Our chaotic political predicament has many wondering how we got here. As a glass-half-full guy, I readily admit our founders made mistakes, but I also stress the courage and wisdom it took for them to rebel against the British monarchy. They designed a system of representative government that has held up well through painful times, including a horrible Civil War spawned by our attachment to slavery.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the courage and wisdom in Homer’s Odyssey, which scholars believe was composed more than 2,500 years before our Constitution. An excerpt from Daniel Mendelsohn’s book An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic that appeared in The New Yorker in the spring of 2017 started me on this train of thought. The excerpt was so good I bought the book, and it sent me back to The Odyssey, as well as to another book, Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture.
Both Mendelsohn and Berry find wisdom in The Odyssey. Mendelsohn comes to understand his difficult relationship with his father, who at 80 joined a class Mendelsohn taught on The Odyssey at Bard College and then traveled with him on a 10-day tour of the sites Odysseus visited on his 10-year return from Troy to Ithaca. In The Unsettling of America, published in 1977, Berry returns to The Odyssey as a way of thinking about our “farm problem,” which by 1977 had led 25 million people to leave their farms since 1940, a trend some of our policymakers considered a sign of progress.
The “farm problem” goes a long way toward explaining how we got here — that is, how we elected a man to our presidency who appears to have no comprehension of the strengths in our representative government, no comprehension of how our country’s environmental policies might doom the generations that follow us, no appreciation for why a free press is crucial to the survival of a democracy, and no understanding of how our policies often contribute to the terrible circumstances that send refugees from other countries to seek asylum here.
When you look at the places in our country where industrial agriculture has swallowed family farms and destroyed the economies of small towns, you are likely to be gazing at the homes of some of Trump’s most committed “base.” These are voters who have, so far, stood by him in spite of his obvious shortcomings. He convinced them he could solve the problems that fuel the fires of their rage and fear. And he stokes those emotions with every rally and tweet.
This base is likely to turn against Republican officeholders who fail to support the president. But where small farms and towns have survived, as in Vermont, these voters often lack much political clout.
When Odysseus returns to his home after 20 years, Wendell Berry reminds us, the poem “moves from the battlefield of Troy to the terraced fields of Ithaka, which through all the years and great deeds of Odysseus’ absence, the peasants have not ceased to farm.” It was the wily Odysseus who proposed the Trojan horse that led to the defeat of Troy, but The Odyssey sets “the values of domesticity and farming,” Berry says, against the warrior values of The Iliad.
There are similarities between the Mediterranean world of Odysseus and the America of Donald Trump, a man who has proved to be our own Trojan horse.
Fostering racism, misogyny, fear, rage and division, he attacks our country’s historic strengths, pretending to “make American great again” while actually seeking to install a self-centered monarchy.
Odysseus’ violent return to his home and to Penelope, killing his wife’s suitors and ordering the execution of servant women seduced by them, reveals his warrior ferocity.
But there is a much gentler kind of courage in his return to the farming that seemed to keep his father, Laertes, sane during his son’s long absence: “Odysseus found his father in solitude / spading the earth around a young fruit tree.”
This is courage joined with wisdom and kindness. It is what we need to restore the parts of our country now embracing the rage, fear and prejudice that fuel dysfunction in our politics. And this kind of courage and wisdom will lead us to reach out to countries that began to experience crises like ours well before Trump and his enablers came to power.
Admittedly, there is irony in proposing this ancient epic as a possible guide for our confusing time. The Odyssey tells of a male-centered world, and I recommend it at a moment in our history when we might be learning what a difference it can make to include more fully empowered women in our government.
But if enough of us glimpse the catastrophic consequences of placing a misogynist Trojan horse in the White House, we might see our way beyond this dark, divided landscape to find we’re actually living on common ground.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.