A New Iliad: The Fixation of Dubya or The Wrath of the American People?

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/17/1940/

A New Iliad: The Fixation of Dubya or The Wrath of the American People?
by Caroline Arnold

snip//

I confess I’m running out of steam. The sheer quantity of information needed to understand what is going on in the world has become unmanageably large; the amount of noise in the system drowns out all sense. Even with good google-skills and a fast computer I can’t keep up with issues like corporate crime, drug smuggling, health care, global economics and a myriad of other things that matter. Among other things, I suspect it is not a good idea to tell pension funds what they can’t invest in, but how do I know?

Worse: it’s getting too hard to offer hope to people. The illusions we have created out of sound bites and formulaic phrases are taking us all to hell. The Middle East is aflame with civil wars, the U.S. President is hated world-wide, global warming and proliferating nuclear weapons threaten all of us.

We the people aren’t in control of our own government any more - nor of our our lives. We’re trying to stop the use of torture and illegal detentions, to end a cruel war, or turn back the march of global warming, and it’s not working.

We’re mostly contributing to the construction of an epic we might as well call Oiliad (”I sing the Fixation of Dubya, that fatal fixation which, in fulfillment of the will of God, brought so much suffering and sent the souls of many noble ones to Hell ….”)

We need an epic about “The Wrath of the American People” against the abuses of the Bush administration. Regrettably, six years of protests, speeches, op-ed essays, online blogs, and MoveOn.org haven’t accomplished much.

And we need an epic that glorifies the worth and dignity of every human being and ends the use of deadly weapons, nuclear bombs, torture, and war.

[ananda]

1. Oiliad

I love it!

Only.. there's no good ending.. no heroes.

[pscot]

2. Well, the Illiad didn't end well either

Heroes are a bloody-minded lot. Troy was sacked. Odesseus was 10 years getting home and had to fight his way in the door. And Agammenon's wife murdered him in his bath so she could put her boy-toy on the throne.

[ixion]

3. one comment about her comment on spelling

I think what she is seeing in the misspelled catch-phrases is the result of poor education, not an intent to change meaning, at least on a conscious level.

I do agree with her basic thesis though: that oral tradition is seeping back into written language. While I don't think that's an inherently bad thing, I do think it opens the possibility for dumbing down the language, which we are seeing as well. That concerns me more than the misspelled phrases.