Interesting perspective:
From: Timothy Harris (rchange@speakeasy.org)
Subject: Classics Corner: Bush/Atreus
Newsgroups: humanities.classics
View: Complete Thread (4 articles) | Original Format
Date: 2002-09-25 10:08:24 PST
Loathe though we must the occurrence of the words ³G. Dubya Bush² and
³Hero² in the same sentence, we at Classics Corner cannot help but be
struck by the many similarities between the House of Atreus and America¹s
First Family.
As you recall, Agamemnon, the irresolute and doomed leader of the Trojan
War, faced a number of choices in his life and handled them all rather
badly. His brother¹s slutty wife runs off with some pretty boy and he
responds by organizing the testosterone-fest of all time. Then Artemis
gets all worked up over a dead pregnant hare and demands he kill his own
daughter. After a bit a hand wringing, the ambitious Agamemnon complies.
Then there was that whole Achilles thing, where his ego gets half the
Greek army killed.
After he wins the war, he again annoys the gods by leveling Troy and
desecrating her temples, and then, to top it all off, he arrives home to
his already ticked off wife with a lady of the night on his arm. The guy was a
walking disaster.
Agamemnon, we think, is a bit like Dubya himself: impulsive, warlike, not
terribly bright, and doomed by the family curse. Much of Agamemnon¹s
behavior was, as we like to say, overdetermined. While he was free to do
as he liked, his family history limited his choices to the more or less
unattractive.
His father Atreus, you see, did something very terrible. He did not sell
drugs though the CIA to finance the Contras in Nicaragua. Nor did he wage
an unnecessary and genocidal war against the people of Iraq. No, he
butchered his brother¹s children and served them for dinner. This, we
think, really isn¹t so bad when compared to the actions of George Senior,
but it was enough to ensure that his son would bear the curse and everyone
around him would pay the price.
But the family curse goes back even further. Pelops, the father of
Atreus, cheated in a chariot race by loosening the wheel of Oenomaus, thus
killing his opponent and incurring a terrible curse upon future
generations. And his father, Tantalus, tested the gods by serving Pelops
as a meal. Only Demeter, distracted by her grief for Persephone, took a
bite. She later replaced the shoulder of the resurrected Pelops with
ivory. The child-murdering proclivities of this family, however, would
continue to haunt them.
The earlier days of the Bush family are only slightly less colorful and
obscured by myth. George Sr.¹s maternal grandfather, George Herbert
³Bert² Walker, was a powerful Wall Street financier and a major financial
backer of Hitler¹s infant Nazi Party. He, apparently, was related to
William Walker, the American Adventurer who set himself up as President of
Nicaragua in 1855, imposed slavery and declared English the official
language. While Walker planned to rule all of Central America, he was
instead executed in 1860. The Bush¹s, however, reasserted themselves with
a Marine invasion in 1912.
At least the House of Atreus kept the family curse pretty much to
themselves. The Bush¹s have shared theirs with the whole world.
Read more of the Perfessr at www.classicscorner.org |
