoover Institution, they have de facto tenure, but you have to be tenured again.

And so I was at this time compiling this huge dossier for the classics department, you know.

And I think I had 16 books and I was showing the scholarly refereed articles and all these, which, you know,

classical studies, American Journal of Philology, classical philology, all these stuff.

At the same time, I was watching this just as a surrogate, you know what I mean?

This tenure process.

And they tenured her with four articles.

I'm not sure they would do that at any UC campus.

I'm not sure that all the CSUs would do that, at least in the past.

It was so controversial, no book.

And they were all on the same topic, you know,

the victimization of black people and a new take on it.

And what got me angry at the time, and then fast forward,

this is 20 years ago.

So this person had not had any scholarly record and was tenured at Stanford and then went to Harvard and was tenured and has a total output of 11 articles.

Okay.

You don't get tenure at Harvard with 11 articles.

I know people in my own experience who have been fired from tenure with two books as an assistant professor.

It's okay.

So she got an exemption.

And then when you look at her larger career, her parents were Haitian immigrants.

Great.

That's the American story.

But she went to Phillips Exeter Academy, the most exclusive prep school in the United States.

Then she went to Princeton.

Then she went to Stanford.

Then she went to Harvard.

And these are schools that take about 8% of their, maybe not even that much these days.

So my point is this.

that coming to this country, her parents, she got every opportunity in the world.

I mean, they bent over backwards at these very prestigious liberal institutions to greenlight her career.

And then when the George Floyd thing comes, she catapults into these high administrative positions on the basis that this is a systematic racist country.

It wasn't with you, Dr.

Gay.

You weren't a victim of systematic racism.

I know you're saying that now.

I know Nicole Hannah-Jones is saying that you

are a victim, but you surely weren't forced to fire like the Stanford president was, as I mentioned.

Stanford President, Mr.

Tessale Devine,

what, 30 years ago, there was an inappropriate illustration or something wrong with his refereed paper.

He withdrew it.

He had to resign.

She didn't have to do that for these plagiarism charges so far.

Liz McGill, the former Stanford law dean, president of the University of Pennsylvania, she's gone.

She's a white woman.

So how in the world can this president who has de-platformed, disinvited guests, gone after Ronald Sullivan, Roland Fryer,

with no record of sanctity of the First Amendment, in other words, she was censoring people and punishing people for speech she thought was inappropriate, meaning ideologically opposite to her own, suddenly go up there and claim that she's a

stalwart protector of the First Amendment.

And what I don't understand is this.

How do you have all of that,

what's the word, laxity, deference?

I don't know what the word is.

How can you have that for your whole, you're in your early 50s and the system of higher academia has

been over backwards to accommodate you as a black woman and now you're posing as a victim of racism?

And it's just,

and then add insult to injury is that you have hundreds of Jewish students under your purview as president, and you have a systematic campaign of people on your campus that are, what, harassing them, calling for their destruction, hoping they all die, and you won't say a word because you claim the First Amendment.

And now after this is all blown over, you,

I don't know, you go to...

Jewish religious observances and all of a sudden you're going to enforce this.

But the only reason reason you are was the reaction to your dismal performance in front of the nation.

Had people thought you did pretty well, you wouldn't do it.

You wouldn't change.

You're only doing this to change, you're only changing and showing deference to Jewish people in the abstract because you want to save your job.

It's just, she's an epitome of what happened to higher education.

The bottom line is that

what took centuries to accrue,

that is the reputation of the Ivy League, can be lost in a few years if it's not an Ivy League, if it's not Stanford, if it's not Duke, it's not Chicago.

And that means if you bring students that don't fit your own standards and you hire faculty on the basis of race or ethnicity or sexual orientation rather than published, or if the president of Harvard has only written 11 papers in her whole life,

and they are under suspicion of being plagiarized, a great deal of them, and she's the leading academic by her,

I don't know, by her perch at Harvard, then there's nothing there.

There's nothing there.

There's a half a million academics in the United States that have a better record than she does.

And there's probably

90% of them are smart enough not to go to Congress and claim that after you censor speech and deplatform people and disinvite guests on the basis of the First Amendment, i.e.

you don't believe in it,

and then say that context matters about people advocating genocide.

And that's what they're saying when they say river to the sea.

And so there's so many things going on here that

part of it is she feels that the DEI community is absolutely exempt from any criticism that it's racist to the core because we saw BLM, remember, with a glider poster almost in a nanosecond glorifying the mass murder by air on October 7th.

There were no ramifications for people who were in BLM.

We know the whole history of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Farrakhan, all of this.

We've known people in the squad.

We know the history of anti-Semitism in the radical left-wing black community.

And so

when she goes up there,

and she has this DEI career and it's been very privileged.

And then not only does she cannot condemn calls for genocide, but she has the audacity to say that it believes on the context because she's

a staunch supporter of the First Amendment when nothing in her career has ever evidenced that.

And then her supporters, to protect her,

play the race card from the bottom of the deck and say that she's a victim of being a powerful black voice when we've just fired Liz McGill, who was not nearly as egregious in her own scholarly career, didn't do anything wrong, just said the same thing Claudine Gay did.

She was out.

It's just,

it's fantastic in the sense of absurd, Orwellian, weird.

And I think everybody's sick of it.

Yes, but why can they make that assumptions that this DEI community people or the people that it benefits are, you know, they can get away with anything.

And I think it's because even though you say, well, it can go like a company, there's just so many companies out there that support this kind of stuff coming out of Harvard.

The professors all, I guess it's a big virtue signal, or they were afraid if they didn't get their name on the supporter of Dr.

Gay list, they would be blackballed.

I don't know how many faculty, there's probably two or three thousand of various statuses at Harvard, but I can guarantee you the 500 are either the most obsequious or the DEI faculty themselves.

So they're heavily invested in her survival as a DEI advocate.

This whole I still think this whole

APA rat's going to come tumbling down.

I really do, because it's based on a lie.

And the lie is that you can judge people by the color of their skin and then say you're not racist.

Or you can have safe spaces.

Or you can have microaggressions.

I mean,

the simple lie of the whole thing was summed up at MIT.

When MIT, like all these universities, have these stupid safe spaces where they create this white bogeyman that's hunting down DEI students, and therefore they need a

segregated space of protection.

And then, when they really are hunting down

Jews at Cooper Union or telling people that

harassing them at MIT, the president can't say,

here's a safe space.

I've created all these little atolls for your sanctuary from our and systematically racist campus, so here's one for you.

No, they say,

I don't think Jewish people should go in these areas.

So there it is.

It's a whole bankrupt, rotten system, and it's too bad because this country depends on high quality research in the sciences and business and law and medicine.

Maybe not law.

We've written off the humanities and social sciences, but if these

systems of higher learning are not using bureaucratic criteria to hire or judge or adjudicate scholarly work, then we're no different than the Soviets in the 30s or 40s with a Commissar system or a Mao's cultural revolution.

And I think right now people realize that if you're a Harvard hire,

I just hired at Harvard University, you're either one of of two categories.

You either are DEI

or

you have written your DEI loyalty oath and you're obsequious.

Just like you were in the 1930s in the Soviet Union when you said Stalin was a great

hydrology engineer or something.

And that's Claudine Gay.

She's a great scholar.

Yeah.

Well, since we're on Harvard, they do have a graduate who is now mayor of Boston.

I believe her name is Michelle Wu.

Yes.

And she recently sent out a memo that she was going to have a party for the Christmas party for all of the people of color.

Or she called them the elected of color, didn't she?

What the heck does that mean?

Did they have a new term?

Yes, they do.

Her attitude was, I loved what she said when they called her on it.

First of all, she sent it out to all the white people, like, hey, white person, you can't come to our DEI Christmas party.

And then she apologized for sending it out to the white people, not apologizing for being a segregationist, but basically said, I don't want any of you crackers coming in here by accident or I'll kick you out.

Somebody should have tried it.

That would have been great.

It would have been like the lunch counters of the 1950s.

Come on in.

No.

Or maybe they could take a,

you know, Tom Sowell once told me about the racist

when blacks had to put their arm up and they had a paper bag.

There were some racist fraternities.

In black colleges.

And black colleges.

And not just black colleges, other places, but at Howard especially.

You had to be lighter than the paper bag to get in.

Well, they should have a white paper bag, like, you know, for a lunch bag.

If you're as white as that bag, you cannot come in to Miss Wu's segregated racist.

And then

I really like it.

She goes, we've been doing this for years.

It reminded me, you know, strom thermodynamic and Dixie cracks.

What's the problem?

We've had Jim Crow for 50, 60, 80 years since the Civil War, and then we had 200 years of slavery.

Come on.

Slavery today, tomorrow, forever.

Segregation.

That's what she is.

She's basically saying segregation yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

And

she's also said, you know, what did she say to the fireman?

She went there and said, I have all these problems with first responders, this and that, and white people, and they're all white.

And she's a racist, and she's married to a white guy.

So the whole thing is a theater of the absurd.

And she knows it, and she knows if anybody else treated anybody the way that that was.

And, you know, I was looking at DirecTV.

I have a subscription.

I was looking at the movies theater day, and it was like, white people can't jump.

White girl.

It was like every single, every five movies, it was white in a disparaging fashion.

It reminded me of the Steppen Fetchin racist movies of the 1930s, you know, where they did this to blacks.

And

at some point,

people are going to say, you know, I am so sick of this.

I live in a community that's 95%

Hispanic.

It's not officially so because so many Hispanics identify on census as white.

And why not?

Because when I know people I went to high school with, I see, and let's say the Hispanic Mexican-American woman is married to a so-called white guy, and therefore her name is something like Brandi Wilson

or Star.

I don't know, Jones.

I'm just taking names.

But if you see the Mexican woman, you would not have any idea that she was Mexican.

You would think she might be Arabic or Italian or Greek or Armenian.

You would have no way of knowing.

The thing is so absurd.

And so

what I'm getting at, this whole DEI thing, is really based on the 1/16th drop of the old Confederacy.

You can't tell half the cases of DEI people.

It was a joke

where I taught for 21 years at Cal State President.

I was on about 10 hiring committees, and we would get these directives from these careerist administrators who were always writing these memos, you know, not in my name, this is not who we are, all this stuff.

Some guy probably in a little elf and some plant was writing them out and sending them all over the United States.

Boilerplate.

But the point I'm making is, we would get there and it was so cynical.

We'd look at the

classics professor,

German professor, and everybody would say, Hey, do we have an Argentine aristocrat?

Is there somebody from Chile who's a sixth-generation Chilean that has an accent on his name or can trill his R?

So it was just so cynical.

And I think that's where we're getting.

And

what's going to end it is the white liberal, the people in Boston

who are liberal.

And they look at their immediate landscape, and what do they see, Sammy?

They look over at Harvard and they say, Claudine Gay is a rac.

God, what a racist.

And then they say,

Elizabeth Thorne, Pocahontas, wow.

She was the first Harvard Native American lawyer.

because she had high cheekbones.

And then they look at Michelle Bu in the same city and they say, this is a trifecta.

This place is absurd.

And I think that's happening now.

And people are going to just say, you know, I'm so sick of these people.

And they don't have, it is a refuge of people to gain advantage in careers.

I don't see middle-class people doing it.

It's mostly the elite and the professional classes.

And I think everybody is getting tired.

And it's going to affect the United States, not because

non-white people are any less talented, but

anybody who is hired or retained or promoted on the basis of race rather than merit, the merit's not that hard to ascertain or adjudicate.

And so, in the case of Claudian Gay, all the Stanford Political Science Department had to do is say,

we expect four articles in one book in the next six years.

If you don't do it, you're gone.

And she didn't do it.

And she wasn't gone.

And that sent the message to everybody, you don't have to do it if you're a particular color.

And that's just a fact.

And

now Harvard has sent the message, if you're a particular color and you plagiarize,

we're going to go after the people who accuse you.

So what's going to happen at Harvard for the next 20 years?

There's going to be a lot of plagiarists that come out of the woodwork.

Of course.

They're going to say, hmm, Harvard says this in their code, but I can kind of take this and tweak it a little bit, add an adverb.

or a noun and then just copy it word for word.

And if they let the president of Harvard get away with it, they'll have to let the assistant professor of economics get away with it.

Yeah, and all the students, too.

How would they ever expel it?

They're expelled about 50 or 60, I think, a year for that.

They can't do it anymore.

They can't do it.

I don't think Stanford's political science department can really fire anybody that doesn't have a book.

All they have to say is they have to invoke the Claudian Gay rule.

And maybe they'll say, well, asterisks, you can invoke it, but you're not black, so you can't really qualify.

If they do that, then at least they're transparent and honest about their racism.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and...

You know I want to just add one thing.

The thing about this

is so ironic.

If you look at some of the most, the brightest guys in the United States,

a lot of them are black.

You take Shelby Steele.

I've known him for 20 years.

He's absolutely brilliant.

He's a beautiful prose stylist.

He taught at San Jose State.

He didn't get any preference.

In fact, when he wrote the content of character, they went out to try to fire him at San Jose State.

And then he went to the Hoover and he was one of our stars.

You look at Tom Soule.

Tom Soule didn't, he came in an area where he didn't get any breaks.

Yeah.

UCLA, Chicago, none.

And the way he reasons and his analysis, he's so light years ahead of people.

You look at Roland Fire, maybe he got a little push in the beginning, but once

his data and his research showed things that were not palatable to the left, they went after him.

And it only made him better.

And that's just

some of the brightest people are black intellectuals, mostly on the conservative side, because they get nothing.

In fact, white liberals hate them.

And they have to endure and be hyper-exact and punctual.

And every little, cross every T, dot every I, and they're really smart people.

And that's what's so sad about the whole thing.

If we just did that for everybody, we would have an black merocratic elite within five years.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back, and we're going to talk about the Odyssey.

And don't worry, folks, we also have Hunter Biden on the agenda today, so we'll get to him.

But we want to look at the Odyssey.

It's a real struggle between civilization and savagery in so many places.

And I think that's going to be a big theme here and what's coming up.

So, stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor is found on social media, on X at V D Hansen, and then also on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

So, please come join us.

There's also the Victor Davis-Hansen Fan Club, which is unassociated with us, but it's a group of people that, as I always say, they dig up the old and they also have the new there.

So it's a good follow to have if you are on Facebook.

So, Victor, we're going to look at the Odyssey today, and I thought we'd have a different approach by looking at some specific books and specific passages.

And one of my favorite is in book five, when Odysseus is just starting to get away from Calypso and is going back to, or trying to get back home.

He's on his way, he's almost there.

And Calypso tells him to build a raft, and he does.

And she says, now take this raft, and you can get across.

And he's crossing, and a huge storm comes up, of course, because Poseidon doesn't like him.

And

Eno comes out and says, get off your raft at this point.

And he says this.

An interesting thing in one of the translations I was looking at, Eno goes, you're a sensible

person.

Now this is what you need to do.

And then Odysseus' own mind is thinking, and here it is from the classic club prose translation of the Odyssey by Samuel Butler.

And he thinks, this is only someone or other of the gods who is luring me to ruin by advising me to quit my raft.

At any rate, I will not do so at present, for the land where she said I should be quit of all my troubles seems to be still a good way off.

I know what I will do.

I am sure it will be best.

No matter what happens, I will stick to the raft as long as her timbers hold together, but when the sea breaks her up, I will swim for it.

I do not see how I can do any better than this.

And I always liked that because Odysseus separates himself from the gods, and I was wondering if you had commented on that.

Homer remembers the name we associate with a supposedly blind bard who composed orally through formula

and type scenes, the Iliad and the Odyssey, these monumental 12,000-line poems composed in Ionic Greek and Dactylic Examiner around 700 B.C.

And we only have two of them.

There must have been 15 or 16 by some by Homer that we don't have, but many other bards.

But these were the monumental poems that apparently in antiquity were considered the most moving, the best, and they coincided with the age of the city-state and the advent of writing.

So they were

formalized or became iconicized by writing.

And then the tradition of world poetry more or less ended.

So it's very different, the Odyssey, than the Iliad.

The Iliad takes place in the tenth year and it's a few weeks' time on the battlefield.

It's about the character development of Achilles and the whole heroic code

put into question.

Agamemnon and Menela don't really deserve their power given their performance on the battlefield.

People like Ajax and Achilles don't get the credit that they

should have won under such a system,

and

etc., etc.

However, The Odyssey is very different.

It's a Mediterranean-wide novel, and it's very sophisticated.

Take the form of it.

It's not a straight narrative.

It's a complete flashback.

The first real monumental novel, if you could say that for this epic poem, is a flashback.

He's at the island of the Phaeacians after Calypso has let him go.

And then he recites all of what he's done since he left Troy for 10 years.

And it's amazing the characterization that he uses.

And then the second thing about it is, this is the creation of archetypes in the West that will dominate literature for the next 2,500 years.

What do I mean by archetype?

Penelope is the loyal wife who puts up with everything.

She's and before you say, well, she's just a wifey in the 1950s.

No, she's brilliant.

She knows how to outsmart these so-called suitors, 102 or something

leeches that come into the house when he's gone.

Her husband's gone for 20 years, and she tries to postpone the forced wedding so they can get a hold of the estate, marry her, get rid of her son, Telemachus.

And so she weaves and unweaves at night.

And she says when this tapestry is done, then she'll marry.

And she outsmarts them.

And she's loyal.

She doesn't sleep around, da-da-da-da.

A lot of feminist scholars don't like that, but she's the rock of the household.

So when the husband is off at war, maybe he's in Vietnam or World War II, it's the woman who keeps things going.

It reminds me of the best years of our lives, the Myrna Lloyd character that just keeps everything going while her husband's gone.

And then there's Odysseus.

He's the modern man.

He's a good fighter, but unlike Achilles or Ajax, he's crafty.

So he figures out things.

When he's up against this pre-modern Cyclops, he not only knows how to sharpen the, get him drunk,

take out his eye, eye, get under the fleece of the sheep to get out, but make him say that nobody did it.

So when he yells out, nobody did this to me, the other cyclops don't come to his aid.

And he does that all the time.

So he's the multi-dimensional person to survive in a Mediterranean tapestry.

That's what the thing.

And then we have Telemachus, the son that's coming of age.

He's really got a lot of potential, but he's rash and he has to be schooled.

We have Laertes, the grandfather, the patriarch of the family.

He's old, he's not quite as active, but he's there with wise counsel.

You've got kind of the patronizing client-master

relationship with Eumaeus, the loyal swineherd.

He's a slave, but he works side by side.

He's kind of like the hired guy that works.

You know, the master has a business and he has a guy that, you know, does all the maintenance.

And the guy, they become better friends than his own family, because he's a wonderful person, Eumaeus.

totally loyal to the dissent

and on and on and on we have women that are I mean it's kind of sexist perhaps but people like

there are women in the ancient world that are modern women they don't choose to marry they don't choose to have kids they're very attractive and they happen to be semi-divine Circe and Calypso

and

They entice him.

And then who is Odysseus?

He's not only the crafty person.

He wants to get home.

So he puts his family first and his homeland.

So for all of these seductive attractions of Calypso and Circe and all of the need to

sail between Charybdis and Scylla or escape the Lystragonian monsters or the Lotus seductive drug peddlers or the sirens.

He's the only person that has the skills to outsmart them all, but outsmart them to get home.

that's mostly the novel, and it's so finely characterized with these archetypes and the flashbacks.

And then you go back from the past time to the present, and then the story goes in chronological order, sort of like pulp fiction.

And that's very sophisticated for an oral bard to pull off.

And the main theme, as you said, is civilization versus savagery.

So what do these challenges have?

They're either postmodern or pre-modern.

They're very crafty, beautiful women

who he has to outsmart.

Or they're people like the sirens that are seductive, or the lotus eaters.

In other words,

they're more than modern.

Or they're pre-modern and they're just savage monsters.

And that would be the Lystragonians or the Cyclops or Charybdis or Scylla.

And he can do either one.

He can outsmart either one of them, pre- and post-modern.

So

it's really a novel and it doesn't have the level

of, it doesn't have the power of description or character development of the Iliad,

but it's not confined on the battlefield and it spans 20 years and it's so much more sophisticated in the novel arts of chronology and characterization and archetypes.

So

these two are sort of bookend poems at the beginning of Western Civ.

Everybody says, oh, wow, Western Civ, why not Chinese or India?

Well, they all have great works, but not at the very beginning.

Two monumental poems so different and of such caliber that really set the standard for all subsequent literature.

Do you ever think, well, why did Homer choose Odysseus for this?

Why not Nestor?

Or

I know he's kind of old, but...

No, there were a lot of...

There was a whole series of epic poems, and a lot of them dealt with what they called the Nostori, the returns.

So

remember, there were these Mycenaean events that took place in real history.

An attack on probably a Hittite-speaking Phoenician city where Troy is, or the sack of Thebes, right?

And in

the Trojan cycle, there were the story of the actual

fighting in Troy, of which were the Iliad.

There was the Trojan horse story, there was the sack of Troy, the Iliad of

Persis, there was the Palladium theft.

There was all of those.

But one component was the nostori.

What happened to all these people?

And we know that there were poems about Agamemnon coming back and being slaughtered by Clytemnestra, which Aeschylus took up in his trilogy, the Oristia.

We know that Menelaus came back with Helen and she flipped Paris.

We know that Ajax killed himself because he didn't get the armor of Odysseus.

We know that Odysseus came back, but it took him 20 years.

And we know Achilles didn't get back.

He was killed on the battlefield.

My point is that there were poems about each one of these, and they all reflected the fact that somewhere around 1200 or 1250 or 1170 or something, a group of Greek speakers went to Asia and they were successful perhaps in destroying Troy or whatever it was historically, but it coincided with the last generation of Mycenaean citadels because on the way back or maybe

almost contemporaneous with that victory, they were wiped out.

And that's reflected over 500 years of exaggeration and myth-making of a

decimated population in the Dark Ages.

They didn't have the technology, it lost the ability to write or to record, but they did see these monumental

tholoi tombs or the Lionsgate, and so they were creating myths about what they saw, and they had the oral tradition that kept alive.

And probably some of these names, like I think Achilles and others,

are in Mycenaean tablets.

And so they're exaggerated.

And suddenly, the last generation was

mythologically transformed into these heroes that came back and they met disaster on the return.

I'm not suggesting the suitors were, you know,

sea peoples from the north, but there was bad things that happened historically when they came after Troy.

So then it's after the fact then, Odysseus, we already have the story and then Homer's developing his character and he makes him into a guy that not only is a great fighter, but he can rethink what the gods have said to him.

Yes.

Homer is composing.

He's not composing in 800 BC, he's not composing in 900, he's not composing in 100.

He's at the last generation of this epic development of the Nostoi, and one of them is Odysseus.

And he is a product of a sophisticated city-state, 700, the beginning of it.

So he has the ability, or after 500 years of refinement, drawing on the work of others, to take just a fairy story and make it a sophisticated novel.

In other words, he can bring in the idea that Odysseus has a definite personality and he has this overriding ability to outsmart people.

And he

understands that the gods are just larger than life.

They're not saints.

They're They're not moral creatures.

They fornicate.

They lie.

They trick.

And that represents the new skepticism of a more affluent and larger population of 1,500 city-states that he's bringing.

In 1993, I wrote kind of a 250,000-word book called The Other Greeks about the city-state, the rise of it.

And I had a chapter, I think it was number two, called Laertes' Farm.

And what I said is, when you look at the description of Laertes' Farm, the father of Odysseus, when he comes back in disguise, he goes up to his dad's farm.

His dad will find out who he is.

But

every element, irrigation,

homestead farming, grapes, grain,

olive trees, it's a

a representation of a sophisticated type of agriculture that was not present in the Mycenaean period.

In other words, when Homer's got the old thing, when he's he's got the old outline, he has the outline.

But he's adding things, and when he wants to talk about a farm, he looks at farms in his own lifetime and puts them back into a context 500 years earlier.

Yeah.

Well, if we could stick with Odysseus' character, I think that he uses a bow and arrow, if I'm not wrong, and when he's first killing all the suitors to his wife Penelope.

And isn't the isn't it more manly, more warrior-like to fight with the sword rather than, and so why clever Odysseus and arrow shooter, the lesser form of warrior?

Well, remember, when he kills the suitors, he starts out with arrows, but then

he adjusts when they're gone to spears and swords.

So he's multifaceted.

But he's a master of the bow, which no other person probably except...

Telemachus

can string the bow.

That's the test of the suitors.

He's the only one, and he looks at Telemachus not to do it.

But the point is that he is using every type of weapon possible, including, and without stain to his character,

a

I guess you call it a cheater's weapon, that you don't kill somebody.

And who's the master in the Iliad?

It's the Fop Paris, who shoots Achilles with an arrow in the heel.

And it's always considered cheating.

In fact, we have from the Wellantine Plain

War of 700, we have prohibitions for using missile weapons.

And in hoplite warfare of the early city-state, it was considered cheating, or it was less heroic to use a bow and arrow.

And so,

but that's the point about Odysseus.

He doesn't really care about tradition.

He doesn't really care about protocol.

He doesn't care about his reputation necessarily.

He's just so

multifaceted and multi-dimensional that he can do anything, and he's willing to do anything.

If he has to sleep with Calypso, he will.

He'll sleep with Circe to save his crew.

If he has to

kind of seduce without sex Nausica, the daughter of the king of Phaeacia, he'll do it.

And

he's the modern man of Apollos.

put into a classical context.

And it's kind of sad that the first piece of literature we have,

not sad but ironic, is a refutation of

the whole epic tradition's values that we see in the Iliad.

And so the Odyssey was probably composed, I don't know, 30 to 50 years later.

It's got a lot of different language.

It has a different type of language.

It has less hoppox legamino.

Those are words that never appear anywhere else in Greek.

In any case, it is

when he goes to the underworld and he sees Achilles, he says, wow, you're the master of the underworld.

That's the greatest thing to be.

You know what I mean?

You die young,

your body never ages, you have your legacy, and you just think Achilles is going to say, yeah, I'm famous, I'm walking around.

And he said, I'd rather be the

lowliest peasant to be alive in Greece than the lord of the underworld.

So it's a rejection of the heroic code.

And he does not, it's not like Odysseus is going to say, hey,

polyphemus, polyphemus, you Cyclops, let's go out and have it like Achilles, one-on-one on the battlefield.

Or he doesn't say the Lystragonians or men are going to line up and fight you.

And he doesn't say any of that.

And he even tempts himself.

He doesn't even put wax in his ears.

He's tied to the

mast post on his ship so he can hear the sirens.

He wants to be tempted and see what they're like.

He says, don't listen to me, you know.

But

he's far more human as a hero.

He's very human.

And he outsmarts the gods, and he knows how to deal with them.

He's a trickster.

And

they recognize that.

But

there's no reverence for an all-powerful, all-moral God, as you see in the Iliad somewhat.

Although even in the Iliad,

it's

a lot of people who

have written about Greek religion see that that element as

reaffirming that there's a society that makes gods that are no better than men.

And therefore, they're very confident people.

Their gods are just don't die, they're stronger, they're better looking, they never age, but they don't necessarily, they're not morally superior.

They have certain rules and protocols.

And you can see that

by the fifth century when the tragedians are doing what Homer does, reworking these old myths, but on the Athenian stage, when

in Euripides' Bacchae,

after Dionysus is slaughtered and just

behead, Pentheus is beheaded by his mother.

I think it's Tiresias

and Cadmus are talking, and they say to Dionysus, you know, God should be better than men, i.e., you're not better than we are, but you should be if you're a god.

Yeah.

Well, you were talking about book 22 when Odysseus takes back the house from the suitors.

And I thought it was interesting at the end where the nurse Euryclea comes up and she wants to celebrate that all of the suitors are dead.

And Odysseus says to her, and again, and this is in the translation by Samuel Butler for the Classics Club, he says, quote, it is an unholy thing to vaunt over dead men.

And I thought, wow, that's a whole different

way of looking at things than our local Hamas do today.

Yeah, and it also it picks up the final part of the Iliad when Achilles lets

Priam have his dead Hector, and he no longer desecrates the corpse and ties him around the chariot.

And it's supposed to signify that

Achilles' character is developed to show compassion for somebody in the same situation as he will be in, and his father will be in, and maybe the end of the heroic code itself.

But

also, remember, it works in

the dramatic progression of the novel because the suitors all have family, right?

And they're going to come and try to fight it out to revenge the death of their sons.

And if you don't lord it over, and there's trying to be it.

That's another aspect of Odysseus' character.

He's going to try to find a peace between...

the families of the suitors whose children he's killed and then not keep this vengeance cycle, the dark age, you know,

way of doing sort of like a Scandinavian saga of you kill me, I kill you, the hat peels and McCoy's, on and on and on.

He's got the skills to bring it to a close.

You think so, because earlier in that

book 22, he says these people,

these are my words, but he basically says these people are going to pay for what they did.

And I'm not going to go light on them at all.

No, no.

I mean, even Eurocleia has to point out all the servant girls that

slept with the suitors.

They're all going to be hanged.

And I guess they're like birds that squeal.

They kill them all.

No,

no, no.

There's not any idea of mitigation.

They're going to pay everybody back.

But once you pay everybody back, the people you pay back, you don't want them to pay you back.

And then you pay back, and you pay back.

So there's a finality of justice.

They did this, they pay.

Sort of like Israel is doing to Hamas.

You came into our country and you slaughtered everybody.

So we're going to destroy the people who did that.

And then what?

Yeah.

They want some type of government to come in that's not Hamas to stop the cycle, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

By destroying Hamas and then not and then finding a way to end it.

Because if they let Hamas go, it's going to be back and forth forever.

You think so?

It won't be back and forth

just trying to end it all with...

I mean, if they end everything about Hamas, I think they'll be successful.

But if they don't just

destroy the whole thing, it has to be one-time destruction.

If you let them go, it'll be back and forth.

That's the solution in the Odyssey.

You destroy the suitors and everything they represented.

And then when they come back, their parents, to get revenge on you

for having got revenge on them, then you stop it.

And the gods come in and everything.

That's the end of it.

All right.

Victor, we're coming close to the end.

We do have Hunter Biden left, but stay with us.

We'll come back after these messages.

We're back.

It's the Victor Davis Hansen Show and we still have Hunter Biden out.

Recently he has been,

he went to, he was supposed to be at a deposition, but instead he went to a press conference across the street and did not go to the

deposition.

And he said a lot of really strange things at this press conference that

people are impugning his character, which I think he's already done himself.

So it's not like, and Trump Colt is obsessed with me and

whatever.

I thought that was so funny.

I think he was trolling everybody.

I mean, here's a guy who took funnel pictures of his phallus

and had all these hookers and then recorded all of them and then had the audacity to write it off as a business expense to cheat on his taxes.

He was using drugs.

He was dealing with Ukrainian and Russian hookers.

He went through $5 million.

He drove some sports car, Porsche or something at over 100 miles an hour.

He did every imaginable

sin there is in biblical terms.

And then he turns around and says, you're defaming me.

I think it was on Greg Gutfield where Tyrus says, and he was mad about that they made fun of his art.

I did the art myself.

Well, I assure you, I did that.

I may be a rogue, a cocaine addict, a drug addict, a procurer of women.

I may

cheat on my taxes, but don't ever accuse my dad of doing my art.

So I think he says he's going to go out of the country if Trump's elected.

It's not going to work.

He's playing the victim.

He's not a victim.

He's a spoiled brat.

I mean, how a person could seduce when he was married the grieving widow of his own brother

or

have a dialogue with his own sister about

when you procure me women, no Asian women, right?

Yeah.

I mean,

every imaginable horror is in that.

And, you know, there's this

pseudonym Marco Polo who did, he just took the report of the Biden laptop and he didn't embellish it.

He just put every single picture and every single text and he footnoted it in a scholarly fashion.

And if you look at that thing,

it's

a house of horrors.

And he did it.

And he knows it.

And the whole thing is absurd because he doesn't exist without Joe Biden.

Even Devin Archer said he was the brand, Joe Biden.

So when Joe Biden, he says, how don't my father had no financial interest?

He had an interest, but we won't call it financial.

And then the New York Times, of course, when they quoted it, they took that out as if they were in 1984.

He had no interest.

That's how they reported his quote.

They took out the word financial.

He was not financially interested.

I know.

I mean,

they've lost.

They're like Dr.

Gay, only the opposite.

They're taking words out that they find unpalatable they're the same type of they're the same type of pseudo-leftist moralists that feel that they're so morally superior that any means necessary to achieve their exalted ends or aims are justified but he did it to himself and he knows that

These people really think we're stupid.

I mean, when China cuts them a $5 million check and they start redistributing it and they write these multi-thousand dollar checks to Joe Biden and they write loan repayment at the bottom.

I mean, that's like one of our listeners who, you know, goes to Vegas,

stays at a hotel, goes to a convention, and then at the bottom he puts

car repair or truck repair on it.

Come on.

And

you had to juxtapose this with this

sanctimonious hypocrite Joe Biden in 2019 and 20 touring the country saying, they're going to have to pay their fair share.

The rich are going to have to pay under me.

Yeah, your whole family never paid their income tax.

And they're rich.

And there's no way you can collate his lifestyle, his houses, etc., with the income he made as a senator or vice president.

No, they're such liars.

What does he think we think?

I mean, they got 26 million collective dollars.

Is he saying that he was a brilliant lawyer and he had an international law firm?

And they said, wow, I met this guy named Hunter Biden that just happened to be

related to some guy named Joe Biden.

I don't care about that.

He was a brilliant legal mind, and I hired him at Burisma for $80,000 a month because he picked up fuel knowledge.

He knows about oil.

He's just a genius.

So we're going to pay him 80, and then he does the same thing with Romanians and Chinese.

Everybody's, wow, he's sort of

half Wall Street wizard and half Alan Dershowitz, you know.

That's

That's what we're supposed to believe.

And he has no other relations with Joe Biden, even though we have him on tape saying the man next to me,

you better be careful.

I'm sitting next to a man, i.e.,

the whole center of the Biden syndicate.

Even James Biden's wife was in on it, you know.

She was the so-called lawyer that was cutting checks.

They were all in it.

The niece was in it.

The daughter was in it.

It was a whole clan of these grasping, wannabe, middle-class people that were faking out like they were all from Scranton and working-class people.

They were always middle-class and they wanted to be wealthy.

And when Joe Biden, for his whole career, was suspicious,

and then finally they hit Paydor when he was vice president, and he was not yet demented, and they thought he would be president someday, and he had a window of opportunity, and Hunter went to work.

And he made him $26 million, and they did not pay pay full income tax on it and that's what the whistleblowers found.

So when

they have all these Democratic housemen, not a shred of evidence you think,

well you have Devin Archer, you have Tony Bomolinski, you have all the exchanges on the laptop,

you have the IRS whistleblowers.

Now you have canceled checks.

What more do you want?

It's all there.

And they know it.

And so I think what's happening is you're starting to see under the Freedom of Information Act and these congressional subpoenas, you're starting for the first time to see

weird, isn't it?

Canceled checks pop up.

We didn't think they'd ever release them.

Why are they releasing them now?

Is it couldn't be that Joe Biden is considered expendable?

And Hunter knows very well that if Joe Biden does not run re-election,

he's got about 11 or 12, he's got now about 13 months until his dad is out of office.

Yeah.

And he knows he will be pardoned.

He will be pardoned.

What does Joe Biden care?

He's going to say, I didn't know what I was doing.

I'm not president anymore.

And Hunter knows that.

In the meantime, his handlers are telling him to say things like, if Trump is elected, Hunter has to flee the United States.

I'm like, no, you can do it anyway.

We don't need you here.

So funny, they have all these never-Trumpers, you know, gosh.

they're all on TV Bill Crystal David from and they're all warning us that you know

if Trump is elected with the end of democracy he's going to go after Michael Cohen the convicted liar and cheat is on now they're quoting him chapter and durse on what Trump might do And there's two things that make that absurd.

He was there for four years.

And the problem with him is he was naive, Trump.

He let Comey run wild.

He let Fauci run wild.

He let McCabe run wild.

He let Clapper and Brennan do.

There was no control.

He wasn't vindictive.

Robert Mueller ate up 22 months of his presidency.

And no sooner did Robert Mueller say, ah, forget all about that, found nothing, than they cooked up this phone call impeachment.

And, you know, Michael Venman, no, Representative Nunes, it's

Lieutenant Colonel Venman.

Remember that guy?

Yes.

He said, oh, I don't know who the wink nod whistleblower is, but was the whistleblower on the car?

No.

So you talked to someone.

I can't talk about that.

That would give away the whistleblower.

That was the days when whistleblowers were sacrosanct, not like the IRS whistleblowers.

The malign and smear every day today.

Isn't that funny how

just, I don't know, three years ago whistleblowers were kingly, saintly people, and that were scum.

And the mere idea of impeaching a president when he loses his majority in his first term was necessary.

And now it's, oh my God, how dare you?

It's unconstitutional.

In the old days, if you subpoena Ivanka and Jared for the January 6th Committee or Steve Bannon or Letita James subpoenas the children of the president,

that's necessary.

No one's above the law.

Now you do it with honor.

He shouldn't have to do it.

This is just punitive.

This is just revenge.

This is just out of control.

The leftists are so shameless, man.

they just take it's like just forget everything i did for four years and now redefine what i'm doing as saintly yeah it's it's it's crazy it is it's these people are

i don't remember anything like these people no i really don't i know there's a leftist mindset but this is This is something new, these people.

You know what it reminds me of?

I feel like I remember when the 9-11, those two towers went down, and you kept just watching it and you're like, play that again and again and again.

I feel the same about those presidents saying, well, genocide depends on context.

Like, play that again.

Like, I never got tired of, could you play that one more time?

Or Hunter's various things.

Stephanie, didn't she say, I asked you 11 times?

Yeah, something like that.

What was weird is they didn't even, they didn't respond to the context.

They were talking about context, but the context was they were under oath.

And they just kept mouthing it.

They said,

did you or did you not

have a

rule about calling for the destruction of an entire people, genocide?

It depends on the context.

And then they ask it again.

It depends on the context.

They didn't, they were like Comey or McCabe or these people.

Right, Christopher Wray, they just repeat this, or Andrew Mayor.

Oh, the border is secure.

Well, how about the border is secure?

The border is secure.

It depends on content.

Yeah.

It's

context and actionable things.

You're like, everybody's sitting in there thinking, you mean you want them to start committing genocide before you can actually punish it?

What's going to happen?

What does that mean?

All these wealthy people that want to be on the board of trustees of Yale and Harvard and Stanford and Penn and MIT.

They want their grandkids in.

They want this, this, this.

They want to tell.

They're looking at this and they're thinking,

well, short term, I got my grandson in.

Long term,

we were all Dr.

Frankensteins, and we created a Frankenstinian monster.

And these presidents are monsters, and they've taken over the entire lab.

And they're going to destroy everything, including us who created them.

And they don't know what to do.

They have...

It must be like the Disney, you know,

corporate board.

We got this guy, Iger, and these people, and they got their trans movie, you know, movies, and they made all of the dwarfs different colors and sexual orientation.

And they did all of this, and we have all this and this.

And nobody wants to watch our movies.

We destroyed our brand.

We did it in about two years.

Our target.

Wow, that was really good.

We have a little cod piece on children's female

panties.

That's really neat.

We're cutting edge.

Our competitors, oh my God.

We did this to our brand in just a year.

And they won't stop.

I know that because I don't think they think their brand is gone.

They think they're going to weather the storm.

I don't know.

They're trying to.

They're getting a lot of conservatives, you know.

Is it Dana White?

All these people that are suddenly drinking Bud Light, you know, conservative people.

But I think everybody should just lay off Bud Light for a little longer.

Yeah, there's a lot better beers out there.

Yeah, and just

don't go to Disney.

You know, just say, you know, I'm not going to Disneyland or Disney World for a while.

If you're going to go to Target, go to Walmart or somewhere else.

Just don't go.

Yeah.

Just for a little while longer to let them stew.

All right.

They're awful people.

They really are.

They deserve everything they get.

This is the end of our show, Victor Davis Hansen.

Well, thank everybody for listening.

Yeah, thanks, everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.

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