The Ableism of Kings, the Fury of Trump

Being reviewed: Advertisement I usually flinch from swashbuckling claims, but let me make this one at least: No hero from ancient myth feels as human as Odysseus. No one as relatable in their indomitable will to survive. Is it any wonder, then, that the Odyssey is having a moment, as humans seem barely to be surviving at all? Last year, Homer’s epic was newly translated by Daniel Mendelsohn, and, this week, Christopher Nolan’s anticipated film adaptation will be released. As a scholar of epic and a fan of Nolan’s last hit, Oppenheimer, I’m bracing for his take. If the trailers are borne out, it leans into Odysseus’s brains and brawn, his penchant for hairbreadth escapes. There’s a reason for this—Homer’s hero defies all odds to get home after ten years. But there’s also a risk. Shoot too long from an everyman angle and you ignore Odysseus’s complexities, his surprising relevance to politics today. To start, we should be clear about Odysseus’s greatest asset: his knack for lying, cheating, and traducing with tales. These are enduring, even modern, habits—sure—but also the antics of one accustomed to rule, a leader hellbent on retaining control. Making sense of the Odyssey’s lasting appeal requires facing up to its hero’s violence, as well as his rakish charm. This is especially important now because Odysseus’s spirit of seduction endures not only in verse, and its reception on the big screen, but in the personae of our leaders. (For the past few months, some of them have been smashing “epic” between “operation” and “fury” to justify a conflict as bleary as the Greek one in Troy.) The result is that the narrative of Homer’s andra (“man”) clarifies more than some universal human experience: It shines a light on the stratagems, and survivalism, of the strongmen inflecting our particular experiences today. To make this second big claim more manageable, let’s focus on one group called out by these demagogues in ways as frequent as they are overlooked: disabled folks (like me). I have two examples, nearly three millennia apart—the first, an early insight into Odysseus; the second, a prophecy of our political woes. Together, they’ll lead us back to reappreciating the Odyssey. Take one. The Iliad, book 2. Year ten of the languorous Trojan War. Aristos are getting richer from loot while everyone else is more miserable by the day. One of these commoners finally steps up. His name is Thersites, “the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion,” as Richmond Lattimore puts it in his iconic, earlier counterpart to Mendelsohn’s Odyssey. He walked “bandy-legged and went lame of one foot,” “shoulders / stooped and drawn together over his chest,” his skull arcing “up to a point.” He has a habit of speaking out. Deviance of mind and deviation of body symbolically reinforce one another. Our suspicion is primed. But his counsel makes sense. To the Greek chieftain Agamemnon, he states the obvious: “Your shelters are filled with bronze.” To his comrades, his recourse is simple: “Let us go back home in our ships, and leave this man here / by himself in Troy to mull his prizes of honor.” The men seem on board. So Odysseus must intervene. “Your words are / ill-considered,” he booms, before clarifying what the malcontent’s body means: “There is no worse man than” Thersites, who advocates “nothing but scandal.” For good measure, Odysseus “dashed [his] scepter” against the “back and / shoulders” of Thersites so that he’s “doubled over, and a round tear dropped from him, / and a bloody welt stood up between his shoulders.” The renegade retreats from the assembly, and the story, for good. The war—and the Iliad itself—can go on. Take two. America. The presidential campaign trail in 2015. Donald Trump impersonates the disabled reporter Serge F. Kovaleski, spasming his arms and cramping his mouth into an “o.” This gratuitous performance echoed remarks Trump made several months earlier, at the start of a feud with his old-guard Republican critic John McCain. The late US senator’s public persona had long depended on his five years in a POW camp during the Vietnam War; his restricted shoulder function reminded us of all he’d endured while there. In an interview with Frank Lutz, Trump repackaged the entire ordeal into a bull’s-eye. He called his gadfly a “dummy” and insisted McCain was a “war hero” only for being caught. The point? “I like people that weren’t captured. I hate to tell you.” One suspects that, in fact, he relished the chance. Unsurprisingly, Trump doubled down after McCain’s death. He insisted, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral”; questioned flying flags at half-mast (“What the fuck are we doing that for?”); and bemoaned that the Affordable Care Act would have been repealed but the turncoat “John McCain, for some reason, couldn’t get his arm up.” Insofar as the ribald double entendre’s a joke, the punch-line is that the reason was clear. In both cases, powerful men disable their foes: They fixate on aspects of others’ bodies, magnify these features to the point of misprision, and hold them up for collective rebuke. I’ve put a name to what’s happening here to explain the strategy’s larger implications, for followers of Homer and current events, alike. It’s easy to call Donald Trump a narcissist or bully, but umbrella terms can occlude how exactly he props himself up and hamper us from resisting his wiles. Attending to the dynamics of disability in epic, too, can elucidate our most authoritative genre, bring us closer to its greatest poems—like the Odyssey—and catch out the limits of who can claim heroism even now. It’s a category the president himself frequently invokes, even while burnishing his reputation as a man of hoi polloi. Odysseus might be proud. The two men are more alike than one would think: forced from power, they experience self-styled trials, worry over female fealty (despite their wanderlust), and inveterately spin yarns. Both return hellbent on avenging their wrongs and reclaiming the power they lost. Their truculence has long been observed, but their insidious disablements more easily evade our stare. To get a handle on them, let’s turn back to the Odyssey: Its hero’s notorious encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus. It comes from a central, four-book section called the Apologoi, which consists of stories about Odysseus’s travels, designed to win points with people whose support he needs to return home. This frame device contains the havoc Odysseus has wrought. Astutely, Mendelsohn brings the ironies of this section to the fore in his introduction and rendering of the poem’s texture, continuing the work he began in his fantastic memoir, An Odyssey. Here, that texture unfurls in an ample line of capacious detail that marks the biggest departure from Emily Wilson’s blockbuster 2017 translation and its sinewy pace, so perfect for performance, as I’ve witnessed first-hand. (Really, we need both halves of this Homeric coin.) As Odysseus describes how they wander into the cyclops’s cave to ransack his cheeses and goods, the king’s defensiveness already protrudes. It’s his men’s humanness, he explains, that licenses this offense against one who “had nothing to do / With other people, but kept to himself, his head filled with lawless thoughts.” Fair enough, perhaps, but notice the self-interested rhetoric. That adversative but parses dependent clauses from one another, literally and rhythmically hiving Polyphemus off. How, then, can Odysseus project himself into the head of something so lawlessly other? Maybe the king has a sense for this tension, too, because he pivots from the creature’s interior life to his “amazing,” marvelously menacing, exterior: “he didn’t look like / A man who eats bread, but rather a craggy, tree-covered peak.” This rhetorical blow triply dehumanizes Polyphemus, as a monster, animal, and plant. While his soldiers beg to flee, Odysseus yearns only “to lay eyes on” Polyphemus and “see if he’d give me guest-gifts.” When the cyclops returns and traps them, however, the travesty of hospitality he offers is for Odysseus to watch all his men be eaten before the king’s engorged, at last. Meanwhile, Odysseus schemes. When Polyphemus asks his name, Odysseus famously answers “No-one.” A complicated pun Mendelsohn expertly unpacks, it’s accepted by the “dolt”; here, too, deficits of mind and body interlace. The cyclops’s inebriation likewise gives them an opening: The few men left standing “twirled” the burning tip of Polyphemus’s staff—which they’ve already whittled to a point—in the cyclops’s eye, “as the blood poured out.” The result is conveyed with searing poignance: Polyphemus’s “eyelids and his brows were blistered all around by the blast / As the eyeball burned, its roots crackling in the fire.” The stertorous alliteration of explosive b sounds, the precisely violent collision of anthropomorphic and botanical metaphors, and the cinematic effect of this close-angle view—all of this and more make Mendelsohn’s rendering a virtuoso performance. Polyphemus yelps for help, but he’s dismissed after crying, “No-One is killing me.” At all of this, Odysseus’s heart “burst out laughing” before planning the rest of their, eventually successful, escape. Of course, in this telling, the king’s genius sparkles, but why share a story surfeited with unforced errors? One answer: the PR-boon of disablement outweighs the blame that might otherwise descend. As with Thersites, discursive and physical disabling join into a positive feedback loop: words other particular features into a difference rendered all the more aberrant with deed. This time, not just a strike but a defensive measure with deep metaphorical implications. The blinding of Polyphemus manifests Odysseus’s signal trait, careful insight, by the negative example of a gruesomely battered eye. For his part, however, Polyphemus has broached uneasy truths about the limits of his foe’s physique, anxieties perhaps the king has long endured. The cyclops knows almost immediately, for one thing, that the Ithacans can’t move the boulder in front of his cave; they lack his superior strength, which Odysseus denounces as excessively inhuman. It’s unsurprising, then, that as they sail away, Polyphemus plangently recalls a prophecy that had predicted this moment of ruin. It hadn’t come to him before because the Ithacan is so gosh-darn “puny.” This may be sour grapes, but it isn’t an outlying position. The epic tradition brims with rumors that the Ithacan king is only a clever poseur, far from the mark of Ajax or Achilles, and one who resorts to “poison arrows” (murmured in the Odyssey itself). Of such things the Phaeacians might well have heard. Odysseus can’t smother all the slanderous flames, but he can tell of snuffing at least one of them out. It works. They send him off in style. It’s no hot take to say that Donald Trump similarly uses rhetoric to win support—that he stokes, and harnesses, Americans’ anger with an undeniable charisma of his own. But Odysseus’s put-down of Polyphemus offers a framework for grasping how the president draws intellectual and physical deficiency into a carefully crafted web: Rescript a physical attribute—even once lauded before—into an index of mockable weakness in somatic and moral terms. So, McCain’s disabled shoulder disqualified him from the MAGA ranks and recalled his impotence at the hands of America’s foes. The result was that Trump—back then, the joke of a dark horse candidate who had been given five draft deferments for Vietnam and was eventually called “Cadet Bone Spurs” by the paraplegic veteran Senator Tammy Duckworth—could emerge stronger, more viable and vital, still. Trump has run his disabling playbook so frequently since maligning McCain—against Hispanic, Black, female, fat, gay, trans, “low-IQ” or generally “loser” bodyminds—it’s impossible to keep track. Everything from denouncing “little” Marco Rubio to warning of the “blood coming out of” Megyn Kelly’s “wherever.” The bigger picture is that the body is useful, here, as a common, human denominator, something we all know intimately, to which we can look at a moment’s notice for reference. It’s thus the easiest thing to enlist in constructing self-interested divides. We can put all of this in more personal, if speculative, terms. Embodied beauty—or handsomeness—seems the thing that Trump wants most desperately to claim for himself, as arbiter and exemplar, alike. To wit, he fixates on his tan and hair and 10s—who once was one, and who is now—framing beauty in highly comparative terms: a matter of bodily superiority in a zero-sum game. It therefore becomes the thing of which he most doggedly deprives his foes. Even so, Trump’s obsession with McCain, during the senator’s lifetime and after his death, suggests that this onetime POW posed a more particular problem, not unlike Thersites in Troy. He was two things threatening to a strongman: disabled and a veteran. Consider, McCain is not the only disabled veteran Trump’s demeaned: In 2018, among talk of a military parade—which he finally made happen, last year, on his birthday—the president spoke of excluding amputees for the discomfort they’d bring. (The subject came up, apparently, because the French procession that inspired Trump included some such men.) “No one wants to see that,” he griped. Indeed, they were absent last June (which is maybe just as well). Since then, cuts at the VA have proved a cornerstone of the president’s ostensible war against government waste, even as he’s embroiled the country in another Middle Eastern conflict. Both wars have already had deadly and disabling effects. Like Odysseus, the consequences of the president’s violence rebound less on himself than on those in his command. Still, the bigger question remains: Why do disabled veterans pose such a threat? The most banal reason is steak-and-potatoes ableism: Insofar as disability stereotypically signifies weakness, neither Trump nor Odysseus wants anything to do with it. More haunting, it’s a reminder of how fragile all bodies are. The war-wounded especially drive this point home: They’re some of society’s fittest brought, as Trump would have it, dramatically low. No wonder, then, that Odysseus exiles Thersites, whose counsel against heroism reinforces the message of his physique. In a world where fighting is rational only because it allows one to cheat inevitable death through a glorious demise that’s immortalized in song, he reminds everyone of the invidious middle ground of deformity and pain that their leaders would rather suppress. Another reason relates to those values of strongmen that are helpfully captured in parades, a formation that—incidentally—epics often depict. Several are included in the work of Homer’s greatest ancient successor, Virgil. His Aeneid is a saga of its namesake’s flight from Troy to found what would become Rome. As one scholar has explained, “the procession that keeps its shape through both time and space resembles [epic’s] own regular verse schemes—meter, rhyme, stanza—that similarly spatialize time and join the poem’s beginning in interconnected sequence to its end.”1 This formal structure has a political charge. It conveys the inevitable continuity of the poem’s imperial winners, their destiny always to come out on top, no matter the troubles or sacrifices incurred along the way. One of the tough decisions Aeneas and his men must make, for instance, is leaving the women, aged, exhausted, and “invalid” soldiers behind. Here, literal and figurative meanings reinforce one another. Aeneas excises those bodies who can’t keep up and, thus, cut against the party line. Their slowness might invite us to inspect the advance of those in charge—as Thersites does in Troy—or question whether the parade was worth what it cost. These risks of executive action are what our disabled veterans likewise represent, mostly despite themselves. They too, then, must be excised from Trump’s parade, as well as his movement. For MAGA tries, as its name implies, to dovetail a glorious American past into an unabashedly revitalized present, which in turn will extend into a future of indefinite length. It’s an “interconnected sequence” that can be used to justify even untenable policies. But only if toadies keep marching in time. Conversely, those who cannot march to the metronome threaten not merely to rail or withhold their service, like Thersites and, even, Achilles himself. Their real threat lies in sacrificing everything to those logics of heroism their leaders demand. It lies in representing—as amputee veterans seem to do—the virtue most inaccessible to the president himself, as reported time and again: self-sacrifice. With his will to the lone heroism of Odysseus—who returns sans men—Trump cannot allow these disabled folks to pull focus away; he thus can’t abide them at all. Where does that leave us? Going back to Polyphemus. As Odysseus sails away, he crows his name, at last. It gives the cyclops an opening: to curse his foe—and appeal to Poseidon for redress. Odysseus’s resulting punishments are the travails around which his epic revolves. This should remind us that there’s power, yet, in being disabled—in speaking our complexities, flaunting our stride, limping in public, rolling where we’re least expected to go, demanding our civil rights even as the Trump Administration tries peeling them away. No one wants to see that: Well, then, we must make ourselves seen. Standing and cursing—protesting, organizing, lagging in toe—can set an entire saga in motion. At the same time, however, cursing isn’t enough. The vaunting of Polyphemus and Odysseus, for instance, never creates; it only destroys. This is a shame because—against all odds—they subtly have much in common, as far as their proximity to monstrosity is concerned. Repeatedly, in fact, Odysseus comes close to being marred in the Odyssey. The famous scar on his leg, say, recalls an old injury that could just as easily have turned to gangrene. His many travails likewise transform his appearance, often in bestial ways that are described—lushly, by Mendelsohn—in terms redolent of Polyphemus himself. Of course, Odysseus’s greatest talent is for orchestrating his transformation back to the heroic baseline of Greek, male ability. But his movement between these conditions implies they’re not so diametrically opposed. The lesson we might learn from this is not to reify the distance of monster and man, the chasm between aberrant others and normal us. This means not dubbing Trump deranged or deriding his size, mocking his venous insufficiency or lambasting his political allies as an “ugly fuck” or “Governor Hot Wheels.” Rather, we should use the language of disability for bridging apparently vast divides—for acknowledging shared experiences of attenuation that are part and parcel of being human in the world. This kind of acknowledgment can undercut some of the key ways Trump’s politics work: producing diametric opposites, carefully categorizing, balkanizing by force and hate. These divisions, we’ve seen, trace their authority back to the body’s material fact, though they have more to do with the discourses that describe it. Even as the body’s unfenceable precarity necessitates such lines be carefully drawn, however, it gives us the tools to efface these borders altogether. Most important of these is a plane on which to meet: a set of thoughts, words, experiences, feelings, worries, fears—and so on—in common. That last one accounts for why so many of the most pressing cultural issues today involve the stuff of the flesh—and our conflicting interpretations of it. Fears are rooted in form. But experiences, feelings, words, even worries: These other affordances give me hope. Relating to Donald Trump on the axis of messy embodiment might be impossible, I’ll grant. But such connection is less utopian in the context of other relationships—with neighbors, family members, or friends, especially those with whom you’ve grown apart. Maybe this distance was for good reason. But maybe, too, it’s time to reconnect—building trust, in part, by turning to the fleshy core of relation and disagreement, in exactly the way Polyphemus and Odysseus never can. No wonder: stealing someone’s cheese, or eating one’s companions—rebellowing ideological assumptions, whatever your side—does not a productive interchange make. There’s another reason for epistemological humility, though. The fact that Odysseus has entranced readers for more than two millennia should remind us that most of us share an affection for raconteur populists—and that such leaders can come in many shapes and sizes, to boot. Where does that leave us, more specifically, on disabled veterans? I’m not one myself, though my father and grandfather both served. The latter was also chief of physical therapy at the Dayton VA. His stories taught me that it’s easier to send soldiers away than support them coming home—incidentally, one of the Odyssey’s greatest themes. What my papou never prepared me for, however, was getting mistaken for one of these veterans myself. Nor was this issue front-of-mind while I was relearning to walk after a spinal cord injury in 2013. I do so now with a cane and brace, a thirty-something with the accoutrements of an octogenarian. It’s true: I cause confusion. Because if we’ve learned anything from epic—or Trump—it’s that disabled people must be made to mean in an able-bodied world. What has happened, folks wonder, to cause such a mismatch in signs? The conclusion some come up with: He must be a disabled vet. Unhelpful, too, is my credit card from USAA, the insurance company for veteran families. Every few months, then, I’m offered a beverage or side by some vendor who’s kindly breached the gates of my humility: “Thank you for your service,” they conspiratorially hum. Almost as often, someone behind me in line, down the street, across the aisle—and so on—makes a point of showing their appreciation, too. This is apropos of zilch, mind you, since the patriotic T-shirts they’re sometimes donning aren’t in my wardrobe at all. (My patriotism tends to inhere more in verbal structures, the Federalist Papers, say, or the Great American Songbook.) Admittedly, I relish in letting these good-natured people down—in their garbled apologies and angsty efforts to make no eye contact at all, though only moments ago they were sending me off with coffee, Coke Zero, and in one case, an orange chicken combo from Panda Express. A charitable reading of this largesse—sometimes, even references to heroism itself—might be that it counters the cruelty of Trump and Odysseus, their resentment and fury. Mostly, I take a different view—that it’s the flip-side of the same dehumanizing coin. Not because I want to speak for veterans, but because the disappointment that crawls across the faces of my interlocutors, like ants on a crumb of cookie, suggests that the goal is less to accept or honor disability than to contain it (over there), make it make sense, insist it cannot be a daily presence for normal folks, and thus never a possible future for them. As a result, there’s little appetite for including disability on a broader scale—only for showing largesse to one person or maybe a small group. Of course, this doesn’t work: Disability is less parsable than we’d hope, and recognition, clearly, a fickle thing (another of Homer’s favorite themes). We cannot, then, allow disability to be hived off—in the collective imagination or the cyclops’s cave. There are many ways to reverse the tides of exclusion, political and interpersonal, alike. But in the spirit of Nolan’s adaptation, we can start by making Thersites and Polyphemus as much as Odysseus a continued part of the Homeric stories we tell. For the best critics of the epic tradition come from within the tradition itself. Even as the genre gives us a window into the rage of battle, and all that justifying it entails, its ambiguities and ambivalences give us a roadmap for questioning the logics of authoritarianism, too. It’s in this double-vision that the true glory of epic resides—the tremendous success of Mendelsohn’s translation. Here’s hoping Nolan’s film looks out with a similarly Janus-faced stare. - David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 31. ↩