Pallas Athena

We’ll begin with the very beginning, the discrimination that finally separated in the popular consciousness of the Greeks the East from the West.  We’re beginning with Homer; we’re beginning with the Iliad, the first work of what can be termed a Western Literature.  And while I could talk about the dramatic elements evident in the Homeric texts so utterly unlike its eastern contemporaries, I’m going to focus merely on the development of humanism.  Homer’s works were always popular fiction, not the cultic practices of priests for religious performances, but being popular fiction they reflected the popular interpretation of the nature of the gods.  And these gods were nothing like the god of the bible; in fact, they possessed human, that is anthropomorphic, qualities and they had a direct influence on human invents in which they seemed particularly invested.  Furthermore, the warriors on the field behaved with human pathos to the events they endured.  Indeed, it seemed finally that the poet found a subject in himself. Read More …

It’s been difficult for me, working entirely as an entertainer, to suffer without the capacity to make commentary on what I consider the most important issues of our time, which seem to frequently double as the most controversial issues of our time.  Truth is, I’m not professor and neither am I some well-read media personality, but there are a few things I’m knowledgeable about hailing back to a time before the career switch to “starving artist” better known as “sleeps in doorways.”  It is the fault of a post-colonial narrative that paints the breadth and scope of Western Civilization as something monstrous, as something terrible; it is the fault of people who know so absolutely little about it, and neither could they tell you very much about other civilizations either, owing to their permanently affixed red-red Marxist goggles that they employ categorically rather than as an interpretive tool.  I intend to do something of a miniseries about this, an elucidation of Western Civilization focusing upon important works of Western Literature to important battles that shaped the western world.  This will be my contribution to what should have been an orderly discussion.  I won’t make any pretense of being unbiased, if I could even be capable of that, but I won’t make assertions that cannot be supported by the facts.  These will be opinion pieces, not research pieces–frankly, with my workload, I just don’t have the time.  So many people nowadays, doesn’t matter the race or the nation of origin, don’t understand the culture that made them what they are, their history, their legacy, and they don’t seem to possess any particular inkling to know, either.  To shatter illusions you have to kill the conjurer, which is my very intention.

Achilles Victorious, Hector Gettin’ Dragged

How would you go about describing “Western Civilization?”  How would you go about elucidating the cultural values that denote, within the western consciousness, the distinction between us and them–our way of doing things versus theirs?  I’m prodigiously read in the classics, and even I couldn’t give you a decent answer, not at least without some serious thought and consideration.  The truth is, we live our lives subsumed in cultural forces so common and so normal that we’re hardly aware of their presence; in fact, when we use the term “culture” we err obscenely in attaching this merely to the colorful and the exotic–the distinct and the different.  This has led to the common claim that “white people have no culture” spewed from the mouths of people who travel by trains and use hand-held computers, people who incidentally fail to realize the Western Culture has never been exclusively white nor exclusively European. Read More …