Casting For Diversity - 'The Odyssey' And The Dumbing Down Of America

Christopher Nolan has been widely criticized for his woke film version of the Odyssey, a sword-and-sandals production with a black Helen of Troy.  'We wanted to make Homer relevant for modern audiences'. 

 

The idea is not new.  A production of The Merchant of Venice in Washington a few years ago featured goombas as Venetians, Locust Valley lockjaw WASPs as Portia's socialite clique, and Brooklyn Jews as Shylock's colleagues.  All the stereotypes were there so that there was no mistaking the ethnic character of the actors.   

The Jews were blunt caricatures of money-grubbing Yids who cackle and rub their hands with greed.  The WASPs were insufferable, arrogant twits, and the Italians were imports from The Sopranos. 

A production of Hamlet had Hamlet speaking the famous 'To be or not to be' soliloquy like a high school drop out. 'To be or not to be?' Hey, whatever, that's the question.  The rest of the elegant verse, the philosophical conundrums within, and the metaphorical allusions were lost, downplayed, or altered to make the speech 'relevant'. 

What does this say about American audiences?  Are we so dumb that we cannot situate ourselves in Ancient Greece or Elizabethan Venice?  So insular in our thinking that the mythical structure of The Odyssey is too remote, or that the interchange between gods and men so complex and unbelievable that it must be reduced to thunderbolts and violent storms?

Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus brought Greek myths to the stage and for the first time wove the stories of gods and men into a dramatic structure.  Oedipus slept with his mother, killed his father and spent a lifetime perplexed by the accusations, and defiantly rejected them until the truth was inescapable.  

Yet he thought he was killing a highway robber, not his father; and had no idea that the woman he married was his mother.  Sophocles anticipated Freud by two thousand years; and this melodrama is too difficult to understand?

Agamemnon goes off to fight the Trojan War because of the abduction of Helen, the most beautiful, desired woman of the known world; but she might have gone off with Paris of her own volition, taken with the young, handsome, dashing prince. If so the ‘abduction’ was a casus belli at best; and modern audiences are expected not to understand the geopolitics of the affair or its sexual dynamics? 

Clytemnestra, Agamemnon's queen takes a lover during the long years of the Trojan conflict while her husband is away, finds out that he has sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods to assure favorable winds, and then is doubly incensed when he comes home with Cassandra, his concubine.

This psycho-social drama is considered beyond our means?  If the sexual dynamics of an ambitious, sexually adventuresome woman, a she-bear of a mother, and a vengeful, vindictive, jealous wife were not enough, we only have to reread Ibsen, Strindberg, or any melodrama on prime time television. 

The relationship between Clytemnestra and her children, Electra and Orestes, is another modern, Freudian classic.  The scenes where Clytemnestra plays on mother-love to cajole and manipulate Orestes so that he will not take vengeance on her for the murder of Agamemnon is classic - obvious, common, and understandable - and Electra's hectoring of her brother to man up and take their mother's life is no less familiar. 

The courtroom drama where Orestes is brought to justice for the murder of his father was one of the first trials by jury in Western literature and has all the elements of a modern courtroom drama.  The play is filled with legalisms, and familiar codicils, accusations and defense, and is straightforward and inimitably understandable. 

Shakespeare's complex metaphors, drawing on mythical, Biblical, and historical references are not easy to decipher.  The iambic pentameter and the Elizabethan language are challenges for the modern reader; yet the stories are familiar.  How can King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, or Othello not resonate with modern audiences?

What makes these classics so difficult for modern American audiences?  Literary illiteracy is one reason. American children are educated within a system that emphasizes self-esteem, cooperative learning, and personal expression.  Logic, exegesis, objective analysis, and the ability to frame, write, and present cogent arguments to defend a hypothesis are gone.  Most public school students graduate from high school with a third-grade reading ability, unable to read a menu let alone Shakespeare. 

Second, patience.  The modern audience, brought up in an age of quick-cuts, MTV, rapid-scrolling, and high-res visuals has no patience for complexity, to delve for meaning, to decipher difficult allegory, to grasp the subtlety of lyricism. 

Third, and perhaps the worst of all is the progressive dismissiveness of the past as racist, colonialist, misogynist, and dangerous - a world to be expunged, removed, and forgotten. There is one approved lens through which to observe events - race, gender, and ethnicity; or stated another way, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Fidelity to a racist, misogynist, colonialist past - i.e. accurate recreations or representations of the life and times of Elizabethan England or Ancient Greece - is to be racist, misogynist, etc. 

 

Just when it seemed that deconstruction and the likes of Derrida and Lacan had passed from notice and these philosophers decommissioned as arbiters of existence, American progressives took up the cudgel. Literature is only of value if it is seen through these arbitrary lenses.  Genius, talent, creativity, artistry are fictitious concepts. 

Christopher Nolan is exemplary of this neo-deconstructionism and its woke application.  His Odyssey is worth nothing in itself.  It is only the basis for a rip-roaring, swashbuckling story peopled with recognizable faces.  It represents the further dumbing down of the American mind, the downward sweep to the bottom. 

Only the familiar, the recognizable, and the quickly understood are standard literary, dramatic, or cinematographic fare.  Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are left on the shelf.  Who would ever want to, let alone be able to 'plow through' War and Peace, one of the most civilized, accomplished, complex novels ever written?  

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's masterpiece of religious inquisition, family dynamics, personal characterization, and broad Biblical exegesis all tightly woven into a story of three brothers and a dominant father is never read - too long, too involved, too difficult, modern readers say.  Is there an abridged edition?

Lawrence, Stendhal, Goethe, Ronsard, and a hundred other writers are left out of curricula.  Dickens, a master, 'approachable' storyteller is one of the few classic writers included in today's library list. The Tale of Two Cities is a marvelous love story, full of longing, loss, desperation, renewal, and eventual happiness.  Who doesn't cry at the ending?  Great Expectations is a coming of age story with pirates, love, ambition, social class, and adventure. 

Along with fidelity, authenticity has gone by the wayside in casting and production of modern films and plays.  Helen of Troy, considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world, was white with classic European features.  The black, African world did not exist for Ancient Greeks.  Its slaves were white, its vision was Aegean, Baltic and European, its standards of beauty were classic.  One has only to look at the statuary of the time when the ideal woman looked no different from the classic beauties of Hollywood, Bollywood, or Istanbul. 

The social order was elite, monarchical, and fixed.  The great epics like the Odyssey were not about struggles of inclusivity, identity, and self-esteem, but supremacy, struggles between the gods and man, and the myths that define human nature. 

Only in one Shakespearean play - Othello - is race featured; but the story is less about the struggle of the black man than about evil, duplicity, psychology, and the fragile relationships between men and women. Othello is a Moor, but only in one early scene is he taunted with racial overtones; in all the rest he is simply Venice's most powerful general. 

Cleopatra was Egyptian, a descendant of the royal Ptolemaic line, a beautiful, powerful queen; and while much is made of the 'sybaritic East' it is not with any sense of diversity of inclusion, but with portrayal of the Roman Empire and its colonies. 

There is not only merit but insistence that these plays remain authentic to the vision of their authors and to reflect what they saw, understood, and realized. 

Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind a number of decades ago (1987) and in it he wrote of the dumbing down of America, victim of liberal cant, assumption, and political idealism, and the increasing inability to think, to reason, to reflect, and to consider. 

His vision was accurate; but even he couldn't have imagine the depths to which American ignorance has fallen. It is indeed a country without a sound, intellectual and moral ethos - that of the Founding Fathers when framing the Constitution - without which any serious consideration of the past and its relevance to the present and the future is impossible. 

Fidelity and authenticity are the keys to historical analysis; and the worst historian is the one who looks at the past through the lens of the present. 

Christopher Nolan has fallen into the trap of inclusivity and in so doing has lost every ounce of cinematographic relevance. 

Ugliness - The Race To The Bottom In A Reverse Progressive Utopia

Melanie Barnum was committed to the principle of public education.  It represented the best of America - a place for all regardless of income, race, or ethnicity and the perfect example of the storied melting pot. 

Her children were sent to public schools although thanks to her husband, a successful business owner, they could have gone to private schools; and in Washington, DC there are many which have educated the best and the brightest for over a century.  

As everything in the Nation's Capital, they are divided by politics. St. Albans, modeled after the English 'public' schools Eton and Harrow, is soundly traditional, Episcopalian, and conservative.  Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school proud of its abolitionist past and early progressivism has been home to the children of liberal lawmakers and public servants for almost as long. 

Other schools, while not of the academic standing of these two institutions, nevertheless pride themselves on the same educational rigor, social discipline, and moral principle.  

Families which can afford a private education for their children, do so without reflection.  The idea of diversity as an ideal means nothing when it comes to preparing their sons and daughters for the successful life expected of them.

Some schools, like Sidwell Friends, let their abolitionist past get the better of them, and adopted an affirmative action admissions policy which within a few short years challenged the intellectual superiority of the school. Progressive parents, while committed to the principle of black reparations, became increasingly hesitant to send their children to a school which although acting on principle, necessarily lowered its academic standards; and sent them instead to the best private boarding schools - Exeter, Andover, St. Paul's, Groton, and Loomis. 

 

Other DC private schools held the line, admitted a few minority students but only on the basis of academic performance and potential. 

Melanie Barnum resented this white flight, this abandonment of moral principle and right behavior, and openly criticized those families who left proper democratic schooling for the aerie of the wealthy and the privileged. 

This obduracy, this unshakeable adherence to a questionable principle, was the hallmark of her overall thinking.  She was a lifelong progressive who never once questioned the canon and was seen at every march for abortion, every conference on affirmative action, Diversity Equity Inclusion, and climate change. 

More telling was her embrace of what the Movement called 'the fancy of beautiful privilege'.  They abhorred the train of blonde, blue-eyed young women who made their way down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, who were featured in Presidential cameos, and who became the signature of right wing conservatism. 

These women were the icons of a political philosophy which favored appearance over substance. The stereotype of the ditzy blonde was never more current than within progressive circles in which unattractiveness meant seriousness.  The ethos of diversity produced its champions - the obese, the misshapen, and the short.  The physical characteristics of the women were reminders, physical examples of Thomas Hobbes' famous statement about life being short, brutish, and ugly. 

Ugliness made a point.  Shabbiness was a sign of oppressed white poverty and thus a symbol of commitment to social change. Worse was the fashion statement that accentuated these unfortunate traits - blue hair, tattoos, nose rings, and Dollar Store clothes. 

Melanie, always a stalwart progressive who was never ashamed to act out her principles, volunteered at a local DC public school. Most of the children read below grade level, and she was recruited as resource volunteer to help them.  What she found was far worse than she expected.  Not only did these children read below grade level, they could barely pick out letters from a basic primer. 

They came to school intermittently - truancy in the DC schools was well over fifty percent - and were from dysfunctional, fatherless homes, raised by illiterate grandmothers, and had little incentive or ability to learn.

Melanie's charges not only couldn't read, they couldn't add simple numbers.  The educational algorithm being what it was, classroom exercises were aimed at improving the lot of these students while any students with ability or especially talent were forgotten, recruited into groups of 'cooperative learning' where they learned nothing and were expected to help 'the less fortunate'.

As much as she hated to admit it, the school was a morass of low-level intelligence, educational indifference, in an atmosphere of social ugliness. It was nothing like St. Albans or its sister school, Cathedral, where prominence was universal and the Greek ethos of physical beauty, athletic prowess, and intellectual achievement was standard. 

She berated herself for the comparison.  The St Albans and Cathedral students were beneficiaries of white privilege, legatees of wealth and Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and were members of an elite ruling class that perpetuated insularity and anti-democratic sentiment. 

Yet there was something alluring about these schools - boys in white shirts and ties attending high church services, showing skill and prowess on the athletic fields, all a universally attractive student body, and being prepared for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 

She shook off the vision, plugged away at little LaShonda trying to get her to recognize the difference between an 'L' and an 'I' with no success. Despite the millions spent by DC to upgrade the physical infrastructure of the school - large, modern windows, wide corridors, study spaces, etc., it was still a miserable place of desultory learning where discipline - the reining in of dangerous anti-social behavior - was the teachers' seemingly only responsibility. 

Her attendance at her adult meetings - all rallying points for strategic revolt against conservative efforts to set back progressive advances in diversity, distribution of wealth, neutering of the corporate classes, and climate sanity - only deepened her depression.  These women were morose and unpleasant.  The problems they were facing could only be met with anger, frustration, and hostility.

There was no optimism let alone brightness and certainly no happiness.  The unkemptness of the women, their deliberate lowering the fashion register to near zero, the clambering for recognition despite their profound unattractiveness left Melanie withered. 

If there are so many problems in the world, then how can a conscionable woman look at herself in the mirror, tart herself up, put on something designer and go out with a clear conscience?  No, desperation requires the look of desperation. 

The old adage states: 'Give a liberal long enough and he will become conservative' - testimony to the eventual distaste for idealism - and the evolution of Melanie Barnum was no different.  In her case it was ugliness that did it.  She could have put up with the febrility and the ponderousness, even the absurdity of many progressive claims; but she couldn't take the ugliness and the disdain for anything positive, beautiful and stunning. It was a race to the bottom, and she had had enough. 

Finally and at long last, she could look in the mirror and see a still quite beautiful face; run her hands over her breast and down her thighs and know that she had kept her figure, run her fingers through her still luxuriant hair and step out and be noticed. 

 

When Black Is White - The Closing Of The American Mind

Mary de Bennett watched the Argentina-England FIFA World Cup Final and said she and everyone she knew was against Argentina - a racist country which eliminated diversity with the landing of European settlers. 

 

Of course they conveniently forget that Portugal, Spain, England, and the Netherlands - also World Cup contenders - were international slavers and responsible for transplanting the African diaspora in the New World.  If sports allegiance is to be based on presumed racial oppression, than these countries should fall under the same shadow of opprobrium and hate.  

 

Worse even than this historical hypocrisy is moral blindness, refusing to see, acknowledges, and accept that  Africans and African origin Europeans and Americans dominate world sports.  The American NBA, WNBA, and NFL - professional basketball and football leagues - are overwhelmingly black.  Olympic events - especially the short distance events - 100, 200 hundred yard dashes and hurdles - are dominated by black athletes.   

Small countries like Jamaica can field teams that successfully challenge much larger ones.  France's FIFA World Cup team is almost all African origin players. There can be only one logical explanation - individuals of African origin are genetically predisposed to athletic success. 

How can American progressives not at least consider the possibility that these criteria which determined the very nature of the black diaspora were correct; that it is not a coincidence that black athletes dominate no matter the sport? 

Mary de Bennett was one of these deliberately myopic individuals.  She was neither dumb nor unschooled.  Yet despite the evidence as plain as the nose on her face, she rejected it and said that it was a product of schooled, inherent white racism.  Black American basketball players, oppressed by the white man and deprived of country clubs and suburban fields could only play basketball on nasty, netless courts.  It was their perseverance, and cultural context which produced them, not genetics.

And what of the American football SEC where black players excel to an unheralded degree, their talents honed and developed on the same fields as their white brothers. 

The list, the examples, and the evidence progressives say are insurmountable - there is something more than culture, environment, and circumstance involved; and progressives not only have not looked at the issue but have determined not to look at it; for to do so would be to label them as racist. 

'To assume that blacks are genetically predisposed to athletic preeminence is heinous and racist'.  End of story.  Facts, evidence, logic are left at the door. Yet why is this conclusion so rejected? One dominant characteristic does not ipso facto exclude others. There is no reason why athletic ability and intelligence cannot coexist. 

There was recently a study of Ethiopian highlanders from which most champion distance runners come.  Ethiopian children born and brought up in Ethiopia were compared with Ethiopian children borne and brought up in Europe and the results were informative - both children showed the essential lung capacity and oxygen blood carrying capacity critical to long distance running 

 

The obvious was proven - there was something up with these Horn of Africa runners; and by extension the relationship with genetic physical disposition and performance was proven.  

American swimmers - white by and large - have a particular body type, the long torso and arms needed to propel them efficiently through the water.  The African body type so essential to running - well developed, large, and strong thighs and buttocks - is of no use in the pool. 

Again Mary de Bennett refused to consider the obvious. She refused to accept the fact that polar ice was increasing not decreasing, that geophysical data showed little or no sea level rises and no unexpected increase in Atlantic hurricanes or Midwest tornadoes. 

So what is it about the liberal mind that refuses to at least consider evidence that might counter or contradict their progressive assumptions?  What makes the liberal so fearful of even looking at data coming from the poles showing increasing, not decreasing ice? Or the actual costs of electric cars, considering ethics (child labor), environment (lithium and rare earth mining, and coal-fired electricity production), toxic waste disposal costs, etc.? Or the bio-physiological absurdity of the gender spectrum and the assumption that sexuality is a choice? Or that Israel is genocidal?

Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 long before the cancel culture of today in which he warned of progressive 1984 groupthink and mind control - a viral epidemic of assumption and presumption over logic and objectivity.  He could not have been more prescient.  The American Left has campaigned on a platform of ideals - what a compassionate, diverse, loving, uncontentious world would be like - without a whit of evidence that such utopian illusions could ever become reality - and have done their best to cloture all argument against the fallacious premise. 

 

In a country founded on the principles of the Enlightenment - logic, analysis, exegesis, and conclusion - how could such an airy, fantastical program have been devised let alone promoted?

Professor Arturo Schwartz of Cornell has offered an explanation.  In an article in Science he wrote this:

Hope and optimism are keystones of the American condition.  We are a country of hopefuls. What after all is the ethos of opportunity, the conviction that one's condition however dire, need not remain so if not hope? Such belief in possibilities, even improbable ones, is at the heart of American liberalism. Progressives have conflated the hoped for results of unerring, absolute conviction with secular action; but in so doing marshalled a monumental suspension of disbelief. If we say it often enough and with conviction, it must be true

Mary de Bennett looked at the inner city slums of Washington DC and did not see a teeming, uninhibited, tribal ghetto - dysfunctional, crime-ridden, and insular - but the expression of African American identity and the emergence of soul despite white oppression. 

She ignored genetics, history, Biblical wisdom, and common sense and believed in gender choice, the gender spectrum, and the fungibility of sexuality.  She ignored the fact that the illegal immigrants who in the millions overwhelmed the host country, offered nothing except numbers for gerrymandering and saw only a stream of needy refugees, innocent people seeking asylum. 

 Energy self-sufficiency is not a blow to the environment and the planet but the geopolitical means to counter Russian and Chinese hegemony.  Capitalism creates wealth and opportunity, the wealthy do not keep their money under the mattress but invest it to create jobs, build companies, and facilitate economic progress. A muscular foreign policy and the willingness to use force is the Machiavellian lesson of history and not bald adventurism. 

 

Argentina won the World Cup semi-final and a colleague mentioned that their victory was all the more impressive because they had no African players on the squad - a disadvantage impossible to overcome.  Mary howled racism, and suggested that her colleague retract such a baldly prejudiced statement.  Or Norway, he said, the whitest country on earth and the whitest team on the pitch. Shouldn't we be rooting for the clear underdog?

Listening to such passionate ignorance is one thing, but living with it quite another, for the political intensity bled over into other areas.  Racial prejudice, inequality, and white supremacy were at the heart of all evils, and she became a vigilante to out the worst cases of false assumption.  She saw injustice everywhere - a bad marriage was the result of male patriarchy and male oppression.  

The slow integration of Latinos into the American mainstream was the result of white supremacy and capitalist manipulation.  Conservative focus on individual responsibility was nothing more than moral arrogance and hermetic thinking. Philandering was a result of the persistence of the male troglodyte mentality - an unreconstructed remnant of the Paleolithic.  

She was  God awful, a harridan, a compulsive, judgmental, impossible woman; and her husband, tired of her lecturing harangues and increasingly febrile and nonsensical conclusions spent more and more time away from home until finally he sued for divorce.

Mary was shellshocked, unbelieving, and distraught. She had only been telling the truth, pointing out error, opening eyes and ears to the world's problems; but her mind was as closed to the realities of marriage, co-existence, and compatibility as it was to climate change, racial dysfunction, and geopolitics. 

A closed mind is a mind closed to every distinction, to every shade, every nuance.  So addled by political hysteria, who could expect her to be thoughtful, rational, and reasonable regarding her personal life?

The unashamed, unapologetic conservativism of Donald Trump has helped to right the balance.  He from the bully pulpit of the presidency has called out the presumptions and idealistic assumptions of the Left.  Black is black and white is white he said, and the nation began to take down their rainbow lawn signs, speak clearly and distinctly about what they saw, and finally rejected the cant and manufactured premises of the Left.