The Fall of Troy
As Americans, we do not believe other than about the His Parousia, that an occurrence, mythical or otherwise, in the 4th century BCE portends events in the 21st century CE. This event is the fall of the City of Troy. Wiki says that “the Ancient Greeks thought the Trojan War was a historical event that had taken place in the 13th or 12th century BC, and believed that Troy was located in modern day Turkey near the Dardanelles. By modern times both the war and the city were widely believed to be non-historical. In 1870, however, German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated a site in this area which he identified as Troy; this claim is now accepted by most scholars. Whether there is any historical reality behind the Trojan War is an open question. Many scholars believe that there is a historical core to the tale, though this may simply mean that the Homeric stories are a fusion of various tales of sieges and expeditions by Mycenaean Greeks during the Bronze Age. . . .”
SANGER’S CORE HISTORICISM
It is the “historical core to the tale of Troy” which interests me as I listen to the CD of David E. Sanger’s The Inheritance: the World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power (2009). Sanger as you may know is a seasoned White House reporter who has access. Access is everything. As “the chief Washington Correspondent of the New York Times he offers an insiders’ account describing the national security crisis that will confront” President Barack Obama, “from a nuclear Iran to the lockup of Chinese oil supplies in Africa.”
David E. Sanger
Because interesting nonfiction is so plentiful, the only way to keep current is to listen to the CD version and use the hard copy to fact check. This is particularly easy when you have a wonderful public library like Iowa City Public Library that believes in staying current. Sanger tells of events involving Afghanistan and Pakistan that speak to the fall of Troy.
If Kabul falls, perhaps the West as we know it will also fall, according to Sophocles, Euripides, and even Herodias, Troy led to the Peloponnesian Wars which destroyed Greek Hegemony. Sanger explains that the Taliban have always seen Pakistan and Afghanistan as one country, a fact that came too late to the Bush Administration.
BUSH VISIONSThe intelligence of the Bush Administration when they looked at Afghanistan did not see what W. H. Auden credits to “the Old Masters,” who understood human nature.
Musée des Beaux Arts : W.H. AudenThe Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
*********
The Bush Administration turned away because their vision of world did not fit its reality in the Middle East. It ignored Icarus. Afghanistan was separate from Pakistan, and with both having elections they were democracies, with each having stable capitals. Western style democracies require capitals and capitalization. Sanger writes that Pakistan took the capital and prepared for war with India, Kabul, the only functioning part of Afghanistan went lacking and the Taliban isolated it from the rest of Afghanistan.
City of Kabul
The fall of City of Kabul, like the City of Troy, will mark the end of an era of Western dominance in the Middle East and the rise a power outside of Western hegemony.
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Comments
The word from Britain these days is that the whole adventure is an utter fiasco.
I loved the poem!
i am not much impressed with your tactical appreciation, but you are good at imagery- keep going.
Up close it's not always easy to notice.
In the 1970s, when Leonid Brezhnev's secret police had ultimate power in the Soviet Union and forced the Nobel-laureate Solzhenitsyn out of the country, someone remarked that the future will see Brezhnev as merely an insignificant local politician who was in office during the Solzhenitsyn-era.
Such characterization looked insane then, but it sure came to pass. (Not that any of these two is remembered by many today :-)