Log in
Welcome to the desert of the real!
If you desire the comfort of neat conclusions, you are lost in this space. Here, we indulge in the unsettling, the excessive, the paradoxes that define our existence.
So, if you have the means and value writing that both enriches and disturbs, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
When, a couple of decades ago, Simon Rattle performed Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder in Berlin, he was asked how he could bring together Gurrelieder (whose performance demands a gigantic orchestra with an additional 400 chorus members) with Schoenberg’s well-known acerbic remark that in civilized Europe everything one needs to render the desired effect in a music performance is six, maximum seven players—we need orchestras only for the primitive Americans… Rattle provided a precise reply: Gurrelieder is simply a piece of chamber music that needs 600 players to be properly performed… I think this paradox renders perfectly the greatness of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.
My first reaction to Odyssey was a big surprise: after reading numerous reviews enthralled by gigantic spectacular scenes and the raw authenticity of fighting, the movie itself appeared to me almost the opposite of these descriptions—a rather modest, almost chamber drama which occasionally reminded me of B productions. We never see the beach in front of Troy with thousands of Greek soldiers and hundreds of boats in the water behind them; there is no mass battle with hundreds of soldiers fighting. The Greeks on the beach are mostly a small group of a couple dozen individuals lost in bad weather on the desolate beach sand. Troy itself is also not shown as a mega-city but more as a group of buildings with narrow, twisted streets between them. Plus, Nolan avoided directly showing excessive cruelty—just recall the passage of Odysseus’ ship between Scylla and Charybdis. Charybdis is not a gigantic whirlpool (easy to render with special effects) but a very modest circle of water posing no terrifying threat… These remarks are not meant as criticism: they point out what makes the film great.
Commentators noted long ago that, while the Iliad focuses on male exploits and struggles with women reduced to background tokens, the Odyssey also brings forward women’s inner lives. The Iliad begins with the rage of Achilles: he is furious because Agamemnon took the slave Briseis from him—however, Achilles is not hurt because of any emotional attachment to Briseis; what matters is simply that his pride was hurt. The Odyssey changes the perspective entirely, and Nolan takes an even more crucial and ingenious step further: the well-known beautiful stars who play women (Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron…) are not made beautiful—the way they are shot, sometimes almost embarrassingly, displays their age fully. They are mostly desexualized (although Calypso kept Odysseus as her lover for years, there is no erotic tension in their relationship). This desexualization reaches its climax in the figure of Circe, superbly played by Samantha Morton. In the poem, Circe is a seductress: she turns men who reject her advances into pigs and keeps Odysseus as her lover for a year, while in the movie she is simply disgusted by male gluttony and turns them into pigs when they cannot stop eating. It is the highest male figure, Agamemnon, who is not really personalized: we mostly don’t see his face, which is hidden behind a gigantic helmet, and the same holds for the Trojan soldiers—they are anonymous and depersonalized, so that although the movie depicts Greek crimes and cheating, it does not do so by opposing them to more honest and sympathetic Trojans.
“That was Stephen Hicks’s warning to students at Galt’s Gulch 2026, our annual student conference held this summer in San Diego. A Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society, Hicks has spent decades studying how political language gets weaponized—most notably in his book Nietzsche and the Nazis. At the conference, he walked students through the actual […]
I recently talked about the need for a “Project 2027”—an agenda for a new Democratic majority to reclaim the power of Congress against a president who has systematically attempted to concentrate all power in himself.
I just spelled out that agenda in more detail in a new article at Liberal Currents.
This has to be a realistic agenda, so I set one big requirement:
That agenda should be based on what we can do with a simple majority—and with Trump still in the White House—which is the most likely outcome of the coming election. What can we do, with just the power of a congressional majority, to rein in Trump and reform the system?
And it turns out we can do a lot. Read the whole thing for more details, but the main headings are:
Declare a national emergency of national emergencies.
We should pass a law immediately suspending all emergency executive powers, requiring the president to submit such powers for review by Congress, one at a time, if he wants any of them reinstated by ordinary law.
Take away executive discretion.
Congress seems to only fitfully remember that it can just tell the executive what to do.
The one that is most relevant to my recent comments on Senator Warner:
Rediscover the power and purpose of impeachment.
[A]bove all, it brings public attention to this administration’s abuses of power—and it shows that Congress is actually serious about those abuses. The public won’t believe that what Trump is doing is unprecedented or an emergency or an attack on the foundations of the American system if we don’t act like it is. Impeachment is our way of saying that we really mean it, that these actions are beyond the bounds of legitimate power.
And finally:
Use the power of the purse.
The power of the purse is the big stick the Constitution gave us to keep the president in line. We don’t need to settle just for symbolic victories. We should make it clear that we can make the gears of the executive grind to a halt until the president makes real concessions. This is the leverage we can use to get everything else on this agenda.
But this one comes with a warning:
This will be the toughest piece of advice to convince the timid Democratic leadership to implement. But to assume ahead of time that Congress using the power of the purse won’t work and we shouldn’t even try would mean that we are preemptively abandoning the most fundamental and effective weapon Congress has. Democratic leadership needs to show that they are willing to use all the tools they have.
Using all the tools we have is the basic thread behind this agenda. Read the whole thing.
I’ve been saying that this is why I’m running. We need someone in Congress who has not just the desire but also the determination and the plan to restore the power of Congress and rein in an out-of-control president. This is the plan.
If you agree, vote for me in the Democratic primary on August 4—early voting is already open.
And support my campaign so we can bring this fight to the US Congress!
Save the credit card processing fees and mail a check to Tracinski for Congress, PO Box 6997, Charlottesville, VA 22906.
Donors must be US citizens and spending their own money. Campaign finance laws limit donations to $3500 per person per election.
Next Page of Stories