“What do you think of the campus riots?”
A friend and I were doing the “solving the world’s problems” thing in the Barker House parking lot. Fixing the world is a subject that I never tire of, but then again, it is tiring all the same.
I didn’t hesitate: “If they cross the line into violence, then arrest and expel.” I’m all for freedom of speech, especially in regard to political opinions, philosophy and religion. But there’s a clear moral boundary between speech and behavior. The constitutionally protected freedom of speech does not extend to destruction, injury, and urging a mob to do so.
Besides, just as the student protests of 1968 didn’t do a thing about stopping the Vietnam War but helped usher in the presidency of Richard Nixon instead, so these rioters will only hasten the opposite of what they putatively riot for: the acceleration of a reactionary law-and-order sentiment. The same goes for the J6 crew.
My friend asked me another juicy one. “What about what’s going in Israel?”
Again, I followed the same decision tree: “Hamas has to be neutralized. And Benjamin Netanyahu is a crook who needs thrown in jail.”
On Oct. 7, Hamas waged horrendous violence on Israel. On the other hand, over 37,000 Gazans — mostly women and children — have perished in the ensuing campaign. Hamas has rejected one peace plan after another advanced by neighboring Arab states (some with Israel’s agreement). Bebe Netanyahu permitted illegal settlements of the West Bank and encouraged Qatari funding of Hamas in Gaza. Netanyahu stays in power, and needs this war, mainly to stay out of chokey. Both he and Hamas have crossed the violent line, many times over.
My friend said I need to choose one side or another. No, I’d rather not. “Picking sides” is a big part of “our problem world,” as Langston Hughes would say. I’m on Israel’s side. And I’m on Gaza’s side. I’m against Hamas and Netanyahu. I fiercely oppose anti-Semitism and anti-Palestinianism. I can do two things at once.
Then he waxed philosophical. “They have a saying over there: if you kill my father and my grandfather, I’m your enemy forever. It’ll never end.”
In a sense, my interlocutor was righter than rain, more right than what he knew. That begetting of violence by violence, that fierce and furious cycle of revenge, is not confined to the Middle East. It is, rather, the history of the world.
Take, for example, the mythical House of Atreus. Or maybe you’d rather not take it. This royal family of Greek mythology was infamous for its multi-generational genealogy of curse and revenge. It started with Tantalus, king of Lydia, who decided to test the gods’ intelligence by serving them pieces of his son for dinner (yes, you read that right). The gods were incensed and condemned him to the lowest spot of Tartarus where he was stuck in a puddle close to a fruit tree. Whenever he was hungry, he’d reach for an apple, but it would swing just out of his reach.
When he’d stoop down for a drink, the water would recede just far enough away. Hence the verb “tantalize.”
The whole family line extended the curse. The grandchildren of Tantalus, two brothers — Atreus and Thyestes — engaged in a bloody feud that involved beheading, backstabbing (literally), rape and incest. In turn, Atreus fathered two sons, the equally infamous Agamemnon and Menelaus.
You’ll recall that the latter married Helen, the misbegotten daughter of Zeus and Leda. It was Helen who had “the face that launched a thousand ships” and ignited the horrendous Trojan War.
Agamemnon, on his way to Troy, sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to ensure victory on the battlefield. Of course, the girl’s mother, Clytemnestra, was not pleased.
When Agamemnon finally returned home to his wife, with his concubine Cassandra unbelievably on his arm, he had no idea what sort of domestic welcome awaited him. While he was in his golden bathtub, cleaning up for the homecoming banquet, Clytemnestra stole in. Thinking she was going to join him, he was undoubtedly surprised when she threw a weighted net over him, preventing his escape, while she and her own amoureux Aegisthus dispatched him with a sword.
Their son Orestes, after years of pressure from his sister Electra, avenged his father’s death by killing his mother Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. For his pains, the mad goddesses of vengeance, the Erinyes (i.e., the Furies) drove Orestes to insanity and grief.
How did you like that story in the last few paragraphs? Peyton Place has nothing on it. The classical writers Aeschylus, Euripides, Ovid and others who narrated this gruesome tale didn’t tell it for enjoyment, but for a warning. This is what will come if one embarks on violence and vengeance. This is what comes of harboring a grudge.
What was the curse of the House of Atreus? It didn’t come from the gods. The curse came from within the Atreides themselves, from their own free choice to linger in their anger, to always pay back, to rehearse their grievances, to name their enemies one by one, over and over again.
A few days after my friend and I tried and failed at fixing the world on the parking lot, I was deadheading and mulching two blocks north in the Cupola House Gardens with another good friend. We were talking about how people can change. I was in a noxious mood at the moment, so I averred that difficult people are so set in their ways they will never change. I was mulling over the House of Atreus, and how Orestes could not escape the cycle of revenge, tantalized by unending grievance.
She didn’t agree, thank God. She pointed at the gardens. “Things can change.” Adam started off as a gardener. The flowers had to rub off on him: they grow, they bloom, they wither in winter, but they don’t let the cold darkness keep them down. They change and come back in Spring. It can happen to humans too, says the Gospel. Christians don’t believe in fate. They believe in grace. Every cycle of violence can be jumped out of for peace.
She was right as rain.
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