Educated Americans believe, for the most part, that revenge–even when it can be excused or mitigated–is always wrong. In legal terms, right—by which I mean the principle of rightness in good behavior—almost always involves the assertion and protection of rights, which are something like the 10 Commandments or Plato’s Ideas or the Natural Law of the Stoics:
Then what does an American citizen do when he discovers that his civil rights are not protected by governments who prefer to protect the universal human rights of illegal alines and criminals? Consider the situation in which the hero of a country song (Hank Williams, Jr.’s, “I Got Rights”) finds himself.
Since a decisive duel is about to be arranged, Iris–the messenger/rainbow of the gods–flies to Troy to prepare Helen. The face that launched a thousand ships is engaged in the entirely domestic task of weaving, but the design is of the Trojans and Greeks fightin
Barack Obama has managed to sneak back into the news. The occasion was an interview with Christiane Amampour in which he compared the modest media response to the death of 700 illegal immigrants, whose boat sank before they could enter Greece, with the hysteria over the fate of 7 rich tourists who tried to visit the Titanic.
But if I am correct in saying we are beginning afresh, would that not imply that the Trojans must be guilty, a second time, of a criminal act that defies the laws of gods and men? Exactly.
Many an ambitious ruler, seeking to extend his power, has stubbed his big toe on the brute facts of family and kinship, and many an ideological revolution that failed to reckon with the bind forces of greed and competition has been brought down by the primitive passions and instincts they had hoped to eliminate or at least suppress.
Now, “brother” and “friend” are or at least used to be rather exclusive terms. They did not refer to just anyone, much less everyone.
This is the text of a talk presented at a conference, in Waterford, Wisconsin, attended by mostly Lutheran pastors plus a sprinkling of heretics and one papist, arranged by my friend Pastor David Ramirez.
David Hume’s essay on The Original Contract has been added. Passages Added from Plato and Aristotle. In addition to the assigned readings, the following passages and fragments will be referred to. More will be added in the coming days. P
